After gamejam, the first thing I wanted to upgrade was the transparent sprite of the main character. Normal sprites on C64 are 1-bit with values that represent pixels: transparent or color/opaque. Then the color of opaque pixels can be set in the program. Each sprite can be 24 pixels wide so each line of a sprite is represented by 3 bytes.
But have no fear – C64 can show multicolor sprites and this results in 3 colors + transparency… but with some budget cuts. First and foremost – the width has to be halved as 3 bytes (24bits) has to be used to represent 2 times the data for each sprite line. The second shortcoming is that two additional colors are shared by all other sprites (there’s a workaround to switch these common colors using raster interrupts). After some toying around I decided that I will use black and white colors as the common ones for shading/highlights etc. and one color can be freely configured for each sprite.
The whole coloring process you can see above was done in GIMP. The first step was to crop all unnecessary left/right borders of the sprite to limit all wasted space. Next, I colored the sprite so the background has a neutral color and details like hat and trousers will have the color of the sprite. White color was used for other parts of the body and cloth, and black for contouring.
The next step was to scale the sprite (without any filtering/sampling) to the right width and then, finally, repair all the damage and loss of detail. I placed all frames on separate layers in GIMP so I only needed to scale everything once and then repair separate layers/frames.
After coloring I imported separate frames into Turbo Rascal sprite editor to add extra shading/details and export .bin file with all frames:
The result after repainting, scaling, importing and shading:
I did the same graphics update regarding the background – currently composed of tiles with different pipe configurations. The first thing I changed was bumping the single tile size from 3×3 characters to 4×4 because I wanted to have more thick pipes with more details. I once again repainted all required chars in TRSE and this resulted with new charset (with some leftovers from the previous one):
Finally, I’ve combined new pipes with new sprites and this is the current look:
What do you guys think? Are these improvements good?