Takashi
Joined: 04 Dec 2006
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 Posted: Sun Apr 21, 2013 8:23 am |
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| end of the world wrote: |
Shibuya: I think it was either Sakaguchi or Tanaka. "I want to put in an image of crossing the bridge", they said, but because there wasn't sufficient memory for the graphics to use, I remember a lot of worrying over whether there was any way to fill the screen with a single image. So since we needed to save a ton of a capacity, the top is a solid color, and the same layer is recycled to represent the hills and sea.
4gamer: What do you mean, recycled?
Shibuya: First of all, drawing a single part and lining it up. Then, to give it the needed accent, just turn it upside down. (laughs) And then from our perspective it's pitch black, and only the hill and the standing characters are left to draw. (I don't really know enough about Famicom graphics to understand this explanation.) |
Let me clarify this:
So, we all understand that NES backgrounds are made out of 8x8 tiles, right? Also, you must know that these tiles can change colors - a part of the image colored green can be colored blue in a different tile. Finally, that you can "flip", that is, make the graphics of a tile upside down.
What he means is that the horizon line, with the castle, and the hill, they actually reuse a lot of identical tiles. They are just flipped, the parts that once belonged to the "sky" are painted black, and the parts that belonged to the river are painted "sky". So the final tile looks nothing like the original one, and they used this technique to build the hill. In the end, other than the characters, there are at best 6 or 7 "landscape" tiles in the image, instead of the 20-ish it would need to draw a full horizon, and they manage that with as little obvious repetition as possible. Great craftmanship at work.
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Last edited by Takashi on Sun Apr 21, 2013 9:24 am; edited 1 time in total |
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