Thursday 14 July 2016

Concept - Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney for CPC

A quick test to see how the game Phoenix Wright  - Ace Attorney might look on the Amstrad.

Prefer the Mode 1 (4 colour mode)


Note: The text would need to be redone for Mode 0.

Wednesday 13 July 2016

Killerwatt CPC Game - Update


Killerwatt on the Amstrad platform, Below is a concept of the title page :)



Recreated the Alligator "Software with Bite" Logo (updated)



With thanks to DevilMarkus via CPCwikiforum we have an adapted "Alligata Logo (Mode 1) from Who Dares Wins II" coded in Basic.  This animated Gif recorded and exported from WinApe (PC) and Prism (NCH Software).



Monday 20 June 2016

Platform - Panic in Robot City

Panic in Robot City.  

I spent a few moment yesterday playing with a few Mode 0 pixels :) 
Really enjoying the challenge working with double wide pixels.

Nearly lost this image from some accidental deletion (thankfully I could recover the file)





Wednesday 15 June 2016

Amstrad - a visual compendium

I'm a big fan of Sam Dyer's Bitmap Books. I plan on buying all of his creations via Kickstarter Campaigns.  Currently raising money for the Nintendo Entertainment System/Famicom Compendium, I do hope he reaches the goal of £175,000 so we can all enjoy the Lenticular Slipcase.

More importantly, I hope on his todo list is an Amstrad Book, and in the spirit of this was curious what the cover might look like.  This concept was lightly based off the ZX Spectrum Compendium.

The colour of each box below represents 26 (+ black) of the 27 colour palette the Amstrad CPC computers have.





Thursday 26 May 2016

C64 KillerWatt game - Amstrad WIP

Back in the day when I owned and enjoyed playing the Amstrad CPC464, one of my friends owned a C64.  Three games I remember playing on his machine were Dambusters, Boulderdash and Killerwatt.

Killerwatt's is a simple horizontal shooter that had nice smooth scrolling. 

For fun rather than a serious project it's nice to re imagine what it might of looked like.
Ingame concept coming soon :)

Ingame Concept



TITLE - WIP




Friday 6 May 2016

The Last UFO - update May 2016

Its been a very busy last few months working on a few games, so sadly games that don't "as yet" have programmers don't get as much as attention.  The Last UFO game for the Amstrad is slowly coming together and I have finally resolved the interaction between player and enemy.  Bullets from both will now be homing, it will simplify the gameplay by not having to be positioned and facing the correct direction in order to shoot.  The only downside is you have to be fairly close to be able to shoot accurately as the bullets have finite distance :)

The Egyptian Level concept below is now converted to 16 colours (this is the maximum colours that mode 0 can have out of its 27 in total)

At the top is the tileset and to the top right you can see the colour palette.



Some Drawings in Pencil of some enemy ideas.



Below are some of the sketches converted into Amstrad Mode 0 pixels :)



This is the current sprite sheet, some are of course just placeholders for tiles that will be replaced with new ones. At the bottom are various collectables (in gold).  The palettes allocated for each level is shown on the right hand side.  Notice 12 colours are locked out for all other game collectables, player, score panel and title splash page and various effects. The last four colours beyond the dark blue are for foreground and enemies of that level.









Friday 8 April 2016

Experimenting with Dan Fesslers HD index painting in Photoshop

Possibly a great way of generating indexed/dithered images for Amstrad CPC 
in Mode 1 or 0.

Goto Dan Fesslers great blog on more technical information on how to create images. (thankyou Dan)




The example Gradient Maps for Mode 0 (16 colours) and Mode 1 (4 colours)



A continued thread discussion is in the CPC forum


A further test (4 colours)




Friday 19 February 2016

Amstrad 4 Colour (Mode 1) Testing




The Test below is converting a 320x256 - 24bit image into 4 colours.
There is an 8 colour version that is currently not possible to display on a CPC machine but closest matches the original.