The stoneship age video looks better/playable, but I guess the developer is just hitting the hard limits of that platform.
> Q. So how did you draw the graphics?
> A. So for 40x48 resolution you can't just take a paint program and have it do this automatically. That tends to lose a lot of important details.
> Usually I take a screenshot and drop a 40x48 grid on top and then trace over it.
If you use "hi-res" (140x192x6 colors) the graphics are 8k, 8 times bigger, so you need 24 disks which is a bit much.
Also with double-buffered hi-res graphics you waste 16k of RAM which is 1/3 of all available RAM on a II+. Double-buffered lo-res only takes 2k.
If you're a commodore person, you should be comparing this with what you could do with a PET or maybe a VIC-20 in this timeframe (not a C64).
A split the middle might have been double low res, 80x48 with the same 16 colors, but only available on the //e and gs
IMHO, running on all the Apples is the better call.