Designing a retro-game art style that evokes the aesthetic of the Game Boy Color | Hacker News Reader

Designing a retro-game art style that evokes the aesthetic of the Game Boy Color

kickstarter.com

64 pointskibwen22 comments

Maybe meant to link to this:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/yachtclubgames/mina-the...

Why oh why is one of the support tiers a fishing mini-game? I will say this whenever it it shows its ugly head in video games, you will see my comments I promise, there is no such thing as a good fishing mini-game. Developers need to stop wasting time on something that will actually make their game worse, I feel like its actually a sick joke at this point every time there is a fishing mini-game as part of any game.

I will die on this hill.

The game looks awesome though! I loved shovel knight and I think they'll knock it out of the park with this one too.

I always love fishing mini games. Especially in the Zelda series. I remember when my friend got links awakening on the original gameboy, we were all super excited about the fishing part. Fast forward to 2020 and my son and I spent a huge amount of time fishing in animal crossing. Fishing in video games is fun, but I have no desire to play an entire game about fishing.

I presume you have not played Stardew Valley, or at least haven’t gone fishing in that game yet!

Only a matter of time before square enix releases a dedicated full-fledged final fantasy fishing simulator ;)

A strange hill to die on, but I'll fight for your right to die there.

Big fan of these projects with throwback aesthetics. One thing I really commend them for is that, in my personal experience, they also remember to not carry over the positively silly difficulty curve from those older games. The games are made to look and feel like older ones, but play like a modern, well-designed title. That's crucial to making an enjoyable game.

I don't remember Gameboy games having quite such a terrifying difficulty curve; in fact some of the magic of e.g. Super Mario Land on the original Gameboy is the simultaneously precise and forgiving nature of control.

Ray Man for the Game Boy Color (which I mentioned in a comment elsewhere on this post) had the titular figure teeter on the edge as if about to fall, to help with playability when jumping between small platforms.

Now, some original 8 bit Spectrum games were absurdly fiddly right from the start -- Hewson/Rafaele Cecco's Cybernoid springs to mind, as does FTL's Hydrofool.

I remember some very playable games too of course -- Imogen from Micro Power/Superior Software on the BBC Micro was beautifully drawn, very playable, and still has me by my wistful heart.

There was a Gameboy original platformer of Ren & Stimpy in space that when I was a kid just never beat, despite the persistence of a kid with nothing else to do in the preinternet era.

More recently I tried it in an emulator and it really is just like harder than Cuphead. I used snapshotting to get through it and the whole game is only 3 levels, so I think they cranked the difficulty to try to give it some longevity but they really overshot it.

I was speaking more broadly about the retro aesthetic, not just GameBoy. Games from Sega and Nintendo consoles used to be pretty brutal, to the best of my recollection. Although maybe I was just a bad player, I was quite young after all.

> I was speaking more broadly about the retro aesthetic, not just GameBoy.

Yeah -- likewise. And I think you're right about the evolution between then and now about discoverability/playability/difficulty ramps.

What sticks to me here is the high saturation levels. GBC screens were not particularly bright or saturated compared to modern displays, so if you want to capture the visual feel of GBC you need to look at the physical screen instead of just frame captures of the pristine digital data.

>>> Mina features sprite art with no 3D, scaling, or rotation, just like the classic 8-bit handhelds. Instead, we use a lifetime’s worth of 2D wizardry knowhow to bring the world to life

Kudos to Yacht Club. So hard to maintain that level of "retro" discipline when you have modern tools at your disposal.

Personally, I prefer playing games at native resolution. Especially on high definition monitors. And developing Mina in 16:9 aspect 256x144 is pretty daring, for a $1M+ backed crowdfunded game!

And it's cool that they have a game dev live stream tier (though it'd be a whole lot cooler if it was public). I've experienced a bit of game dev live streams via Twitch. And the act of community engagement with the team, where they are incorporating crowd suggestions live into a playable demo, able to obtain instantaneous feedback from their most devoted players. It's amazing. Like it's hard to go back to alienated dev after that. And players get to exclaim: "See that gelatinous cube, that was my idea!"

That's amazing! Beautiful retro graphics. That brings back so many memories.

Indeed.

For example I have very fond memories of Ray Man for the Game Boy Color.

In many ways I think that game is a genuine high-water-mark for graphics within any given set of limitations.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=REM9s3Z1gd8

I still find it quite astonishing. It's a simple scheme, actually -- a rich painted background and surprisingly few sprites -- that just has so much personality.

Any work to bring back this kind of art is so welcome.

Oh, this looks cool... oh it's from the same people who made Shovel Knight... almost to the fishing mini-game stretch goal... fine, shut up and take my money.

I get what they were trying to do with the puddles of water in the street casting reflections but they don’t quite look right, they should make them look more like water. maybe apply dithering.

The aesthetic comes from severe limitations. How do you replicate that?

Color, what? That looks more like Advance to me. Very nice though.

It looks very visually similar to Oracle of Ages/Seasons and lot less like Minish Cap or A Link to the Past. There's definitely a much more limited color palette per sprite than what the GBA games typically do.

1.5 Million dollars pledged? Golly

Nice!

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