Those are some beautiful screenshots you've posted up

This looks awesome! I can't wait to play it

Awesome work! That looks really good

Thanks guys!

DJ_O pointed out that the walls look a little plain / flat, which coincidentally was something that had been bugging me a little as well. So I've been experimenting a little bit, and come up with a new concept for the tiled floor look and walls that looks somewhat more similar to the original Amiga game.

Here's a comparison image of the original Amiga game walls / floor vs. my new proposed wall / floor gfx. Thoughts?

I'd personally play around with more complex textures for the walls, espcially for that space simply filled with dithering. Seems AB on Amiga had pipes, circuitry, etc. making up the walls, I'd suggest following suit, at least on the internals of the walls. On the external walls (the walls you would collide with in-game), I'd suggest simply finding a more interesting (set of?) pattern(s), what you have right now works but it still feels flat, and the boldness of the walls really draws your eyes to them. If nothing else I'd break up those white lines on the edges a bit.

Mmm yes, all very good points. I'll mess around some more tomorrow, I've got a few ideas in mind now based on your suggestions

That dithering originally represented space, as in outer space (the game is mostly set on a space station). However, if I can put together a decent set of wall tiles that don't include any flat black tiles, then I can use flat black tiles to represent space, like it was on the original game. Which would most likely look much better than the dithering I'm currently using for space.

Thanks for the tips Ashbad!

I like it, but would be cool to see what more detailed walls would look like.

If it were me I'd try testing out some "shadow" tiles that you can put next to the wall tiles to give it a little more depth. If you're going to go for dynamic tile generation like I mentioned on Omni, then you could also generate the shadow tiles in your precalculations ^^

I like the more detailed walls now, but I would love even more detail, perhaps the dithering that Ashbad mentioned. Shadows are an interesting idea too, although since this is a monochrome engine, I'm not sure how good that would look.

Eh, I think shadows would work if they simply applied a 25/75 dither pattern () to the shadowed tile, probably wouldn't be too noisy to draw the viewer's attention, and not too contrasted to the floors to look like walls themselves. That is, as long as the floors stay relatively simple like they are right now

Here's something new I've tried, going even closer to the original game in terms of wall tiles. Thoughts on this one? Better / worse?

It feels a little busy. I like the black better than the dithering, though.

Yeah I think it could be better, but I can't seem to come up with anything better right at this moment... So I'm gonna go and finish of coding of some other small parts and come back to this in a couple of days hopefully with some more inspiration

I too prefer the solid black walls to the dithered walls. Good luck with what you're working on, and hope you find inspiration.

After further experimentation, I've decided to stick with (at least for now) the more random looking type walls. When I applied them to the game, I thought they looked a bit better, and not as distracting as the the larger blown up image above. Also, it looks much closer to the original Amiga games imo

Either way, it's not necessarily set in stone. I've done the hard work in recoding the tileset and converting the old level data to suit. So at least now if I decided to change the wall textures again, it should be as simple as just redrawing the 21 wall tiles, unless it was a radical change that required more / less wall tile variations.

I also used an idea suggested by leafy and a few others which was to store the wall tiles all as a single tile-type, and then when a level is decompressed, a routine calculates what each wall tile should be changed to. This means that the compression on the levels will stay almost the same, but that the levels look much nicer. The only downside (which you can see below) is that the level takes a few seconds to load, but I think the extra compression pay off is worthwhile.

Here are a couple of things to look at. The still image shows the same portion of level 3 both in-game & in the level editor, to demonstrate how the level is stored as basic wall blocks, but re-processed when a level is decompressed & loaded in-game to show dynamic walls. The animated clip shows some of level 1 in action. As can see, it looks much nicer than the earlier clip of level 1 that I posted last week

Those are some awesome looking sprites! I think I'd be quite happy with those as is. As to the loading level, that's no big deal to me.

After seeing it in-game like that, it does looks nice. The loading isn't a huge deal.

I'm super excited to get this on my calculator! The art looks great!

Thanks guys! Glad you like the look of it

Yeah, I don't think an extra second or two of loading time is a problem, especially for those nice-looking walls. The one caveat I must state is that for the sake of user-interface friendliness, any loading longer than about 1 second on a calculator should do something visual to show that the calculator is working, not frozen. Even something as simple as the hourglass in Doors CS during archiving / unarchiving is sufficient to prevent frustrated users, I think, although progress bars, perhaps with a level-specific bit of text, might be nice too.