hooglwap.blogg.se

1. #HEXCELLS QUESTION MARKS FULL#
2. #HEXCELLS QUESTION MARKS CODE#
3. #HEXCELLS QUESTION MARKS PLUS#
4. #HEXCELLS QUESTION MARKS FREE#

The simplest useful remapping is just counting how many pixels of each color is used in each 8×8 cell (out of 32 double pixels) and pick the 3 most used colors. This means those screen characters need to share the same 3 colors + background, which is too restrictive in the source art.īeing able to use all 3 colors for each 8×8 character in the hex cell art helps add color and distinctiveness to each hex cell type so the best solution is to accept drawing cells in overlapping characters with color remapping. The top and bottom of the hex cells the screen characters are shared with neighboring cells. Below is an example of one screen character with the background color black, and custom colors dark gray, mid gray and light gray.Īn example of one bitmap character (8×8 pixels with double width to specify multicolor)

#HEXCELLS QUESTION MARKS PLUS#

Dealing with overlapsĬommodore 64 multicolor bitmap mode uses 3 out of 16 colors plus a shared background color for each screen character (8×8 pixels). This choice ended up with B as the winner because I could fit exactly 10 hex cells horizontally on even lines and 9 on odd lines, and 8 rows perfectly filling 40 by 25 character cells! Of course this didn’t leave any room for a game HUD but that’s a different problem that future me will have to deal with. This stage of just drawing different grid layouts and seeing how each compared to the rest took quite a bit of time and these examples are just the most workable ones I came up with. The noticeable difference between A and B in the image above is that the hex cells are larger in A allowing more art detail per cell, but the slanted edges look worse due to the double width pixels. The first design question was what is the best orientation for the hex grid? In multi-color mode the pixels are also double width, meaning each pair of pixels share the same color. This required some planning for hardware built for 40 by 25 characters of 8 by 8 pixels. One early decision was to use a hex grid for the map. This is not its final form, but a readable capture from mid-development!ĭesign notes, this page is the entire documented map design of Space Moguls Cell layout planning This picture was printed on paper and all the subsequent design was based on notes written over it. For a short while the town covered three land cells, but as seen above the town sits in land cell #42.

#HEXCELLS QUESTION MARKS FULL#

Going back to the planning, here is the full on-paper map design of the game. The end result of the Map Screen during the Production Phase 4 rounds into a game. This is how the final map screen looks like during the Production stage, one of the seven stages of each turn:

Since each land cell type produces different amounts of each item type this means players may change their strategy as the game reveals more of the map. The map is procedurally generated at the start of the game, and much of the map is covered in fog so that the final map is not known in the beginning. is the map screen which instead of being two color black on white uses the full 16 color palette the computer is capable of, This was the first system created for the game and contains several features that may not be obvious while playing the game. One aspect where Space Moguls differs from M.U.L.E.

#HEXCELLS QUESTION MARKS FREE#

To learn more about the game feel free to look over the Player’s Guide here: space-moguls-players-guide Both games are based on taking turns claiming land, generating items and trading between players and the store with the goal of having the most wealth at the end. that was released 35 years earlier in 1983 by Ozark Softscape and published by then just-founded Electronic Arts. Space Moguls is a 2018 four player strategy game inspired by M.U.L.E.

#HEXCELLS QUESTION MARKS CODE#

There are no code snippets in this article. The article is not reasoning why I develop Commodore 64 games, but a technical and design deep dive into the map screen of the title. This is a technical article describing the development of the map screen of Space Moguls for Commodore 64 and published by Protovision.