Video Game Demakes!
Calling all pixel artists, graphic artists, graphic designers, and anyone with a computer! I say, we have a a DEmake contest!
The aim is to take an existing game, and roll it back to the past. Don't worry though, you aren't making a full game, just a screen shot! For this contest, we are going to make our games for the gameboy. Yep, that's the right, the original, the big grey brick.
For those of you not in the know, here are the Gameboy's specs:
[list]
160x144 resolution
2-bit color (black, dark grey, light grey, white)
8x8 tiles
8x8, 8x16 and 16x8 sprites
1 4-color background palette
2 3-color sprite palettes (that must choose from same 4 colors as the bg)
Background tiles each get a foreground/background flag (in front of or behind the sprites)
No more than 10 sprites per scanline on the raster
[/list]
Here is an example of colours used in the old GB games:
For more inspiration, head over here.
Here is an excerpt from that site, which explains things way better than I ever could.
Background tile palette: every background tile can use any of the 4 colors.
Background tile priority: each tile has a 0 or 1 that determines whether or not it is drawn in front of or behind the sprites. This doesn't matter a TON for mockups either, but still interesting! However, I believe it works across whole tiles; so you couldn't have half a tile covering up part of a sprite, or something, because tiles don't have transparency.
Sprite palettes: this one is pretty weird, even I admit that, but it does actually make sense. Since the GB only has 4 colors, and sprites need at least 1 color slot for transparency, the GB lets you use up to 2 different palettes for your sprites, each (one would assume) indicating a different color for transparency. E.g. palette one might mark black as the transparent color, for bright sprites on a dark background, while palette two might have white as trans, which would be good for making dark sprites over a light background. If you look at each of the screenshots above you'll see that nearly all of their sprite palettes drop one or the other of the grays, to keep sprite contrast high.