Palette Cycling on the Game Boy Color
This is a basic demo showing how advanced palette cycling techniques can be used on the Game Boy Color to create more lively scenes with more animations than the default 25-frame, 10-actor limit. I'm trying to use the style/process developed by Mark Ferrari for the early Lucasfilm games...we'll see how successful I can be, as that man is literally a genius
The scene itself is inspired by the Cascade Kingdom from Super Mario Odyssey, though I think it's painfully obvious that there's little implemented in terms of gameplay (or even music lol).
It's literally just to show the technique. I'll probably be using this technique extensively in the future when making Gameboy games, so that'll be fun. I made this awhile ago and figured I should upload it...
| Status | Released |
| Platforms | HTML5 |
| Rating | Rated 5.0 out of 5 stars (2 total ratings) |
| Author | Cormorant42 |
| Tags | demo, gbstudio, mechanic, palette-cycling |
Comments
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Very cool! Do you plan on sharing the source or a discussion of how you achieved this effect? ^_^
I'm definitely open to it. The source won't be that helpful, simply because of the massive amount of palettes in it (48 for the animated water alone)...you won't be able to use it as a template :(
But the technique itself is rather simple, you create "animation" by cycling through colors in a palette (hence the name). Basically, you create tiles which use all four colors progressively, i.e., in a row somehow. Then you have a static actor (I repurposed my UI element for this part) have, as part of its "On Update" script, switch the palettes used in the scene. If you've done it right, and set up your palettes correctly, it'll make a nice smooth animation.
What makes this demo unique is the amount of palettes I used: there's one basic palette (four shades of blue) that the water cycles through, but then I used an online generator to make twelve palettes in between each of the original four as transitions. That's what makes the smooth effect, since it's updating at roughly 60fps and is changing palettes every frame. But that's also the hard part, since you have to input the palettes manually and it's very unintuitive.
Wow, super cool!
I am familiar with palette rotation, but I was impressed by how smooth you got the effect here! Your idea to use a palette generator to create intermediate palettes is really clever, and I appreciate your tenacity and patients inputting all the value by hand! The final result is great :)
Thanks for walking through how you achieved this effect, it'll be super useful for me as I'd like to use this cycling technique in my own game! I just wish there was some way to interpolate colours in GB Studio so you don't have to do it by hand. But maybe the new update will help with that :).
(Also, thanks for mentioning Mark Ferrari which lead me to watch his GDC talk which was also really helpful).
That GDC talk is one of my all-time favorites. Unfortunately, I don't think you can do all of the effects that he did in the GBC due to how palettes work, since every 8x8 tile is limited to four colors...I'm still working on that though, I'll be sure to update this demo if I ever figure out more advanced animation techniques
Can you imagine the upcoming parallax scrolling with palette cycling? Gonna be beautiful