Impressionism and the NES Palette

Lately, I spend some time watching the experiments of some blokes making pixel art with the very own palette of the original NES. This palette is quite limited, thus it forbid absolutely the nice & soft gradients our eyes are accustomed to …

Therefore, I noticed some nice contrasts of blue / orange, in such experiments, nothing revolutionnary, but it reminded me two things :


I checked the facts, and indeed, there IS a violent and gorgeous contrast of blue and orange, especially in that Morimoto’s anime. Then I decided to conjugate these visuals with the so-called “NES Palette”.

The result was beyond my expectations, ‘looks like it was made for it :


And Yet, no tweak at all !!!


Then I tried this palette on my 3D. It required some tweaks, but looks nice :



I have to work with this palette. Period.

VipeUt Bootleg Demake Finished (well, almost)

I finally put the [Finished] stamp on this thing I had started for the “Bootlet Demake” TIGSource contest, on tigsource.com

It’s all but finished, anyway, I mainly wanted to emulate the very original rendering of a Vectrex, and make a small and playable game. I think I more or less succeeded, so let’s settle on something else.

Credits :
Code / Graphics : Astrofra
Music : Rez (Chiptune.com)
Engine : nEngine (pre-GameStart3D)

To download that thing, click on the link below :
VipeUt-install.zip

Tech Notes:
It should run on a PC, WinXP or Vista, with a rather recent 3D card. Vista users : make sure the UAC is disabled, the engine won’t like it.

During the install, u’ll be prompted to deploy OpenAL. Please install it, unless you already have it, otherwise, the game won’t probably start.

The installer creates two shortcuts on the desktop, one using the full featured renderer (OpenGL 2.0), the other one using a more consusual rendering method, not as pretty but fairly ok.

Controls : use the arrow keys. Up = accelerate, Left & Right to strafe, Down = brake. The paddle is not handled.

The ship have a certain amount of energy, that decreases when colliding against enemies. Then it blows up.
Catch some bonus, that will drive the ship for you (autopilot), or increase your energy (power up). Just drive till the end, for 6 laps, and you’re done

Press ESC to quit the game.

ENJOY!