Here is a short video showing the results of my unified sprites tests on the ZX Spectrum Next. Hopefully, they will evolve into a full side-scrolling hack’n’slash videogame!
The sprites used are adaptations of the beautiful works by Sven Thole, while the original background was made by Digital Moons.
My main reference for sprites is the ZX Spectrum Next sprites wiki page. In this test, for the hero and bandit characters I used unified sprites, made up of 3×3 simple 16×16 pixels sprites, so I can have 48×48 pixels patterns. Since the 48×48 character images I used have at least one 16×16 area in which all pixels are transparent, 8 16×16 sprites, instead of 9, are required. By using 4 bit colour depth, a total of 128/8 = 16 different patterns are available. I am investigating on other techniques, such as modifying sprite patterns at runtime using DMA, to achieve an arbitrary number of patterns. In order to correctly handle depth, at each frame objects are reordered, so that characters with smaller Y coordinate will be assigned a smaller sprite id and thus lower priority, while characters with higher Y coordinate will be assigned a bigger sprite number and thus higher priority, and will be displayed be on top, “closer” to the view.
Stay tuned for updates!
