Commodore 64 graphics

[Tuomo L]

I see every now and then resources pop up that are "retro" and "old school" and "nostlgic shots" but I always thought "You guys want old school? I'll give you old school." If you truly want to make a game that feels outdated already on the day it's released, look no further than these glorious C64 approved color schemes.


(Music to put you into propper mood)










Charasets

Spoiler

Tilesets


World

Spoiler

To truly capture the C64 feel, I recommend lowering your game's resolution to 320x200. Using scripts that make longer loading times for that authentic "wait 20 minutes for game to load" is also highly recommended. (Not really, please don't do any of that)


FAQ


Q: Why does everything look so horrible!


A: Commodore 64 used only 16 colors. That's right, 16 colors.


Q: Are you trolling?


A: Actually, no. I just have fondness for this old stupid thing because I used to grow up with it and I'm actually making use of this as a gag in my new game. I'm sharing the start for fun of it, though I doubt anyone will ever make use of any of this stuff.


Q: Why so few things?


A: Believe or not, this stuff actually takes long time. It's not as simple as just restricting colors, careful curation of the reduced color limitations has to be done, so that image detail is not lost or the colors are twisted. The first two things on tileset alone took very long time. This early stuff is just to see if anyone would actually care about me sharing more of these or just move on to other, more wanted things.


Q: Can I use this in my commercial game?


A: Er... Yes, yes, you can. You need to own the RPG Maker MV to make use of these resources. You can't make use of the song though, but there's a very good old school chiptune back that you can get here https://www.rpgmakerweb.com/a/jdb-artist/retroperspective-music-pack

 

[Milennin]

If you want true old school graphics, they should be much lower resolution. Looking at Boulder Dash, it has tiles that are 16x16 in size, and only have 3-4 unique colours in them (lol).

 

[Tuomo L]

If you want true old school graphics, they should be much lower resolution. Looking at Boulder Dash, it has tiles that are 16x16 in size, and only have 3-4 unique colours in them (lol).

Lowering the resolution made it look worse actually.

Going lower than RPG Maker MV resolution will also cause problems with scenes and windows, requiring you to adjust all of those as well. Again C64 ran on 320x200, which is impossible to do on RPG Maker MV aside massive tweaking, so the sprites weren't just tiny on a big screen.



I actually thought of that and figured if there'd be a downscale scripts of sorts, it'd be a better idea to keep them in same resolution as rest of RPG Maker MV and then just later downscale all of them via plugin or something to desired low resolution.

 

[Milennin]

I'm sure that could be worked around with with plugins. RPG Maker 2000 and 2003 work with a default 16x16 tileset, so it should be much easier to make something truly old school-looking in there.

 

[Tuomo L]

I'm sure that could be worked around with with plugins. RPG Maker 2000 and 2003 work with a default 16x16 tileset, so it should be much easier to make something truly old school-looking in there.

The plugin would have to pretty much rewrite every single menus and scenes to work properly with the scale down function. It'd be quite the task to do and one I'm not going to embark on, I'll just settle with these edits instead. I think there was something kind of like that for RPG Maker VX Ace but I don't think it's been ported to RPG Maker MV.

 

[Milennin]

That looks really cool. Damn, now I want to make an old school game that looks like that... Must...resist...urge... to make new project...

 

[Tuomo L]

That looks really cool. Damn, now I want to make an old school game that looks like that... Must...resist...urge... to make new project...

If you actually want to do the C64 game, I'll be happy to do these edits for you, you just need to find a way to rescale the graphics down a bit.


Oh and you totally need to use this as a soundtrack  https://www.rpgmakerweb.com/a/jdb-artist/retroperspective-music-pack

 

[Sharm]

But . . . this isn't the C64 palette.  What's the point of the reference if you're not using the palette?


I think you've misunderstood the draw of retro.  It's more than just a reduced color palette, it's the drawing itself that's built with the limited palette in mind that makes it so appealing.  It can be made pretty,  I've done it more than once.

 

[Tuomo L]

But . . . this isn't the C64 palette.  What's the point of the reference if you're not using the palette?

Incorrect, it actually literally is.


Color codes to build the palette were literally taken from


https://www.c64-wiki.com/index.php/Color

 

[Sharm]

Huh.  My apologies.  I remembered the palette looking a little different, looked it up on google to double check, and must have found a bunch of versions of the palette that had different calibration or something, because it didn't match.  Sorry!

 

[Tuomo L]

Huh.  My apologies.  I remembered the palette looking a little different, looked it up on google to double check, and must have found a bunch of versions of the palette that had different calibration or something, because it didn't match.  Sorry!

Not a problem. As for redrawn/resized sprites, like I said to Milennin I kept the resolution on purpose so that you could downscale everything to a resolution you'd prefer with a plugin or something, as you'd have to resize all scenes and windows as well so that the sprites won't just dissapear on the screen.


I'd like to see what you've done with C64 palette though, it's very hard to make things with it. As for looking pretty, well...


Street Fighter

Double Dragon

Aztec Challenge

 

[Sharm]

See, there the palette looks different again.  For example, the orange in those screencaps is significantly less vibrant.  Oh well, guess it doesn't really matter.


I've never used that particular palette before, but I have used other 16 color palettes.  I have a strong preference for Dawnbringer's palettes.  A friend of mine did a cool set with the worst palette I've ever known, the EGA palette.


http://opengameart.org/content/mines-of-sharega


I have some tiles done with 16 colors in my resource thread, green link in sig.


You know, instead of trying to scale down MV, which sounds pretty hard, why not scale up the artwork?  If the pixels are all 3x3 then the tiles would be 16x16.

 

[Tuomo L]

See, there the palette looks different again.  For example, the orange in those screencaps is significantly less vibrant.  Oh well, guess it doesn't really matter.


I've never used that particular palette before, but I have used other 16 color palettes.  I have a strong preference for Dawnbringer's palettes.  A friend of mine did a cool set with the worst palette I've ever known, the EGA palette.


http://opengameart.org/content/mines-of-sharega


I have some tiles done with 16 colors in my resource thread, green link in sig.


You know, instead of trying to scale down MV, which sounds pretty hard, why not scale up the artwork?  If the pixels are all 3x3 then the tiles would be 16x16.

It's most likely due to low quality screenshots honestly.


Scale up what artwork? You mean, you want quality like Aztec Challenge but on a higher resolution?

Scaling up such low res would cause it to look REALLY bad as seen here.

 

[Sharm]

Is Aztec Warrior something that you'd consider good pixel art?  No, I mean scaled up cleanly and with better consideration for pixel placement.  It can look good.  I mean, the POP! Horror tiles by Vexed are 16x16.  

 

[Tuomo L]

Is Aztec Warrior something that you'd consider good pixel art?  No, I mean scaled up cleanly and with better consideration for pixel placement.  It can look good.  I mean, the POP! Horror tiles by Vexed are 16x16.  

Aztec Challenge was top notch C64 when it came out during 1983 and showed things like 3D style stages and it had numerous varying levels. It was very advanced for its time. In fact it was praised for its good graphics during its release.


See, here's the problem I have with making overly complicated style art is that while you could do something like this with "C64 graphics"

They're nothing but fake, the C64 would never be able to process a game this complicated. It'd be just impossible. The hardware would bottleneck already during the first scene. The closest to multi answer adventure like this was Law of The West.

I love this game by the way and it was very ahead of its time with its multiple choice dialogues and ability to kill everyone (even children!) or no one at all if you'd want.


You can pull the best C64 game list and none of the pixel art would be probably be what you'd consider "good pixel art" because the hardware was so limited, that's the entire point.

 

[Sharm]

Are we talking about two different things?  I thought this was about finding ways to mimic the old school style with a more modern engine  I wasn't really concerned about accuracy, just that the style being old wasn't what makes it attractive to current gamers and that you can get an older style with a more modern, prettier aesthetic.  I'm not following what point you're making.  Your artwork wouldn't work in a C64 game either?

 

[Tuomo L]

Are we talking about two different things?  I thought this was about finding ways to mimic the old school style with a more modern engine  I wasn't really concerned about accuracy, just that the style being old wasn't what makes it attractive to current gamers and that you can get an older style with a more modern, prettier aesthetic.  I'm not following what point you're making.  Your artwork wouldn't work in a C64 game either?

Actually that would depend on what sort of game you're making, complexity of the game and its length. Downscaling the size of the game's resolution helps too to be able to fit to the casette size limit. Depends what you're after, really.

 

[ssbkalidore]

I love this!  I don't post much, but had to comment.  Miss my C64.  I will save these and possibly use them sometime. 


Thanks!