u/retroartdude

Ok this will be my final post on this stuff, but I'm a bit proud of how dialogue box turned out in the end. It really contrasts well with a lot of the backgrounds and adds a bit of visual pop to it (well maybe not the map screen - gotta change that background color.)

Honestly it was really tempting to make it look like ff6 and 7's menus with the blue gradient, but I think I found something that give's it it's own distinct look.

If you're wondering how this was accomplished, I basically modified the Scanline FX plugin to change the 4th color entry for the 8th palette at specific vertical breakpoints based on where the scanline was. GBDK has very useful tools to do this, and you can get away with using a switch statement if you keep the number of breakpoints to a reasonable number (8 is what what I went with.)

This works fine if you're just rendering the gradient in the background, or if your dialogue boxes are always at the bottom of the screen, however different story if they're at the top though! You have to find a way for it to continue to render the background after rendering the window.

Well with the help of AI I found a decent solution, but I still need to finesse the code myself to make the experience that more polished.

Oh, before anyone get's any ideas, I don't use AI for anything other than programming. I make my own art, sound effects, and (terrible) music - seriously I might need to find a composer...

I probably should do a blog post on my itch.io page and go in depth at some point since this was quite a learning experience.

In any case, as a bonus I also included an animation I shared on my x account of some of the menu frames I was considering before settling on the beveled look.

Hope you all found this interesting, and maybe it will encourage you to give this a shot too!

-Nigel

You may have seen a previous post where I showed a background gradient generated with scanline interrupts.

I mentioned that this effect has some drawbacks (at least my shoddy implementation) and felt that it may be better for message windows.

Well here is how that looks like!

-Nigel

I'll probably do a blog post about it later, but here is the basic rundown:

This was basically vibe coded but even with 8 colors I managed to get good performance.

What brought this on you ask? Well the phenomenal work by u/Holy_Squirtal made me wonder if I could give it a shot.

What you see here is a modified Scanline FX plugin that updates the 4th color in background color in palette 0. This adds some flexibility as you can still manually assign values in GB Studio for the first 3 colors of that palette. If you look closely you can see that the clouds have a bit of shading to them.

Now there are some caveat's:

-More scanline updates really eat away at performance
-Updating more than one color, the entire palette, or more than one palette will slows things down if you are coding in anything higher than assembly
-Currently there are some graphical glitches in this implementation

In any case, this was a fun distraction. Maybe I'll refine it and fix the bugs to make it more worth while in my game. Presently I don't see a good use case for it in my game specifically outside of menus / dialogue boxes and non gameplay related visuals.

Hope you like!

-Nigel

I know it’s not a major update but I worked on this the day before and am kinda proud of it. Reminds me of box art lol!

Honestly I might use this for the product box if I ever get to a physical release.

Aside from this, I’ve just been adding new enemies and trying to creat a graphics plugin.

-Nigel