How to Create Palette Cycle Animations for Sega Genesis & Mega Drive - Beginner Game Dev Tutorials

[@dacueba-games]

The "8-bit" example is absolutely stunning.

[@PigsysRetroGameDevTutorials]

It really is! Mark Ferrari did say that it takes a week or more for a single picture, so it's certainly time-intensive!

[@GreyMatterShades]

Definitely worth watching the whole video. There's some mind-melting stuff in there, as well as some practical techniques and advice for pixel art.

[@axelguzman-rb8nj]

Saludos desde Michoacán de ocampo México viva sega

[@dan_perry]

Solid tutorial for a classic yet powerful effect! Excellent! Jon Burton of Traveller's Tales really abused this technique often for wild stuff. Although my all time favorite waterfall technique can be seen at the end of Jurassic Park: Rampage Edition.

[@inceptional]

There's also a really intense one in one or maybe even both of the Vectorman games for Genesis too. Might actually be more like soldering sparks falling than water, if I'm recalling correctly. But, whatever it is, it's a cool visual trick.

[@dan_perry]

Yup! Same dev team.

[@inceptional]

@@dan_perry Well, that totally makes sense now. :)

[@PigsysRetroGameDevTutorials]

Yeah, that's really nice, I should do a lesson on that technique one day (I think it uses h-ints)

[@PigsysRetroGameDevTutorials]

@@inceptional Did you delete the comment you made yesterday? It's strange, it seems that youtube constantly makes your comments disappear and then re-appear and so on (unless this is something you are doing yourself?)

[@GreyMatterShades]

This is a cool effect that can be used for a lot of things. Game Hut/Coding Secrets did a video showing how they used it in the intro of a game to create a smooth, full screen animation of the Sega logo. I'm curious, is there a way to change the specific colours with code, or do you have to swap the whole palette? There could be scenarios where creating different palettes might not be practical.

[@PigsysRetroGameDevTutorials]

I wanted to keep things simple for this tutorial and use functions everyone is already familiar with, but there are lots of other ways to manipulate colours (using PAL_setColor for example). I'll cover them in some future tutorial

[@GreyMatterShades]

@@PigsysRetroGameDevTutorials Awesome, glad to hear it! And yeah, the technique you showed was great in that it basically used only elements that you'd already covered. Keep up the awesome work, man! 👍

[@nintendo4life132]

So, the only tutorials you share are for Sega Genesis and Game Gear, sometimes Saturn? Do you thought about any other tutorials, like Nintendo

[@PigsysRetroGameDevTutorials]

Yeah, just Genesis at the moment, it's all I have time for! In the future I want to do Saturn tutorials too. If I were to ever do a nintendo system, then I think it would be the GB or GBA, as they seem to have nice dev kits for them.

[@SpiralPegasus]

Hello Pigsy First and foremost - thanks again for your tutorials! I started trying to follow them and wondered what do you do regarding color management. MD can output up to 64 colors on screen, but can you actually choose any 0-255 value per color channel? I believe not, but I can't figure out how do devs who work on ports of the likes of Cadillacs and Dinosaurs or Sunset Riders to get them to look as good as they do. Approaching with values in increments of 32 has me losing an awful lot of detail on similarly color shades.

[@SpiralPegasus]

2) Also, is there any good rules of thumb, tools or else to do said color approximation? 3) And lastly, as I guess it'd be pretty difficult to answer every question, are there any forums, discord servers or else you'd recommend for people who are new to this? I've had both a hand at development and game development, but never having to deal with limitations of old :)

[@panzerdragonlegend6664]

Pigsy's The waterfall from Revenge of Shinobi Every time I see it, Calm inspires me with the Unforgettable Melodies Of Yuzo Koshiro The Art Of Games

[@PhoticSneezeOne]

Would it be possible to simulate a rotating cloud effect with the use of palette cycles for the grim reaper scene in your genesis port of symphony of the night like the one at 1:25?

[@GreyMatterShades]

I had the same thought when I first saw that part of the SotN rom. I think it would technically be possible, but they'd probably have to sacrifice a decent number of colours to get the effect looking smooth. Might not be practical with the other graphics in the scene, but it would be cool to see the attempt!

[@PigsysRetroGameDevTutorials]

It might be possible, but I only have 16 colours available for the sky in that scene, which I don't think will be enough to make it look good

[@Tiptup300]

please check out the book clean code probably would be helpful to you as a developer. self taught mostly working on just ones own code can create some bad habits

[@gustavolopez6247]

Please Master pigsy, don't forgett Castlevania SON. 🙏

[@lordanthrax2417]

While i am not the master id like to inform you that you don't have to be afraid. Look through all his other videos and you will find the one where he explains the schedule for the year. Whe are currently in the "game dev tutorial"-phase... No need to remind him. He seems to be one of those structured guys who achieve what he wants ;) Have a nice day!

[@gustavolopez6247]

@@lordanthrax2417 i can write anything. Whats your problem man?

[@lordanthrax2417]

@@gustavolopez6247 oh... So you are one of those hate-people! I did not say that you can write anything and i did not say that i have a problem. I just wanted to help and you seem to have a problem with that. What a pitty. Hope your life will get better so you don't have to behave in such an unsocial way in the future. Have a nice day and gfy ;)

[@gustavolopez6247]

@@lordanthrax2417 no man, You didnt answer to me. You are one of those people. Be happy.

[@PigsysRetroGameDevTutorials]

It's ok, I haven't forgotten SotN, it's just that I have limited time and lots of different things that I want to do, so I need to schedule things very carefully. For the first half of this year my focus is on filming tutorials, GG Shinobi programming/graphics and learning some Saturn dev stuff. I'll turn most of my focus back to SotN from around July onwards

[@NoSpamForYou]

Wouldn't you just shift the colors left or right in the palette each loop or every few frames instead of loading new palette each time?

[@weerbox]

You can't "just shift colors" in the palette, because the palette is not stored in ram, but in color ram, which is part of video ram. You can load the palette from vram to ram. But in each cycle you will still have to: 1. shift the color in ram 2. load the palette from ram to vram.

[@PigsysRetroGameDevTutorials]

what you can do is copy the palette data to an array and then manipulate that. I will actually be using arrays in the next lesson on fading in colours. I wanted to keep this lesson nice and simple and stick to techniques I've already covered to do something new

[@zummone]

You can do that in assembly by moving the pointer and then copying just that palette data to the CRAM portion of the DMA buffer, I suppose it's not as immediate doing it in C with this SDK.

[@NoSpamForYou]

The waterfall from Shinobi wasn't very good as palette cycling art goes. I watched a color cycling tutorial a few weeks ago and I think they layer a dither checkerboard over or under the animated palette. Not sure if the dither was static or they vertically scrolled the dither pattern at a different speed than the palette cycle. If nothing else a dither cloud can be used around rock sprites or tiles to give a misting look.

[@GreyMatterShades]

I don't think the purpose of the tutorial was how to make the best palette cycling art, just how to create the effect with code. Even though the Shinobi waterfall wasn't the best example of palette cycling art, it's one that a lot of people have seen and it's a simple example where the effect is obvious/understandable. And you're right that a misting effect around the rocks would improve the visuals. Do you remember the channel that did the colour cycling tutorial? I'd love to check it out.

[@PigsysRetroGameDevTutorials]

While it's not as nice as the Mark Ferrari examples shown in the video, I think it's still a pretty effective use of the technique. BTW, Mark covers using dithering on waterfalls in that video. I need to do some water effects in my games, so I'm studying how to get it looking nice

[@Stefanswiss]

I won't talk for today's standards but to give you a first hand impression, when I was a kid and I arrived at the second stage on my CRT TV, the effect did a great impression on me. It was the first time ever that I saw such a massive background moving and probably the CRT made it look more fluid. As always the things we experienced as kid don't always keep up with what we remember but, wow back then I was mind blown