Life of Pixel

[Gryzor]

Just wanted to share this with you guys.


Yesterday I bought the Windows version of Life of Pixel. What an awesome little game! 64 levels in the style of various old computers and consoles, the 464 included (though I haven't played those yet). Up to now I've played the ZX80, ZX81 and 2600 levels and let me know, I haven't got this much fun from €5 in absolute ages!!!


Here's the trailer:



Life of Pixel Trailer on Vimeo


Go check it out!

[pelrun]

Here's hoping you don't get to the CPC levels only to discover it's a speccy port

[Carnivius]

Hm.  Didn't spot anything of mine in that trailer.  Perhaps they've replaced those for this version.  The original PlayStation Mobile version did have some graphics of mine modified in it.   They offered me a PS Vita for compensation but I turned it down thinking a £200 (at the time) handheld console was too much for what appeared to be a couple of accidentally used sprites of mine and they were just a small company (if it had been EA I'd have said yes thanks and give me a PS4 and a flashy car and a mansion as well).   I kinda wish I'd taken it though cos I've got so many frickin' PSVita games to play on one (from all the Crossbuy and PS Plus freebies) and I've got PSM games that I don't like playing on my phone (including this one) but would enjoy on a Vita with it's real buttons.   Plus with Game Maker:Studio now able to produce games for PSVita, PS3 and PS4... dangit. 

[Gryzor]

Really? More titles with your work? At least they offered to make it up to you, that was nice.


Here's the 464 as it appears in the game:


[attachimg=1]

[MacDeath]

I can see some CPC Rick Dangerous rippofff tiles sometimes...
Perhaps also a few from antiriad as well...

[mr_lou]

Wow, this is almost exactly like an idea I got long time ago.

My idea was about a villain who escaped through various retro platforms, and the hero had to follow him through various levels of (somewhat) known games (that the authors granted permission to use) on various platforms. The villain would mess up the levels somehow, e.g. by putting stuff (sprites) that didn't belong there, and you had to fix it, while chasing him.
E.g. the villain could place a bomb from Bomb Jack into the game Bubble Bobble. And you then had to somehow put it back to the right game.

There would be portals here and there, allowing the villain and the player to jump to another game on another platform.

If anyone feels like doing a project like that, feel free to steal the idea. :-)

[Gryzor]

That's a great idea!

Life of Pixel is quite simpler actually, just a number of platform screens styled after each system. And the implementation is really good!

[MacDeath]

yes, looks fun and good point is that Amstrad CPC was implemented alongside all those inferior other  8biters just as it should...


hey, where is MSX1 ?

Also music seems top notch.

[Gryzor]

Maybe it's one of the locked/hidden machines. They've also said that more machines are coming...

[MacDeath]

www.youtube.com/watch?v=H5LmcJDv7EY

love how he is complaining about "cheap death" but miss that it is the point of this retro madness...
He never fully experienced the REAL actual 8 bit experience in all its frustrating richness... I guess.

here another one, spoiler lerts I guess...

www.youtube.com/watch?v=zs-N5p0CUwM

WTF CPC64 ? this dude forgot that this device was provided with an in-built Mass Data storage, hence labeled as 4-64... (or 6-64 or 6-128)

[Gryzor]

Yeah, I noticed the cheap deaths as well, but as you say, I took it as part of the experience and am just laughing at it!

Otherwise, the review is good, and shows the different styles very nicely...

[Carnivius]

Heh, just spotted my edited sprite in that first review. 

And yeah originally the CPC levels weren't very accurate in colour (using too many shades of grey) til I mentioned it to them back when it came out on PSM and I thiiink they corrected it.

[Gryzor]

Very nice of you, and kind of them So far I've enjoyed the ZX80 (because of the character-based sprites), the ZX81 (colour-clashing glory!) and CPC levels the most. I wonder if the fact that I like the c64 levels the least is coindidental

[MacDeath]

I think it is not ZX80 & ZX81 but ZX81 & ZXspeccy48...
And yep the CPC levels seem nice. But it seems that sometimes they make a crude use of the CPC palette.
on the other hand it is quite accurate to so many CPC games...
The heavy use of Rick dangerous tiles reminds me when I modded them for Rick Dangerous 128PLUS.
But used like this I sometimes feel the colours don"t always match well as they mixed tiles from different levels.

you tell they used more than one medium grey ? wow then it is clearly not CPC, lol...

according to whatr I found on the net :
=first release wasn't really accurate, then it got patched.
=as a result many photos we see on the net use the unaccurate graphics...

but now it seems better with the latest releases anyway... should get my hand on this one perhaps.

what about release on the real machines ?

how difficult would it be to get this CPC version ?
Well I bet they don't stick to original screensizes...

look like a mode0 version would need to be 240x270 to be perfect port, oops we can only 192x272 I guess...

[Gryzor]

I think each machine's levels could be perfectly emulated on the original machines. Of course resolution would have to change on all the levels (you're talking about the CPC, but think about GameBoy ), but other than that if you get the animation fluid there's nothing special...

[Bryce]

A Gameboy Emulator should be easy on a CPC shouldn't it? They are very similar.

Bryce.

[TFM]

Not the CPU...

[MacDeath]

A Gameboy Emulator should be easy on a CPC shouldn't it? They are very similar.

may be hard to implement the hard sprites from the gameboy, would be quite slow, also the Gameboy was not a perfect/standard Z80... some extra features if I recall well.

otherwise the Mode1 with "magnified" pixels may work... what was it, 160x100 on Gameboy ? oh no it was 160x144...

a 1:1 emulator may work, the limited resolution would mean a very little screen but also extra CPU and RAM for the CPC as less ressources used by the "screen".

But back to topic.

do some of those CPC levels have some scrolling ?
The BBC micro could also be done on a CPC, after all it is some sort of Mode0 with quite poorer palette. 

An Amstrad PLUS version would certainly be quite impressive... and could do C64 as well (even betterly than a C64 lol).
Could also do the atari2600 version vell, thx to mega raster effects.

Would they license their franchise on real machines ?
After all it was done with cyber chicken. 


The speccy version seems to be actually MSX because some "sprites" don't really have colour clashes from what i saw, but I don't have the game anyway.

[redbox]

Gameboy has 40 hardware sprites, with up to 10 per scan line.

Also the CPU is a Z80 clone - doesn't have Index registers and some other bits are different too.

So not as simple as it initially seems...

[arnoldemu]

A Gameboy Emulator should be easy on a CPC shouldn't it? They are very similar.

Bryce.

LOL!

[arnoldemu]

The BBC micro could also be done on a CPC, after all it is some sort of Mode0 with quite poorer palette. 

different cpu, has a 2Mhz 6502 (faster than C64 ) and compared to a 4mhz z80 it's probably faster.
It's CRTC is setup different too.

So no, not so easy.


However, porting of the games to cpc rewriting them in z80 is much much more possible!
CPC has generally more ram free and a bigger palette and a better sound chip.

[Bryce]

LOL!

That's just me once again showing my lack of knowledge about anything outside hardware

Bryce.

[MacDeath]

different cpu, has a 2Mhz 6502 (faster than C64 ) and compared to a 4mhz z80 it's probably faster.
It's CRTC is setup different too.
So no, not so easy.
However, porting of the games to cpc rewriting them in z80 is much much more possible!
CPC has generally more ram free and a bigger palette and a better sound chip.

I didn't meant to use BBC micro code on the CPC...

The game despite its skins is somewhat the same... resolution wise, BBC micro and CPC have the same sort of Mode1 pixels, jsut BBC micro has poorer palette.

the CPC can get the same 320x256 or 160x256 resolutions...

If the game engine is good enough on the CPC, then you can apply the BBC palette "skin" on it.

That's the main point with Life of Pixel... it uses retro computer "skins" for the graphics, sound and gameplay limitation (scrollings ?), mostly.
But runs on PSP or modern PC...

That's just me once again showing my lack of knowledge about anything outside hardware

I guess it may be possible to have a game boy emulator on the PCW16 instead...

Gameboy has 40 hardware sprites, with up to 10 per scan line.

Also the CPU is a Z80 clone - doesn't have Index registers and some other bits are different too.

So not as simple as it initially seems...

Wouldn't be that much different than the PACMAN emulator, just more complexe and each ROM/games may have to be patched to a various degree if they use extra CPU features (not available on the Z80A)
As I told, if the CPC keep on Mode1 in 160x144... that may work but the screen would feature an even bigger border than with speccy ports/emulators.
of course soundcheap is different, Gameboy has 4 channels, but this is a job for the Mighty CTC-AY I guess.

Wikipedia :

CPU: Custom 8-bit Sharp LR35902[20] core at 4.19 MHz. This processor is similar to an Intel 8080 in that none of the registers introduced in the Z80 are present. However, some of the Z80's instruction set enhancements over the stock 8080, particularly bit manipulation, are present. Still other instructions are unique to this particular flavor of Z80 CPU. The core also contains integrated sound generation.[21]

Sound: 2 pulse wave generators, 1 PCM 4-bit wave sample (64 4-bit samples played in 1×64 bank or 2×32 bank) channel, 1 noise generator, and one audio input from the cartridge.[25] The unit only has one speaker, but headphones provide stereo sound (for further information, see Game Boy music)

anyway such emulator would be difficult to do because, well, hard to emulate a machine with somewhat the same CPU power.

according to wikipedia, Gameboy is about 60hz screen refresh, games may be even slowlier on CPC at 50hz... still would be quite fun.



Sorry to derail the t opic. a GameBoy emulator project could actually be a nice proper topic by itself.

[Gryzor]

But I didn't mean emulate all the different levels/systems on the CPC. I mean that the CPC levels could be done on a CPC, the BBC ones on a BBC and so on...

[ralferoo]

The chip in the gameboy is nominally a clone of the Z80, but really it's totally different. It's probably closer to an 8080 expanded in a different way to the Z80 with Z80 style mnemonics for the instructions...

It's missing an alternate register set, hasn't got any index registers, but it does have something like the 6502's zero page (but at #ff00) and post-increment and post-decrement (HL) instructions...