Monday, June 6, 2011

My Sixteen Favourite Colours



Here's my first try at the EGA-look! Stuff is kind of giant compared to the character :O. Click the image to see it in all its blocky majesty!

I'm a pretty big computer game geek. Not newer games, but the games that happened in the sweet ol' days of EGA and VGA. Old school Sierra and LucasArts adventure games are a major inspiration of mine. I have a particular love for EGA, which was a glorious sixteen colour palette. The sixteen colours you see above were all those companies needed to create some of my favourite computer game art of all time: Colonel's Bequest, Quest for Glory II: Trial by Fire, Monkey Island 1, King's Quest 3 and 4... The Colonel's Bequest particularly had some of the loveliest pixel-painting of any of those adventure games.

Every time I watch Youtuber hercrabbiness's Let's Play of Colonel's Bequest I get so psyched to create a game like that. With a utility called Adventure Game Studio, this wouldn't be an impossible dream!

My silkscreen work has always been somewhat influenced by those computer games I enjoyed as a kid. I love sharp lines (anti-aliased blurriness makes me angry!), limited colour palettes, and the technique of using coloured half-tone screens to create intermediate colours.

Here's my other digital stuff, but my love for EGA is so great that I think I'll be redoing the character stuff I did in VGA with EGA!

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

Very cool illustration!

Laura said...

Lovely, lovely stuff.

Julia Minamata said...

Thanks, Laura! Love your fanpage :). Here is a new background I'm working on: http://www.juliaminamata.com/kitchen_brownwood.gif

Work in progress!

Laura said...

Love the EGA look. It appears that you're strictly adhering to the classic EGA 16-color palette? It's one hell of an undertaking, but the backgrounds are looking mighty fine. Best of luck!

Julia Minamata said...

Thanks, Laura! I'm so in love with that classic EGA palette. Definitely going to do my game entirely in glorious sixteen colours!

Shroom said...

Ah, I completely share your love for the Old Classics (Sierra & LucasArts).
I've been dreaming about making a text parser game of my own, so glad to find a kindred spirit! I'm actually working on a script of my own right now, and I just downloaded AGS - we'll see if I get anywhere with my project. It's so much fun coming up with all the puzzles and problems!

Your work looks astonishing! How's your script coming along? You mentioned somewhere that so far you've focused more on the visuals than writing the story, any news on that front?
:)
-Olga

Julia Minamata said...

Thanks, Olga!

Best of luck with your game, and do share your work-in-progress!

I've just finished integrating my "outside house" backgrounds with my "inside house" backgrounds -- I think I'm up to 56 rooms? Right now I'm actually starting work on programming in my actual story and puzzles :D. I roughed out my story ages ago, so I have to consult those notes and see where I'm at!

-- Julia