Wiering Software has just released Charlie II version 3.10, which now includes two free training levels, meant for first-time players and young kids who have trouble getting through the first regular level. In fact, the first level can be completed by only holding down the right arrow key (be sure to set the difficulty to easy if you try that, or you won’t survive!).
To download, visit to the Charlie II website.
Coltris is a small casual game I wrote a long time ago. It’s a match-3 game in which you must try to line up at least three blocks of the same color to remove them. During the game, more and more colors appear, making it harder. This game was originally for DOS, but I recently ported it to Windows / DirectX. This game is freeware.
Download: DOS version | Windows version
I’m working on real 256-color palette support for Tile Studio. They are already supported in a way, but I don’t think anyone uses them with the current implementation.
You might be thinking: why in the world use 256-color palettes now that everyone has RGBA / true-color display? Well, it might seem like going a step back, but using palettes does have a huge advantage: you can use the same graphics with various color palettes. If you choose your palettes well, you can save yourself a lot of work by making drawings that work with different palettes. For example, take a look at the graphics of Charlie II, the same blocks are used many times in different shades or colors.
Here, I’ve divided the palette into 32 rows of 8 colors (dark to light). So by shifting the colors by +1, +2 or -1, -2, your graphics become lighter or darker. And by using values like +8, +$11 or -$1F, for example, you (also) get a different row of colors. This makes it easy to add some more variation to your maps.
Another example is if you have a game that takes place in 4 different settings (like daytime, sunset, night, morning), you could divide the palette into 4 sections of 64 colors. Or if half of your game takes place under water, you might divide your entire palette into two 128-color sections.
In the old days, when every game used 256-color modes, palettes were also used for animations. The advantage was that you could make graphics all over the screen change without actually drawing them (which was very slow), but simply by changing palette values (fast!). See my PC Mario clone for example, the waterfalls in the first level are done with palette animation and so are the background bricks in level 2!
There is still a lot of work to do (map editing, exporting, etc.), so it will take some time before the next version is available.
Welcome to the Wiering Software blog! I’ve just registered WieringSoftware.eu and I’m setting things up now. If you are interested in game development, be sure to bookmark this site and come back later, there will be lots of interesting articles here!