The verdict

After weeks of polishing my three-layer parallax, I had to face facts: the result wasn't up to what I had in mind. Yes, making a smooth Shadow of the Beast is, good grief, nowhere near that simple.

Technically it worked. Three layers of scenery sliding at different speeds, just like in Shadow of the Beast. But on screen it was bland. On the STe the available colours are few, and they have to be shared between all the layers. The result: every layer was poor and drab, and the depth effect wasn't enough to make you forget how thin the scenery looked.

I want to prove the Atari STe can be beautiful. A parallax that impresses on paper wasn't enough. Not yet.

The realisation

What makes a game beautiful on this machine isn't showmanship, it's art. Scenery drawn with care, where every pixel counts, will always have more impact than a stack of layers with cramped colours. I realised I had been fighting for the wrong thing: I was trying to multiply the layers when I didn't even have a single genuinely beautiful one.

On this hardware, art beats technique. For now, at least. I'm not giving up on parallax!

The new approach: scenery painted whole

The principle is radically simple: instead of assembling the scenery from small repeated tiles and stacked layers, I draw the level as one big painting, end to end, and the machine simply scrolls that painting. A single layer, but a free one, where I can put whatever I want wherever I want.

That gives me all the machine's colours for one piece of scenery, instead of scattering them. Every torch, every shadow, every detail can finally breathe.

Flames that live on their own

A small joy of this approach: I animate every torch in the scenery in one gesture, by cycling a few colours reserved for fire. The flames flicker continuously, across the whole width of the level, without the game having to compute anything extra. It's free, and it immediately brings the forest to life.

What I gain, what I lose

I gain total artistic freedom: every pixel can be different, nothing is constrained by tiles that have to be stitched together. I also gain simplicity, the engine breathes and the scenery looks superb.

I lose the parallax: the scenery lives on a single layer, with no depth effect. I also lose flexibility, since a painted level costs more than scenery made of reusable tiles, and it has to be drawn end to end, with no infinite scrolling.

For this first game it's the right trade. But it's only postponed. Parallax stays in a corner of my mind. I learned a lot building it, and the day I have scenery drawn specifically for each layer, rather than bodged together in a hurry, I will come back to it. The long-term goal: a proper multi-layer parallax worthy of the STe. It will come.

What comes next

Level 1, "The Cursed Forest", is in place: a long dark stretch of scenery, animated torches, and my hero walking and jumping through it. Next step: enemies and combat. The following levels will be longer and more varied.

Play it now

Here is the game at this step. Level 1, "The Cursed Forest", is playable: smoothly scrolling scenery, animated torches, jumping.

Download morteveille-004-bitmap.prg (183 KB) - Historical archive of this step. Run it in Hatari in STe mode, 1 MB of RAM. Arrows to move, up to jump, fire to quit. For the current version of the game, see the homepage.

Move from left to right to travel through the level, and watch the torches live.

Sometimes the simplest solution is also the most beautiful.