I've been inching back into the CRPG work... mostly thinking about combat. I may need to write-out the entire battle engine in pseudo-code first, and then do an honest assessment of whether or not I have the memory to do what I want. Things have a way of taking up a LOT more space than you initially thought. I'd probably also go back to the idea of making the engine run in a stand-alone format for testing and refinement, and then integrating it into the travel engine.

In the mean-time, I've also been doing something more creative but of lesser priority.. the title screen.

A good title screen is something you tend to remember about a game. Ultima boasted some lively animated ones, and a lot of Apple II games made it a point to have a VERY good title screen, something that would draw people in if viewed in, say, a computer store.

The TI's bitmap mode is actually very capable of generating some fantastic images, despite the color limitation of 2-colors per octet. (That's 8-bits horizontal.) There's even some very good utilities to convert images to TMS9918A bitmap format (Usually called mode 2), thanks to some overlap from the MSX crowd, who have done more of this sort of thing than 99'ers over the years.

I wanted a nice landscape picture for my title, but also something that wasn't proprietary. So I went with a piece called "The White Mountains" by Thomas Moran, a famous painter of American landscapes in the late 19th century. It's pleasing, and it's public domain.

Converting it to the TI bitmap mode, though, has proven to be a real challenge. Just a straight computer conversion looks like absolute crap. This isn't surprising, since the 15-color limitation is going to wreck havoc on a watercolor piece with a number of hues and gradients.

Right now, my solution has been to convert the images to something slightly closer, around 256 colors, then I have separated the background and foreground objects, and rendered them into black and white. From there, I can individually apply color to bring certain objects into better detail. I also want the piece to have a "black" background to go with the game. I may need to dither the background part a bit to lessen it, as the two combined at the moment make a royal mess that's hard to distinguish...

I eventually plan to put the game's title into the background, hopefully making the letters both stand out and flow with the picture... somehow. I'm not sure how well that's going to come off as yet.