Dev log #3

One of Time To Live's biggest selling points is its 16-color graphics.

16-color is a essence of the classic IBM PC games. My personal goal is to recreate the graphics of the EGA. The color table consists of eight basic colors, eight brighter colors, and 16 colors in total. These 16 colors are very sufficient for drawing, and I believe that having this constraint pushes human creativity even further, because it forces us to use our brains to overcome scarce resources.



Drawing in 16 colors is a technique that's been perfected by many before me, so it's a simple matter of following suit. There are classic games like Commander Keen, Duke Nukem, and so many more.

In the beginning, I was thought, “Just draw a picture and modify it with a indexed 16 colors.” but I soon learned that this was a grave mistake. Index colors don't translate as well as I thought they would. For example, here's an example of my failure.



The figure on the left was dithered too much, which made it look quite ugly. The dithering pattern is also not uniform, so I drew it again. On the right is how it will look in the actual game.



The biggest problem is that the lines are inconsistent in thickness - I want them to be clean, one-pixel lines, but the program is too dumb, you know.

Eventually, I decided to throw away these failed drafts and start drawing it myself.

Here's how I drew them in 16 colors.



Let's start with photography. I usually travel to different places and take pictures of impressive views, which are very helpful when I'm creating something. I'll use this photo as a reference.



Start with a rough sketch. For reference, all of the background pictures have a resolution of 475 x 275 (actually 950 x 550 by 2x). I'm assuming that Time To Live will have a resolution of 640 x 360 (again, this is actually 1280 x 720 by 2x).



I drew the pixels roughly based on my sketch. Pixels should only be drawn with a mouse. If you draw with a tablet, the pixels will clump together, you won't get uniformly thick lines, and the result will be ugly.



Draw the trees to be dense.



These leaves are not hand drawn, but I created a pattern of these shapes, which I then duplicated.



You might be wondering why the color of the leaves is dark blue + dark green. Personally, I think the light green+dark green color combination is too bland, and it's a very obvious leaf color, and the outlines don't stand out. Real life leaves don't look that light green, either. Anyway, that's why I don't use light green very often.



I flipped it over and drew the leaves on the other side, then cleaned them up a bit. Then I drew the background mountain, the water, and the bridge in the distance. Since I have a limited number of colors, it's all about how much natural dithering I can add. For this reason, I often change the pattern and color of the dither as I draw. I save my dithering patterns as patterns in Photoshop.



I drew the overpass in the background. I really wanted to draw an overpass. One of the things I personally look for in art is how Korean it is, because when you go to the countryside in Korea, you always see overpasses. I want to recreate the scenery that I see around me. At the BIC exhibition, someone once asked me, “Isn't the background too Korean?” but that was my intention. The game is set in Korea, not some faraway country or other world.



This is the finalized look. I adjusted the dithering pattern of the sky to change the color a bit.



Since the game will have different backgrounds depending on the weather, we'll just change the color and dither pattern to represent a cloudy day. When I'm done, I convert it to the index color and save it, just in case. This will correct any small pixels that I didn't catch that are outside the 16 colors.



This is what it actually looks like in-game.

So there you have it, the process of creating a 16-color background illustration, and I hope you like it, whether you've played the game from this era or are seeing it for the first time.

Thank you.