Hello. How are you all doing?
DaveC and anyone else with questions about the look and design, I'll try to answer them here.
I really didn't want to get into all this technicallity, but I hope it explains the layout better.
First of all, a little on me. I'm a dot artist in this part of the world who is reasonably well versed in the "tile", "pixel art", "sprite", and "dot art" techniques.
Since this now kind of rare (out of Asia) video game art is the expertise of Yuan Works, we wanted to treat the GP2X users with something that would be hard to have on this system. We know that GP2X users love tile and sprite based work because of all the programs that run games for such systems, like the NeoGeo MVS/AVS, Sega MegaDrive/Genesis, and others.
Some of the rules that apply to such game design is that ALL THE GRAPHICS are multiples of eight or sixteen pixles, edited at PIXEL LEVEL, and so forth. I am not going to explain the reasons for this in this post because it's not pertaining.
Like many of the games of the NeoGeo system, we do not use "calculated" effects on our animations (except for semi-transparencies) , and everything including the zooming, fading out, and other effects are done by hand pixel by pixel. When you download the game, take a look at the "Ready", "Time Over", "Game Over", and other text animations to see what I mean
Now, to make the blocks bigger we would need them to be four tiles big, and that would just be too big to fit on the GP2X screen. It is not possible to enlarge them, say 15% more because of the tile layout we use in the game. Here's a screenshot to illustrate.
This is like the "golden ratio" of 2-D video games.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_ratio
If you analyze closely, you'll notice that all professional games from companies like Nintendo, SquareEnix, or SNK Playmore obey these rules in their design; and we at Yuan Works give you that design quality, too.
Hope this helps answer the questions a little more. Thank you very much and have fun playing the game!
Yuan
