Uzebox Forums

I found a retro style flash game recently: Dino Run. It is accessible for example here, but you may find it probably several other places. It is a rather well designed runner.

From Uzebox's perspective what's interesting is the very low resolution. It uses 266 x 150 square pixels for the main game, which is less than even Mode 74's (7 cycles / pixel) total pixel count (39900 versus 43904 pixels). Of course a lot of techniques within are impossible for Uzebox, but the graphics design, how a low resolution can be utilized to convey an interesting game are relevant. The use of "flat" sprites having very few colors might give an idea for utilizing ROM better, trading off color for animation (my in-progress UCC entry also does something similar). It might also suggest how a double scanned resolution (such as 160x112 using 9 cycles per pixel) might work out for an useful game.

An attractive game, especially when it morphs to nearly monochrome red/black and the wall of doom is behind you. Visually that parallax does a lot for me so I guess I would go to extremes to try and keep such a thing for a runner game like that. For certain things I still believe a row based RLE scheme could yield a lot or even replicate some of those scenes with parallax and all, depending on how many cycles to blit. I played with something that was around 180 pixels wide and Cunning had some ijmp thing that hit much more but was also of course slower to blit. Sparse low colored stuff, it probably is at least a competitive solution.