#8bit

Let me tell you the grand tale of Riolu and Chimchar from Team Fire.

⬇ Dᴏᴡɴʟᴏᴀᴅs
http://riolu.link/rezawrces/music

Very creative team name, I know. Back then, I couldn’t think of a better name and wanted to continue playing. PMD2 Sky is one of my most favourite games and so is the soundtrack. I’m very thankful that I was given the opportunity to experience this wonderful game as a child and to this day I get very emotional when I listen to the soundtrack or even see scenes of the game. That’s quite useful actually, whenever I have something in my eye I can just listen to some especially emotional or sad songs and it will be removed in no time.

The game has so many great songs that I couldn’t decide which one to cover first, so I just took the first song to begin the PMD 2 covers and to get some more practice before I do the best songs. At first, I finished the cover only using the 2A03 channels. I put up that initial version for download as well. However, I didn’t like the sound of the noise-only base drums at all but the triangle channel was entirely used up by the bass and juggling base and drums in the same loud triangle channel doesn’t sound good either. I also had the idea to use additional channels to attempt to create an echo, so I added the VRC6 channels, moved the base to the sawtooth channel, added triangle sounds to the base drums and had two more pulse channels to use for the echo or other things. I wasn’t sure if using the sawtooth channel as base is a good idea though as it doesn’t sound as good and the loud triangle base is certainly a very distinct feature of 2A03 music. Because I used an odd number of lines per beat, I had to add Gxx in every single line of the first echo channel to make it start half a beat later. Using more than 1 effect column with 7 channels however wouldn’t fit my video layout and I didn’t want to half the resolution just for a couple of pixels, so I edited the second effect column of VRC6’s Pulse 1 channel out. Just pretend the echo notes in that channel all have G04 behind them.

A year ago, I tried to draw a BotW landscape to use as my outro. It was supposed to have signs next to a pathwaytrailroutetrack with previous videos and everything. Unfortunately though, my pixel art abilities were not nearly good enough and after a couple of days, I gave up because it looked horrible. Then I had the idea of the stage that the video is being showed on and the standing signs turned into hanging signs. Now, with a lot more pixel art experience, I attempted to draw a landscape again and to my surprise it looked great. I’m always afraid to draw at higher resolutions because then one can see my non-existing drawing abilities in greater detail. I proceeded to draw Wigglytuff and it looked great, so did Riolu and Chimchar. I couldn’t believe that something I drew looked that great. I guess I did indeed improve and I shouldn’t be scared. Saying this feels very familiar.

Then I drew Chatot though and it looked horrible. At first, I thought that was because I had reference poses of the other 3 Pokémon in SFM and apparently I could only draw something that looks good with a perfectly posed reference. Next was Grovyle and it looked just as good as the first 3 but there was no Grovyle model for SFM as well, so I guess it wasn’t the missing reference. Apparently, birds are just as impossible to draw as hands. I considered removing Chatot because it’s ruining this otherwise beautiful piece (I call it "Cover Cover"), but Chatot just fits perfectly in Shaymins spot being looked at by Wigglytuff and I can’t have Wigglytuff without Chatot. In the end, I gave up on improving Chatot and the ugliness is kind of needed, it would look too good for a drawing by me otherwise.

Using the NES colour palette was once again fun and looks great, it just doesn’t have enough colours to nicely shade things. I considered using dithering but sometimes the only fitting colour is the same as the outline and I also don’t know if dithering would look good with my coloured lines in general. Maybe I should just try it some time. This time though, I settled for no shading since I also like flat unshaded styles.

I have no idea why I finished the fideo this late. It only took 60 hours to make, this would finally have given me some time before the next fideo to start working on my website and to finish the channel revolution. Apparently, the once again unusually large amount of RL stuff that happened during the last two weeks consumed the remaining time I had. Some big, positive and greatly needed things have happened recently though, so that’s good. There will be 2 more 8-bit covers before the obligatory annual Christmas fideo. I hope that I will be able to finish them quickly and finally have time for said things without having to stop regular uploads again. Until then, have a wonderful day and if you actually read all of this, have a delicious Toast Hyrule :)

👆 Lɪɴᴋs
Website: http://riolu.link

The Night 𝙃𝙚 Came to Termina!

⬇ Dᴏᴡɴʟᴏᴀᴅs
http://riolu.link/rezawrces/music

At the beginning of the year, I had the idea to make an 8-bit version of this song and I was really excited to recreate the high ticking noise and everything else. But I put it on my fideo list to make it for Halloween, hoping that by then I would have a lot of FamiTracker experience and would be able to do the song justice.

Now I’d say I’ve just had enough experience to make it good enough. The base drum actually sounds like one unlike the terrible attempt I made in the GoT theme. Apparently 3 Triangle wave ticks are enough. During the creation process and when I was done I actually liked and was satisfied with how it sounded. In fact, I liked it so much that I listened to it for hours while drawing the pixel art. Maybe that’s why I’m not sure if it’s good anymore now as I usually don’t like a song anymore when I’ve listened to it too many times consecutively. I just couldn’t resist because I was so surprised that I actually for the first time made an 8-bit cover that I liked. Now however, I think it just sounds good because the song is so simple that it’s impossible to make a bad sounding cover. The only thing I’m still satisfied with is the percussion.

I’ve actually not watched the film before, I just knew the great music from Dead by Daylight but to get something for the visuals of the fideo, I watched it. I expected a scene of Laurie looking ouf of a window and seeing Michael Myers outside in the dark that I could recreate in a top-down video game style but I only found one potential scene: Michael Myers standing menacingly on top of the stairs, only his silhouette being visible in the dark and Laurie or rather the camera looking up to him. While I could barely see anything during that actual scene, in my head I had all kinds of ideas how a scene like this could look amazing. Myers, or as a Zelda reference the Skull Kid with Majora’s Mask and Myers’s’s knife, could be standing up there, his dark silhouette in front of a window that gives a bit of light to the top floor and lets us see the beautiful stars, but also Majora’s Mask’s eerie moon, the main focus lying on the mask’s glowing eyes. Of course, the Skull Kid has to be accompanied by Tael.

Unfortunately, the end result doesn’t even come close to the incredible scene I had envisioned in my mind. I had to redraw the interior of the house many many times, especially the stairs and railings to get the perspective right. There were also other things I wanted to add like maybe a generator or some other DbD reference and a pumpkin glowing in the bottom left corner behind the railing similar to the film poster I animated but I ran out of time. I really need a lot more pixel art experience, the visuals for these fideos take way too long to make and are not at all to my standards.

Regarding the integration of the film into my mind, I was disappointed by it. Amarizo watched it last year on Halloween and already told me that it was boring and apparently he was right. To me it just consisted of meaningless and boring scenes. Occasionally, Michael Myers shows up to do nothing or when he actually does something, he just kills people in unspectacular ways who to me were just actors pretending to be killed and not actually dying characters with interesting personalities that I learn about and get close to during the story. Another big part of the non-existing story that bothers me is the fact that Michael’s motive and backstory is just: He is evil. That’s it. He has been evil from birth for no reason and will forever be evil. In my opinion, this is just boring and unimaginative and really shows that the entire film has no content at all, just a couple of scary scenes that were not really scary. The only good thing about it is the music. And I guess a couple of nice sounding quotes by Michael’s psychiatrist. Maybe it’s a good thing though that it wasn’t more scary or brutal, I actually don’t like horror or violence at all. Instead of nightmares, I got some alright iconic scenes, great music and great quotes. I love quotes. Quote me on that.

👆 Lɪɴᴋs
Website: http://riolu.link
Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/linkriolu
Twitter: https://twitter.com/LinkRiolu
Discord server: http://discord.riolu.link
Secondary YouTube channel with random videos, work in progresses, behind the scenes etc.: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC6OogQGNdNLLRix0TR0Ke_A
Steemit: https://steemit.com/@link-ger
DeviantArt: https://www.deviantart.com/link-riolu
Twitch (German): https://www.twitch.tv/link_riolu

🕒 Exᴘᴇɴᴅɪᴛᴜʀᴇ ᴏꜰ ᴛɪᴍᴇ
65.5 hours total
Watching the film: 1.5 hours
Song: 7 hours
Thumbnail: 12 hours
Animation: 33 hours
Editing: 12 hours

⬇ Dᴏᴡɴʟᴏᴀᴅs
http://riolu.link/rezawrces/music

I briefly started working on this 5 months ago and I wanted to get it done before season 8 ends. But of course things went differently.

This is my first attempt at percussion in FamiTracker. I used both the triangle and noise channel with volume slides, pitch slides and arpeggio envelopes. At first I thought the triangle drums sounded a bit weird but when there are other sounds playing at the same time it sounds alright.

There are multiple reasons why it took 4 weeks to get this fideo done. Some were out of my control like real life stuff and the troubles I had trying to make the animation. Clip Studio Paint is amazing and can do a lot of the things I always dreamt of but quite a few of them don’t always work, at least the way I need them. For a pixel art animation I of course needed nearest neighbour interpolation which is amazingly possible in a canvas setting. Unfortunately, this applies only to moving raster images, not to file objects inside an animation folder (but outside of animation folders it does?!) and not to camera movements. I love file objects, the ability to add a seperate file as layer is amazing and what I always wanted and so I use them whenever possible in animations. It took a long time to figure all these strange things out and to make it work the way I wanted it to. Adding every single one of the many 60 fps-frames that I animated and exported in Aseprite to their respective frames in Clip Studio Paint was annoying and time consuming as well. Actually, at first I wanted to animate the camera movements in Video deluxe since it has good position keyframing but of course no way to change the scaling interpolation. After the finished animation was exported in Clip Studio Paint, I had to resize every one of the 5900 frames to 3840p in Aseprite. I tried it multiple times but every time Aseprite (and other programmes) crashed because it ran out of memory. So I had to import the images into multiple Aseprite files and export them separately. The resizing alone took 4 hours. But I’m still incredibly glad that I can now use Aseprite to do this.

The biggest reason in my control were my usual self-doubts. A lot of the time I wasn’t motivated to continue because I thought the song and the animation will be terrible. Some times I actually liked my progress and had fun but in the next moment I changed my mind again. I’m not sure if this is good or good enough but I tried to convince myself that it might be terrible now but I need to continue if I want to improve. Just like my Developer Updates and Jeff Sings improved. Though it seems like people only watch my old and bad fideos. First the old DbD bug fideos and now Introducing Link was suddenly watched by six thousand people. I should be honoured that people actually watch it but it’s just really terrible quality-wise and content-wise and unfortunately these people don’t seem to take a look at or are interested in my better fideos.

🕒 Exᴘᴇɴᴅɪᴛᴜʀᴇ ᴏꜰ ᴛɪᴍᴇ
83 hours total
(26 hours for the song
51 hours for the animation
6 hours for editing, thumbnail and everything else)

💾 Pʀᴏɢʀᴀᴍᴍᴇs ᴜsᴇᴅ
Video editing: DaVinvi Resolve https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/davinciresolve/
Pixel art + pixel animation: Aseprite https://www.aseprite.org/
Pixel animation camera movement: Clip Studio Paint Ex https://www.clipstudio.net/en/
8-bit audio production: FamiTracker http://famitracker.com/
Audio editing: Audacity https://www.audacityteam.org/
Screen recording: OBS Studio https://obsproject.com/
Video conversion: FFmpeg https://ffmpeg.org/

🎵 Mᴜsɪᴄ ᴜsᴇᴅ
Original song: Ramin Djawadi – Main Title (From The "Game Of Thrones" Soundtrack) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s7L2PVdrb_8
[8-Bit] The Legend of Zelda – Overworld Theme https://youtu.be/qc1RTNB6Rwc
[8-Bit] The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess – Ilia’s Theme https://youtu.be/IWw9-V1yJtk

⬇ Dᴏᴡɴʟᴏᴀᴅs
http://riolu.link/rezawrces/music

This is the first actual song cover I’ve created using FamiTracker and I’m surprisingly pretty happy with how it turned out. For the main voice I used the triangle channel because it sounds kind of like a flute at high octaves, the downside is that it doesn’t allow many modifications or decorations except for vibrati which is why I considered using the FDS expansion with a triangle wave at first. In order to simulate the sound of the supporting voice, I used a volume envelope that starts loud, becomes quieter quickly and then slowly fades along with a bit of a tremolo. This creates an interesting sound with an initial attack that lingers a bit afterwards, just like in the original. Both pulse channels play the supporting voice alternately to make the most out of the lingering sounds and to prevent the overlapping lingering of the last two notes from causing a dissonance I added a faster fade as release in the volume envelope that is used on the second to last note of longer notes. (I wrote this paragraph a year ago when I made the song)

In regard of the integration of the drawings into the fideo, this was my first time drawing hair. For the first time it turned out acceptably I think, partly thanks to Amarizo’s helpful suggestions.

🕒 Exᴘᴇɴᴅɪᴛᴜʀᴇ ᴏꜰ ᴛɪᴍᴇ
600 hours

💾 Pʀᴏɢʀᴀᴍᴍᴇs ᴜsᴇᴅ
Video editing: DaVinvi Resolve https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/davinciresolve/
Pixel art + animations: Aseprite https://www.aseprite.org/
Drawing + animations: Clip Studio Paint Ex https://www.clipstudio.net/en/
Image editing: Affinity Photo https://affinity.serif.com/en-us/photo/
Image editing (and formerly pixel art): Paint.NET https://www.getpaint.net/
8-bit audio production: FamiTracker http://famitracker.com/
Audio production: FL Studio http://www.image-line.com/flstudio/
Audio editing: Audacity https://www.audacityteam.org/
3D animating: Source Filmmaker https://store.steampowered.com/app/1840/Source_Filmmaker/
3D modelling and animating: Blender https://www.blender.org/
Screen recording: Shadowplay https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/geforce-experience/shadowplay/
Console recording: RECentral https://www.avermedia.com/gaming/product/game_capture/recentral4
Streaming: OBS Studio https://obsproject.com/

🎵 Mᴜsɪᴄ ᴜsᴇᴅ
[8-Bit] The Legend of Zelda – Overworld Theme https://youtu.be/qc1RTNB6Rwc
[8-Bit] The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess – Ilia’s Theme

⬇ Dᴏᴡɴʟᴏᴀᴅs
Song: http://riolu.link/rezawrces/music
Game: http://riolu.link/tlok (playable in web browsers or as download)

It all started a year ago in New Jersey, I mean in Ordon, when I wanted to make an 8-bit version of Ilia’s Theme to use in my outro and while I’m at it a high quality version of the Overworld Theme to use in my intro. I started by recreating the already 8-bit Overworld Theme to learn how to use FamiTracker and to learn about 8-bit music in general. After I made Ilia’s Theme as well, I realised I really enjoyed making 8-bit music and that I should start making 8-bit covers of songs I love. In fideo form there had to be some sort of visuals as well, so I came up with the idea of making short pixel animations fitting to the songs along with the pattern and oscilloscopes from FamiTracker for those interested. Originally I didn’t want to upload the Overworld Theme as it’s almost the same as the original, but I liked the idea of making an animation of Link-Riolu in a first-Zelda-style environment killing an enemy with a sword. Link-Riolu was supposed to kill an enemy, then move a room to the right where the animation would loop and the same room with the enemy would appear again. But then I thought, why not make a couple of different rooms? Or why not a whole area? Or why not a whole game with a big map, interesting characters and an interesting story?

So I started drawing terrain textures which I have never done before. The rock walls were especially difficult. I tried many different versions and colours but I just couldn’t get something that actually looks like a rock wall. The current version was the best but then the next big obstacle appeared: Making many versions of this texture for all possible angles that all perfectly fit together in any combination. This was very tiring to do and I was very glad when I was done. The water animations turned out surprisingly well I think, considering I’ve never drawn or animated water before. Then I drew the walking animation for Link-Riolu and it was again a new challenge to draw a character in very few pixels. I couldn’t get something even close to acceptable at first, so I took a look at older Pokémon sprites for reference and proceeded to make the body very wide with barely any legs. It was good enough for my first attempt, so next I spent a lot of time creating the map, outlining the story and thinking of interesting characters. I’ve always wanted to write stories and create characters and I enjoyed doing so a lot. This was also the birth of Zelda-Kirlia. Unfortunately, you won’t be seeing the story or characters yet as I will stop working on the game to make other things for now.

When it came to implementing the ideas into the game, I had to spend days to get the transition between maps right. In TLoZ, enemies are not visible during the transition, so I created the entire map in one game map and then created lots of screen sized maps that each have a part of the whole map in them. When transitioning, first the player would be teleported from the screen sized map they are currently on to the relative position on the big map, making all enemies disappear. Then the player would be moved by one tile to the next part of the map, triggering the Map Scroll script. After the camera is centered on the next part of the map, the player would be teleported to the relative position on the respective screen sized map, making the enemies of that map part appear and completing the transition. However, there were multiple problems.

Firstly, the Map Scroll script starts the camera transition when the bottom right of the player’s sprite leaves the screen. This results in an instant start of the camera movement on bottom and right transitions, but on very delayed movements on top and left transitions. So I came up with the solution of making the player invisible as soon as the top and left transitions start and moving them at maximum speed to the next tile, activating the camera movement as soon as possible. To create the illusion of the player moving regularly, a copy of Link-Riolu’s sprite appears and moves 1 tile up or left at regular speed.

Secondly, there are no native ways (at least to my knowledge) in RPG Maker MV of triggering player teleports upon attempting to leave the map at the edge of the screen. Usually, teleports are triggered upon touching the tile on the edge of the screen. However, I wanted the player to be able to stand on the tiles on the edge of the screen without triggering the transition, instead triggering it only when leaving that tile in the direction of the next map. So I tried many different things for days until I found a looping check for button inputs that starts when touching the tile on the edge of the screen, ending the input check when pressing the movement key that leads back and triggering the transition steps upon pressing the movement key that leads out of the current screen. This worked nearly perfectly, exc

#8bit

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