Elite 3/4 (Patreon)

our heroine continues fighting through the treacherous mapping jungle, creating room after room of pure, unadulterated graphics hell.......

no actually though, so i did mention i was going to make these E4 rooms somewhat flashy and honestly i'm real happy with how all of the now-three rooms that are finished have come out. however, i'm pretty sure i have lost hours of the day, let alone years of my life, from trying to be particular about color count and consistent palettes instead of just mass adjusting color like it would've been so much easier to do (and i eventually gave into)

to clarify: like okay so when i'm talking about color count, i mean... if you're spriting for an old-school style game, especially on a romhack or something, you probably have 8 or 16 or 256 colors/shades per graphic that you can actually use, and if you use more than that then you will be smited by the unholy gods below (and so will your image quality). so you have to be very careful about that when spriting. further, if a sprite has a lot of different shades, it becomes rather hellish to edit, so it's typically best to use as few as possible.

over all, i have not held perfectly to color count in reborn because it is severely limiting, but for the sake of ease of editing and for good practice, I have actively been aware of it as much as feasible. so i was trying to do that here and
god
counting colors in 2019 is just so not worth the stretch, especially when i'm doing lighting/gradient effects in every room all the time. 

i had been considering for a while whether i would sprite or hand-draw tiles for starlight. the resolution allows the latter, but i'm more comfortable with spriting. however, this has made me really lean towards just drawing.

anyway, i still have one more room to do, and it's been the one that i've been least sure of what i wanted to do with it. obviously it has to match the character's field effect, but just going straight for that would be sooooo boring. so, i figured it out last last night. i realized that the map i was working on until this morning was kind of similar to a recurring location that i see in my dreams sometimes. i didn't play to that angle much even after realizing it...

however, it got me thinking about other recurring locations i've had in my dreams over the years. there are a fair number that have been somewhat consistent. i'm quite fond of them, even if some of them are less than pleasant in and of themselves... actually now that i think about it, in my younger days i toyed around making a game crossing various fairy tales over with those places. i don't remember much about it by now but the blitzle event in reborn is similar to the puzzle i made for the gingerbread man, lol....
...................... i don't wanna talk about it.

anyway, i honestly have no way to rationalize it for the given character, but there is one place in particular that feels very right for me to try and make the last room based off of. even lacking rationalization... i feel much more strongly about it than just playing the field's theme straight. i think i will be regretting it if i do not.

as for what that place is... i would share the name i've always called it. however, some folks prefer to avoid spoilers even insofar as that much, so...
well, tbh, i had intended this whole post to be a full spoiler post, and i was going to post some bits of the room i just finished... but i ended up typing a lot that can actually be shared  normally, so i'm just going to post as is for now. instead, i'll make a separate post a bit later for the stuff from the room i just finished.

...but as for the name of the places i'll be basing the last room off of, what should we do? that'd be awkward to shoehorn into the other post. sooo how about i leave it somewhere else for you so that those who don't want to know don't have to? but where? ah, how about i make a hangman game for it?
great, here you go.  
...given that it's a longer name it's probably hard to lose the game, but the challenge isn't the point here. 

visuals later.