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Hello everyone,

I thought to post a quick tutorial on how to get a nice effective old skool CRT look, however I had a look about the forum index and saw no specific area related to posting tutorials. My apologies if I have posted this into the wrong section.


Ok so I really like that old CRT  look, in particular when it comes to pixel art. Over the years I have seen various games and emulators try to simulate various styles of scan-lines and CRT looks, however I have rarely (if ever) seen ones that try to simulate the actual RGB component to each cell on a CRT screen. This style may not be to everyone's taste though.

Anyway I thought to try come up with something effective and thought to post my method here on the AGS forum since many of you are working at the pixel art level. This method could be applied to any lod res , however Its designed and most effective for pixel art styles.


So first of all to make this work you have to understand that you must upscale your artwork to at least 300%. This means for every pixel of your art work it will now have 9 pixels of detail, this will be needed for 2 reasons,  the first reason is to get Red Green and Blue going horizontally across each of your pixels, and the second reason is you will simulate the CRT cell beveling at the top and bottom of this 3x3 pixel.

This upscaling of art work may obviously not work with some projects  since those projects would be locked to a certain game res, but in general this is just the method and could in theory be applied to any game no matter its res.


Ok here are the very simple steps, and underneath are images of the process and underneath that is another image demonstrating how effective it can be.


Step 1:
Up-Scale your raw pixel art work up by 300% using nearest neighbor scaling (to avoid aa/blurring)
then zoom right in on one of your artwork pixels (which is now 3x3 pixels), then simply paint 3 vertical lines of 3 pixels, Red, Green and Blue. (Make sure to keep neatly inside your art work pixel)

Step 2
Now to simulate the slight bevel you see on CRT cells if you look close enough. Either apply a bevel or just paint lighter shade of Red,Green, Blue on the top row of 3 pixels, then at the bottom row of 3 pixels paint in darker R, G, B colors.


Step 3
Now you simply (but very carefully) copy and paste this to make a row,, then copy that row to make a block, and copy that block.. and so on. But its very import to take care that in each of your art work pixels the RGB cell is sitting in snug, with the highlight of the bevel on top and the dark part on the bottom and the Red component starting first.

Step 4
Once you have the whole of your image covered , simply use a "Soft Light" layer blend and your done. No need to touch Opacity settings. In this example I am using PS, however most GFX software that has layers will have a close equivalent to PS Layer Blends.

Step 5
On zooming right in you can make sure you didn't go wrong with the copy/pasting of the cells/rows..etc





And here are some examples of how effective this overlay filtering can be. , I have also provided you with a strip of overlay filter at the very bottom that's on a transparent background so if your too lazy to make it your self, just grab that and copy/paste until you have your image covered. (you will still need to apply a layer blend such as Soft Light)
You could bake this overlay effect into your image, or in theory it could be used as a real-time screen overlay filter in a game engine however I am not sure AGS could do that.




There is one disadvantage to this CRT effect in that it darkens the image slightly, however due to the nature of the effect its  kind of unavoidable , but its authentic to how a CRT would do it. You could brighten your under lay image up or  brighten your baked image but you might run the risk of washing the colors out a bit then.

Anyway have fun with it, hope it's useful to someone out there.

Hello, I will give more details soon, but the short version is I can not code or script, but have "some" ability with art work, and have had some experience in general with game design. You guys can have a gander at some of my conceptual crap here: http://www.fractalscapes.net/game_design.html

Ok so I was knocking about around the time of the classic lucas, sierra..etc era so I know the gist of how point and clicks go. No so long ago I created some conceptual stuff with general game ideas for a point and click, I moved on to other things at the time so never came back to it, but you can see that general idea here: http://fractalscapes.net/_media/Game_Design/We_are_The_Robots/index.html

The idea I have "now" , is sort of similar to the idea I had with We Are the Robots, but some differences are this game will have a top-down, slightly angled perspective, much like Retro City Rampage ( http://www.retrocityrampage.com/map/city.pngv ) .. however unlike Retro City 8bit look, my idea will strive to simulate an 16bit look, and be slightly more detailed with regard resolution.

I have not created a project progress page like I have done with other projects, however I have created some very early conceptual bits and pieces .... thus:

This is like my experiment/concept sheet, where I just try this and that out, right now I am still establishing an aesthetic


Zoomed in on the area I am working on (with some filtering, color correction)


The game will feature much neon and ideally might have day/night cycle/states, as a quick example:


Many if not all buildings the player will be able to enter, so all in all certainly art work wise its an ambitious project, if you consider the scale of something like Retro City Rampage....  it's likely to be smaller then that tho.

So, what am I looking for here?... well as I mentioned in my opening I could do with someone to help with the scripting end of things, and also, although I have created some concept npc/characters (top left corner of Concept Sheet image), I really don't think they fit so well to the style I am establishing with the buildings/city itself, so perhaps someone who is good and character design and animation would be also fantastic.

Anyhoo if anyone sounds in anyway interested in this I would be over joyed to here what you think and over the moon if you could get involved in someway. Naturally I am aiming to have this game as a product so equal shares in whatever is made, if anything, would be agreed upon.

take care yee set`o`salty sea dogs



NOTE:
although my heart is with AGS.. I am concerned a number of visual features that ideally I think would help this game shine ags would struggle to do (in particular certain lighting effects) , in that case I am very open to any other engine, anything to make the game look its best and attract more people is a good thing.