Scramble (arcade game remake)

[RokCoder]

a version where the graphics look like the art on the packaging / flyers / arcade cabinet.

Totally in the realms of needing an artist or at least someone with time and some artistic flair. There's a reason I tend to use the original sprite sheets

Over the weekend just for fun I googled Scramble and started playing with the graphics from the arcade cabinet and various flyers and manuals, with the idea of modding the game with those (see attached). 

Obviously the resolution of these is much higher than the 1981 game. For example, in the game, the ship's sprite is 32x16 pixels, while the one from the manual is 340x117, and the really nice one from the cabinet is 436x159. The fuel tank is 16x16, while the one from the cabinet is 46x38. 

I think it would be pretty cool to mod the game to hi-res graphics (for a 1080p display or similar) and use the images from the cabinet, etc. I can edit the new images in paint.net fairly easily, to get the right aspect ratio, and create a new sprite sheet with the same layout as yours, just larger by some multiple. 

So as long as the code isn't too hard to tweak to work with larger images, it should be doable in an hour or two. Could you offer any info on what values in the game code would have to be changed, to get it to work with these larger graphics? Any guidance appreciated!

If all graphics are scaled up by the same aspect ratio then it would be reasonably straight forward. Possibly as easy as changing the TILE_WIDTH and TILE_HEIGHT variables from 8x8 to whatever the new equivalent tile size would be. I haven't tested this but it would certainly do most of the grunt work for you. The premise of the setup is that it's a game based on 8x8 tiles at present - the landscape, the aliens, the player, etc. If your upscaled graphics are four times the size, you'd probably get away with setting the tile size to 32x32 for example. If your new graphics aren't all scaled up from the originals by the same amount then I think it would affect the dynamics of the game. You'd certainly have to change all the initialisation routines in the sprite loader to handle the new sizes, collision boxes, etc.

One part that you might end up having to do by hand is the actual landscape tiles. Or you could just scale the exiting ones up by whatever ratio you're using. They're going to look very blocky compared to everything else though.

If you run into any problems then I'm happy to help. Reach out either here or by DM.

As an afterthought, why not scale the sprite sheet up by 4x (or whatever) and replace the graphics in there with the new ones that way. If you change the TILE_* constants as well then you might have little else that you need to do!