When I started out making this game, I figured that, given the tight time constraints of #AdvJam2018, making graphics in 16 colour low res (Sierra’s AGI graphics were effectively 160x168 pixels, horizontally doubled to 320x168 pixels) would be a time saver. Now, I’m not so sure.

When a character’s body is 3 pixels wide, how are you going to make it seem like they’re wearing any sort of interesting clothes or give them any personality? The lack of colours also makes it far more difficult to create aesthetically pleasing or visually interesting backgrounds. There are little or no shading options and many colours (orange? dark brown?) just don’t exist in the EGA palette, nor do you . Having the full width of 320 pixels and/or even as little as 64 colours would make things so much easier.

And that is without even mentioning the lack of sprite scaling AGI has leading making it very difficult to keep things from getting overly disproportionate with the scene perspective, especially in indoor locations.

Working on AGI style graphics has left me with a renewed respect for Sierra’s background artists who managed to make some very impressive backgrounds given the limited resources available to them.