16-bit characters are a lot of fun to write for and direct. They always get their lines correct, never go off on self-indulgent tangents, and will repeat a scene however many times it takes to get it correct. They are the perfect actors for the micro-managing control freak in all of us… except for a few minor drawbacks like having zero to only a few facial expressions to convey emotion, a limited number of gestures, and spoken lines read as text, lacking the nuance of a real human voice.

Far from stifling 16-bit RPGs as a creative works, such limitations combine together to create a unique and expressive medium all their own. Over the years, people who make such games have come up with a variety of measures to deal with the unique problems created by these limitations, and over the course of my next few blogs I’d like to offer some of my thoughts on these problems and the techniques used to address them as well as how some of them have been used in Shadows of Adam.

The first technique I’d like to discuss is….

The Hop

Freeze a character’s animation and move them up and then back down quickly. This move is “the hop.” Initially, the hop was banned from Shadows of Adam for being “too cheesy” and let me tell you, I was hopping mad about this because I adore this move. It’s a simple technique that offers so much!

Need a character to jump in surprise, in pain, or epiphany? Use the hop! This is especially helpful if you’ve got a huge cast of characters and don’t have the time, energy, or budget to create a fitting animation. The hop is also great for showing excitement.

But none of these reasons was good enough for my compadres. It wasn’t until we faced a very special problem that I finally convinced them that we needed to get some character’s hoppin’. What was that problem? An angry mob.

Long story short, we had a scene with a big crowd of people, and in order to express their irritation many of the mob were given speaking parts. The idea was to have our poor hero assailed from all sides by angry accusations. The first time I saw the scene I cringed. As the text plopped down on the screen you couldn’t tell who was talking. Worse, almost nobody was moving. The scene was dead on arrival.

Enter the hop.

The hop is fantastic at focusing a player’s attention on a particular character. So for a crowd of characters with speaking parts, it’s an ideal way to shift attention to each speaker. You just have that character hop then deliver the line. Boom! Suddenly the mob was brought to life.