I updated/upgraded the player character in a lot of ways. I got rid of the stupid smiley face temporary graphic I was using and messed around with drawing out plans for how I want the characters to look on my iPad. Of course there are a ton of limits when it comes to creating the graphics on the Atari. For one, you can only have one colour per horizontal line of the sprite. The black pixels you see above are transparent and will show whatever the current background colour is in the game. Also the player character can only be 8 pixels wide. It can have a height as large as I’d like though but I decided to keep that at 8 pixels as well, so all the characters in this game will have a uniform clean look to them. It just seems like they would fit better as a perfect square in this grid like world I’m attempting to create.
One thing I do find is Atari did have an impressive colour palette to work with for the time. 128 colours for NTSC shown above, and 104 for PAL
I also coded the animations and views of the player character from all sides. He now faces in the direction he is walking! I decided it would also be cool if he had the ability to bust down some walls inside the rooms. So I also managed to code that after a lot of trial and error. I am really happy with how it turned out though.