once in a while i sit down and try to make a tileset for an imaginary NES-styled videogame i might make, and I always end up disappointed. i don't have any examples handy, I think I threw them all out, but the problem was always the same: the world looked completely flat and lifeless, and I couldn't figure out why. well, a lot of it, as it turns out, is that there's just more shadow in the NES games I like than I remembered.
i know a decent amount about art, to the point that artists have described my attempts as "surprisingly good all things considered." i get lighting and shadow and I am decent at applying them, but somehow I never really noticed how many NES games had a highly pronounced sense of light and shadow in the art direction. that is, the games that we always try to duplicate - i feel this is worth harping on.
when someone tries to make an "8-bit styled game" (and I'm p. much talking about action platformers in this post since that seems like mostly what people clone) most of the time what they mean is "a title from the last few years of the NES lifespan." a lot of the stuff that put the NES on the map was... pretty primitive looking.
For instance, stuff like Mario, Metroid and Kid Icarus have virtually no projected shadows - but that's because they pretty much don't have backgrounds, you're just playing against a hot blue that suggests an infinitely-distant sky, or a stark black that suggests a vast underground cave. It's not until the later years of the platform that platform games start consistently having textured backgrounds that suggest a surface just "behind" the foreground layer, and thus something that platforms and ceilings can cast shadows upon.
Going with a "fullbright" look can be a stylistic choice, to be clear, but in general (for reasons I'll address) I think it was mostly a technical thing, so later NES games tend to have more shadows. Even so, some devs seemingly didn't pick it up as much or as quickly as others. Capcom, for instance, seemed to not really bother with prominent shadows for the most part until very late in the game (ha.)
In this screenshot from Mega Man 3 (1990), nothing is casting any shadows - or more accurately, the ceiling isn't casting a shadow onto the backdrop. There are little single-pixel shadow lines in the background itself, but there's nothing to signify a change in depth between the blocks at the top and the "wall" behind it. It's as if the entire scene is being illuminated from all angles at once.
However, in Capcom's Ducktales (1989), platforms cast harsh black shadows; this technique got used in a lot of games for technical reasons I'll address later. Mega Man 5 (1992) on the other hand has what I would call "full-fat shadows"; soft, hand-drawn shadows cast by structures onto the surfaces beneath them. So Capcom did eventually adopt this technique, but not nearly to the degree of some other companies.
Batman (1989) was developed by Sunsoft. Sunsoft loved shadows, and of course this is a very shadow-friendly license, so they went hard in the paint with it. Look at the lush, pillowy shadows enrobing every surface - the vertical pillars even get a sort of "ambient occlusion", where the left side, which ought to be catching the illumination directly, still spills off some shadow. It makes no sense, but it looks amazing.
To wit: To draw a scene with illumination effects, one first needs to decide where the light is coming from. This is completely arbitrary, you can choose any direction, but it needs to be consistent within a scene. Intriguingly, from my (decidedly non-thorough) observations, I think developers tended to have house lighting angles.
For instance, when Capcom uses shadows, they tend to cast them straight down, as if the light source was dead center above the screen, so the shadows under platforms are directly underneath, not cast to either side. Sunsoft, on the other hand, tended to go with an upper-left light source.
Blaster Master (1988) is one of my favorite games, making it even weirder that I never noticed the shadows.
It's hard to tell with it being so dark, but the shadows in Sunsoft's Batman came from the upper left. It's much easier to see it here though, with the higher ambient light level, and it's also easier to see that the foreground layer is heavily offset from the background. That means that the penumbra (the "soft" part of the shadow) is very wide, and has been very carefully hand-feathered into the background to give a tremendous sense of depth. This was central to Sunsoft's art ethos, at least in this era: Platforms stick way out from the background.
Konami tended to go with a "directly above and center" light source. The Maze Of Galious actually had nice looking shadows when it first came out for MSX1 in 1987, which is kinda impressive given the graphical limitations of the platform. It's mostly just an extra little black line at the tops of some of the tiles, but it still gives a nice sense of depth. The Famicom port from a couple years later (pic 2) however softened the shadows considerably.
Curiously, Castlevastle doesn't have many shadows. The first game has virtually none in fact, almost everything is just flat-lit, and 3 is about the same. This, I realize now, is part of why I always felt those games didn't look all that great - there's almost no sense of depth.
Simon's Quest, on the other hand, attempts to add shadows but kind of misses the landing in places. I remember, as a kid, thinking "damn this game ugly in a Unique Way" and again, I think the shadows are a lot of the problem for me.
Out in the world, Konami seems to have drawn some nice feathered shadows into the tileset, but in towns and castles, they seem to be limited to harsh black rectangles, and in a lot of places they just... don't really work, IMO. And this brings us to the technical aspect of all this.
On the NES, and other pre-90s platforms in general, you couldn't just "cast" a shadow. There was no technique for adding one graphic on top of another other than to use a sprite, which were in short supply and had much better things to do with their time. In short, every single thing you see in the background of an NES game had to be drawn, by hand, exactly as you see it.
These games also used graphics built from tiles, which (in short, and excluding some rare techniques) means that every single thing you can possibly see in the game has to be broken up into 8x8-pixel blocks and burned to a ROM chip. So Blaster Master's cartridge contains a tile for "tree," another one for "tree, shadowed from above," another for "tree, shadowed from above and to the left", and then a whole other set of tiles for "tree, shadowed from two tiles above", "tree, shadowed from two tiles above and to the left", and maybe even a third layer after that, I haven't checked.
In other words, the decision to add shadows to your NES game literally multiplies the amount of art you need to make, and the amount of cartridge space you need to store it all. You have to decide, for every surface texture, "can this ever have a shadow cast on it?" and if the answer is yes, then you have to sigh and make a bunch of additional versions.
This is probably part of why textured backgrounds and nice shadows took a while to show up: Early NES games, before the introduction of mapper chips, had severely limited ROM space and just couldn't spend it on extra flair like this. Later, after ROM sizes increased, it got a lot easier, but it was still quite an imposition to add many variations of the same graphics.
There are ways to mitigate this. Sunsoft was taking the high-effort route: two- or three-layer shadows, coming from a diagonal, force you to make 12 or 16 versions of a single tile. Capcom on the other hand went with straight-down shadows, which means that Mega Man 5 only needs four versions of a given tile: "unshadowed", "directly underneath platform", "under left edge of platform" and "under right edge of platform."
Even easier however is what they did in Ducktales, for instance: Harsh black shadows. These are simple because they aren't modifications of an existing tile, they're just a black square. You can put those anywhere; just keep a tile loaded at all times that's solid color 0 and you're good, since pretty much every game always has at least one palette loaded at all times with black in entry 0.
The problem is that it kinda looks like shit. Platforms in Ducktales have 16 pixels of solid black beneath them, and to be frank, especially as a kid, I don't think I really read them as shadows, because they didn't feather into the background at all. And this is partly what bugs me about Simon's Quest too, except I think Konami also just... kind of... lost their minds, artwise?
Simon's Quimon uses a mix of single-tile 8-pixel shadows (particularly outdoors in the town) and four-tile 16-pixel shadows (particularly indoors.) None of them look particularly good IMO, but it also feels like they failed to pick a direction and stick with it. If you look at the church up there - where's the light coming from? The upper right, I guess, because the wall on the right seems to be casting shadow down and to the left... but then what's going on with the stairs? They seem to be shadowed on both sides. huh? And the highlights on the block tiles suggest light from the upper left.
And then look at the outside:
The windowsills cast light straight down, as do the platforms, but then the stairs have that black aura on the right side as well, and the buildings have black on either side for some reason? So you end up with what looks like harsh shadows on both sides that make it hard to form an idea of where light is coming from. Idk. Maybe it bothers me more than you, that'd be fair.
And then there's these rooms, where there seem to be shadows on all sides? As if the light is being cast from all sides at once, kinda like a top-down Zelda dungeon. And then there's the mysterious black blocks at the top of the walls on either sides, which I never understood. Why are these peppered all throughout Sest Quest? I remember seeing them in dracula's castles and wondering what they represented. It can't be a technical constraint, so... was Konami trying to make the roof shadow the walls? That's weird. It just feels like Konami's artists hadn't thought this through, or hadn't agreed on what approach to take.
Anyway, all of this is just kind of meandering pontification, I don't really have a core thesis, except that if you're trying to make something like this: think about shadows!
I've been messing around with a project that's using placeholder graphics ripped from Legacy of the Wizard (AKA Dragon Slayer 4: Drasle Family) and this is part of how I ended up thinking about this, because at first I had only ripped the "solid" tiles and backgrounds, and it took me several hours of going "why doesn't this look very good?" before I realized that I'd skipped the shadows. I went back and added them, and instantly I had something that looked like a game, it was astonishing.
However, while I was grabbing those shadows, I noticed something I'd missed before:
The light source is in the upper right! These shadows are cast down and to the left!! I'm not sure I've seen any other games that do this, even from Falcom - their Saturn remake of Dragon Slayer II: Xanadu, for instance, which redrew all the art for that game from scratch, uses straight-down shadows. I wonder if the upper-right light source is part of why Legacy always felt so alienating and strange to me as a kid.
Anyway, the neat thing about working with a modern engine is that you can get the effect of drawing 16 extra versions of a single tile without actually having to do that, so it's absolutely worth it to put big pillowy shadows on everything.
I took the shadowed versions of a tile from LotW, deleted all the pixels except for the shadow itself, and now I have generic tiles I can put on a higher layer above my background, allowing me to shadow any tile I like easily. I also made a "dissolve" version which can be used to add "shading" - for instance, look at the two stacks of white bricks in the screenshot. The left one has been shaded with a dissolve tile, and it looks much more at home under that platform than it would with a harsh black shadow. This could have been done on the NES, but would have chewed up a lot of precious CHR ROM and maybe not played well with the limited palette options.
Anywa,y shadows are good
