Tetra Master DS v0.3

[wraggster]

News/release from Massif

If you're not familiar with Tetra Master, it's the card based mini game from Final Fantasy IX. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minigames_of_Final_Fantasy

The current version supports a simple quick play mode against the computer.

Future Revisions:
-Fully collectable card game with save/load features, player stats and card collection screen
-More intelligent AI, different levels of difficulty
-Multiplayer playing/trading

Home Page: http://www.codinginthedark.com/?page_id=16

Version 0.3
-Updated Graphics
-Touch Screen Menu
-Added Sound Effects
-Added Options menu (Enable/Disable sounds)
-Added double size sprites to upper screen
-Added coin toss to decide who goes first
-Added Flawless Victory (capture all cards)
-Fixed bug where switching back to the menu after placing a card caused graphical error

Download and Give Feedback Via Comments

[warioswoods]

This versions is a huge improvement over the last one, and very enjoyable - is there a way to get higher resolution card art for the top display? I don't recall the cards being that pixellated on the original game.

[Massif]

The images that I used for the card sprites are only 40x48 pixels. If there are higher res versions somewhere on the web, I would consider using them (although it would probably increase the download size by 4x)

Also, I'm considering replacing all of the card art with my own images in future versions to avoid any legal issues with using square's graphics. If I choose to do that, I would definitely make higher res versions of all the cards.

[warioswoods]

I see, now I understand the problem - it's not the resolution, but the color depth/detail. Your source images are probably close to these: http://www.ffonline.com/ff9/cards-monster2.htm -- and when I put the ds side by side with one of these images, I see that it's not the resolution, but instead the fact that the number of colors has been reduced dramatically, making it look much more pixellated.

I don't know the details of the DS's color capabilities, so I don't know if more colors could be preserved, but perhaps there is a way to take the lower-res, high-color images and put them through photoshop or something similar, to turn them into higher-res. but lower color depth versions - so that extra pixels (twice as many if possible) would be used to simulate the gradients, etc that you are losing with the lower color depth.

[warioswoods]

compare these two, just as a quick example -
this is the original size:
http://www.ffonline.com/1_ff9cards/hedgehogpie.gif

and this is intelligently scaled to 200% by photoshop and then exported:
https://wfs.bc.edu/phillijv/hedgehogpie.gif

I believe that the latter, once reduced in color depth by the DS, would look better than the former, since there is more pixel data to work with even if the colors are decreased.

If you test using something like this and it turns out that it looks better, I'd be more than happy to do the work of scaling all the cards in photoshop to some size (2x in the example, but 3x might look even better when used), and then save everything to one zip file for you. But I could be on the wrong track with this; in any case, I'd be curious to see if it looks any better this way.