11 hours ago, Ed Minchau said:
Your name reminds me - Monkey Island would face the same challenge as Wolfenstein- the cx16 doesn't have resizeable sprites.
Yes, but shrinking an already low-resolution sprite never looked that good anyway - Guybrush's eye is just 1 black pixel at full size, so the small version is basically Pitfall Harry. Except Pitfall Harry looked better, because he was designed to look the best he could at that size.
Since resizing these sprites smaller just strips all the detail off of them, it's possibly more efficient to design different sized sprites in the first place and swap them out. The end result is about the same - less detailed images being displayed - but you've done the work beforehand rather than asking the program to do it constantly. So the size transitions would be less fluid, but potentially better-looking at each size. Or if you'd rather stay truer to the original, you could pre-render the scaling; import the exact resized images from Monkey Island, and make them your sprites for X16. Or, since Monkey Island's environments are static backgrounds, you could zoom in. Instead of watching Guybrush approach from a distant path and get bigger while while the screen stays still, he could stay the same size while the camera pans out with him, the screen gradually displaying more of the background until it's full size. That would probably be a terrible compromise, but watching Guybrush approach and get bigger usually acts only as a cutscene effect, so it wouldn't change the gameplay. Of course DOOM is a much different situation than Monkey Island, and without resizing it will probably be obvious that the enemies are just getting bigger rather than coming closer. But you could design the AI so that they tend to move laterally instead of straight towards you; have them go around corners or hide behind something while you approach, or generally try to design the levels so that enemies are either far away or close up. That's a tall order for level design, but trickier tricks have been done. And DOOM graphics were always something to get used to anyway; those med packs rotating and staring at you, because they're actually 2D and the only thing not rotating. So if you come up with something that works, people will accept it as natural if it's a good game. For example, the enemy sprite animations could help obscure the resizing by briefly turning sideways or crouching slightly every time the sprite is swapped for a bigger one. At the moment when the sprite becomes bigger, it's doing something that makes it look slightly smaller. But even if you made the enemy sprites change size seamlessly in DOOM, you still need the wall textures and everything else in the room to get bigger as you approach. So something like Wolfenstein is probably a more achievable goal.