Given that the story evolved around DPaint, most people knowledgeable of the era will probably assume that the artwork was done on an Amiga, where no such restriction existed. At least that was my idea of this story the whole time.
But... even if the artwork was being done on an Amiga, the game was being built on a PC. How are you getting your Amiga dPaint files over to the PC? Certainly not on an amiga formatted floppy. It’s got to go into a FAT file system before Ron Gilbert gets hold of it, so it’s not going to have a .brush extension.
They would know Monkey Island used VGA and 256 colors - not possible to do the artwork on Amiga.
Deluxe Paint was awesome. Brushes, stencils, spare, grids, multibrush / symmetry. It was really fast to whip up something, yet possible to pixel tweak as well.
Wolfenstein and Doom art was also done with Deluxe Paint as well IIRC.
A DP "brush" made for a character would have many fewer colors since most of the scarce color palette would be reserved for the scene art (the Amiga modes were also paletted). The character art would have been started at an early stage.
It certainly was possible on the Amiga, although I'm not sure if dpaint could do it at the time of making Monkey Island 1. At least later versions supported HAM modes and of course when AGA arrived it did 256 colors too.
Another reason why the Amiga to PC workflow wouldn't have worked: Aspect ratio.
The Amiga's standard 320-wide resolution was 320 x 200, while VGA used 320 x 240. These were both typically scanned to fill a 4:3 screen, meaning the Amiga's resolution had slightly tall pixels (DeluxePaint actually had an option to compensate for this when using round brushes and the circle tool, called "square pixels"). So artwork transferred from an Amiga to a PC would look slightly squished.
The resolution was interesting since it was different for NTSC and PAL: NTSC had 320 x 200 while PAL had 320 x 256. In practice games varied[1] whether they were full screen or had black bars in PAL.
As much as I am an old Amiga fan, that's not correct. The 4096 colors were the whole palette (3 bits per color -> 2^12 = 4096 colors), but you could only use 32 of those colours without limitations. And then there were the "special modes" (EHB with 64 colors, where the second set of 32 were the first set with half brightness, and HAM, where you could theoretically see all 4096 colors at once, but only with careful optimization of the base 16 colors). Plus you could use the "Copper" (coprocessor) to set a new palette for each scanline. Some games used all of these tricks (and more) to achieve some very impressive results, but I don't think cross-platform titles like Monkey Island really invested that much effort into Amiga-specific optimizations...
It was (as the article says), but I think it is very much known as the graphics editor for Amiga. I would imagine that more people will remember it as an Amiga tool than as a PC tool.
That's fair. I wonder how many dev houses at the time had amigas just for the art (as some companies do macs now), or if they kept uniform hardware and used the DOS version.
