Heaven/TQA Posted February 22, 2005 Share Posted February 22, 2005 http://www.langston.com/LFGames/TenTips.html Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Fröhn Posted February 22, 2005 Share Posted February 22, 2005 *sigh* rule 4 seems to be lost nowadays. mobile phones show thousands of colors, but sound aweful with their beep melodies. gameboy is the same: good gfx, lame sound. most pc games also focus on the graphics and ignore the importance of sound. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JB Posted February 22, 2005 Share Posted February 22, 2005 *sigh* rule 4 seems to be lost nowadays. mobile phones show thousands of colors, but sound aweful with their beep melodies. gameboy is the same: good gfx, lame sound. most pc games also focus on the graphics and ignore the importance of sound.Yah. I've always found sound easily as important as graphics. In many cases more so. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
samurai Posted February 22, 2005 Share Posted February 22, 2005 Yeah, that;s so right. For instance: do you remeber in how many games is Jakub Huskak's great music ? Many good games would be a lot worse without his music, and many shit games would never sell a disk without it. Examples of his great music: 1. Inside 2. Tanks 3. Problem Jasia 4. Thinker 5. Battle Ships ok ...time for Husak's ASMA entries for today and many many more Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Heaven/TQA Posted February 22, 2005 Author Share Posted February 22, 2005 samurai... or western examples rob hubbard and the other UK musicians... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
TMR Posted February 22, 2005 Share Posted February 22, 2005 samurai... or western examples rob hubbard and the other UK musicians... The perfect example of that has to be Knucklebusters on the C64; average graphics, very poor gameplay but an 18 minute in-game soundtrack by Hubbard. People paid good money for the music! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
sack-c0s Posted February 23, 2005 Share Posted February 23, 2005 once I was playing with a tetris-style puzzler on the gameboy colour I was writing (but never finished) At the time I was living with a couple of students and occasionally passed the gameboy to my housemate Liz. She enjoyed it and played it for ages with th laid back calypso test-tune in the background. Then I had the idea I wanted something like the bomberman multiplayer music for when you got dangerously near the top, did a reasonable approximation of that kind of tune in 4 patterns and gave her it again. she paniced like hell, made countless mistakes, swore like crazy and gave me an utter bollocking for making the thing so fustratingly hard. And the music was the only modification I did. Maybe she was an extreme example (she was one of those people who was easily startled/made to laugh/wound up/etc.) but it pretty much spells out the improtance of rule 4 for me Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Great Hierophant Posted February 23, 2005 Share Posted February 23, 2005 You are right to say that companies ignore sound in favor of graphics, but in one instance it amuses me. Creative Labs is the undisputed leader in 3-D positional audio. However, some of the biggest games like Half-Life 2 and Doom 3 have the own 3-D sound engines in software and don't utilize the advanced features of Creative Labs EAX. (Doom 3 does now to some extent after a patent tiff with them.) Considering their monopoly on audio hardware has truly retarded audio hardware development and their software is abominably resource hogging, I think they are justly punished. We are rapidly approaching the limits of what we can do with sound. The human ear is one drawback. The number of speakers you can fit around a person is another. Positioning sound above and below a position is hard to do because people don't have speakers above and below their chair. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JB Posted February 23, 2005 Share Posted February 23, 2005 once I was playing with a tetris-style puzzler on the gameboy colour I was writing (but never finished) At the time I was living with a couple of students and occasionally passed the gameboy to my housemate Liz. She enjoyed it and played it for ages with th laid back calypso test-tune in the background. Then I had the idea I wanted something like the bomberman multiplayer music for when you got dangerously near the top, did a reasonable approximation of that kind of tune in 4 patterns and gave her it again. she paniced like hell, made countless mistakes, swore like crazy and gave me an utter bollocking for making the thing so fustratingly hard. And the music was the only modification I did. Maybe she was an extreme example (she was one of those people who was easily startled/made to laugh/wound up/etc.) but it pretty much spells out the improtance of rule 4 for me I've noticed that effect with the NES and GBO Tetris. The music speeds up, I screw up. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JB Posted February 23, 2005 Share Posted February 23, 2005 You are right to say that companies ignore sound in favor of graphics, but in one instance it amuses me. Creative Labs is the undisputed leader in 3-D positional audio. However, some of the biggest games like Half-Life 2 and Doom 3 have the own 3-D sound engines in software and don't utilize the advanced features of Creative Labs EAX. (Doom 3 does now to some extent after a patent tiff with them.) Considering their monopoly on audio hardware has truly retarded audio hardware development and their software is abominably resource hogging, I think they are justly punished. We are rapidly approaching the limits of what we can do with sound. The human ear is one drawback. The number of speakers you can fit around a person is another. Positioning sound above and below a position is hard to do because people don't have speakers above and below their chair. Hypothetically, headphones are the perfect solution. We only have 2 ears, mating one speaker to each one seems a good idea. In reality, adding a subwoofer helps a lot. And we don't have the computing power to implement a virtual world outputting to 2 speakers. http://www.waterpump.f9.co.uk/ Someone recommended listening to the fireworks recording here. With good headphones. It's a stereo recording, but it sounds VERY lifelike. As another note... Remember QSound? If the speakers where positioned right, you could get a proper surround sound effect from just 2 speakers. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
emkay Posted February 23, 2005 Share Posted February 23, 2005 Emkay's opinions First make it right, than make it fast. This "rule" is a self writing one. A coder firstly has to build a program, and after it's fully working, some code-optimizations can be done. Fail Fast No offence, but this is often disregarded by A8 coders. One example is "Yie ar Kung Fu". A whole interactive demo is available, but no game. It lacks in the enemies "A.I." and the movement is handycaped, because no fully working softwaresprite is impemented. Top down and bottom up It's always the best way, if you want to finish something, to check what is done and what's to do next... Sound is your secret weapon Ofcourse it is. Guess, why C64 was the "remembered" leader at the 8-bit era... The sentence was "said" in a time, when the resolution of a computergame looked blocky at all...."but, can you remember the sound " ... was heard more often. It hasn't to do with "3D positional audio from Creative" Today It's no problem to do the "needed" FX plus scene enhancing Soundtracks. 3D positional audio is a nice thing when it comes to 3D action. Having a look at UBIsoft's XIII, the "3D FX" are done on the screen, and it worked great ... Keep your sense of humor ...as it is Make it real Remembering some different racing games (from classic to modern PC) with "real physics".... does anyone know a steering wheel (with pedals) that is as precisely as a real car? Make it hard Some coders may think, that a hard control over the "protagonist" does make a hard game... maybe some humorous people do like such games.. The problem is, that, even today, this rule is disregarded very often. The best way is to make the controls "feeling free" and give the hardness by the approach inside the levels. Make it easy This rule is nonsense, isn't it? It inhabits the todays problem of heavy wasting resources by easy writing a game (or any other Application) on the PC. Make it perfect Isn't this rule mostly disregarded by Lucas Arts games? (Several 3D Shooter are anything else but perfect) Don't be afraid to break the rules ... just put innovations in. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Heaven/TQA Posted February 23, 2005 Author Share Posted February 23, 2005 ok... let's see how boinxx fit in here: 1. make it right then make it fast all sub-engines are written to work 1st... see wrapper, level depacker, ball sprite engine, game logic etc... the optimisation starts when i get into trouble in terms of cpu cycles or when the game itself is finished (or parts of it). 2. fail fast for me i never programmed a wrapper and a tile based level depacker... so with the 1st goal that boinxx should fit into 4k i was coding the wrapper, scroll-engine, collision detection 1st as without this the whole game is useless you would agree... as it stands now the next bottle neck will be the (planned) softsprite engine for the enemies or the enemie engine... as i never programmed any kind of A.I. but we will see... 3. top down bottom up boinxx started as 3d trackball like trailblazer for the 24hour competition on the net... the engine worked so far but unfortunatly i lost all the source codes... so when i was sitting in my bath tube i watched the tiles on the floor and thought... ok let's turn it from 3d into 2d and make a "arcadisch" gameboy like game out of it... 4. sound is your secret weapon knowing that sound can enhance or ruin the overall experience i asked several guys who are good in chip sound music & game music to write a nice soundtrack for boinxx (f.e. xray, samurai etc). xray wrote 4 tunes (1x 4 channel one, 3x ingame 3 channel ones to have 1 channel left for sound fx). samurai started to compose a nice RMT... so imho the music in boinxx is not bad compared to a lot even commercial games so for a "free project" well done... at the moment i have no clue how the sound fx will be implemented and who will do that... as the MPT music playback routine used at the moment is not capable of triggering sounds individually on channel 4... jaskier promissed to adapt the MPT player for that... 5. keep sense of humor well... do not know how this affects boinxx... but i was thinking of implementing a kind of story line... 6. make it real i played around 2 weeks with the "bouncing physics" to make it feel right... at the moment it looks good and "feels" right. 7. make it hard yup... vidol is designing some very hard level layouts... at the moment i have 3 from him which you guys haven't seen yet... but i can promisse you they are really weird and hard... so i'll try to keep boinxx challenging... 8. make it easy well... boinxx is purely 6502 code... but lookuptables and the level editor are done in basic or are used from c64 not to spend too much time on stuff which are already on the market and working... 9. make it perfect always an aim from me... that's why i used G2f title screen, g2f game logo, 5 colour ingame, 4 colour pm-gfx, score panel on the screen to keep arcadisch style, usage of extra RAM if available (secret... ), uses all available 56k ram on 64k models, parallax scrolling, bit and pieces here and there which let boinxx shine... kind of "Factor 5" and "turrican" attitude or "Thalion" attidue. 10. break the rules how many people said boinxx is another "jump" clone etc... but i tell them... it will the best... just my 2 cents... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JB Posted February 23, 2005 Share Posted February 23, 2005 Sound is your secret weapon Ofcourse it is. Guess, why C64 was the "remembered" leader at the 8-bit era... The sentence was "said" in a time, when the resolution of a computergame looked blocky at all...."but, can you remember the sound " ... was heard more often. It hasn't to do with "3D positional audio from Creative" Today It's no problem to do the "needed" FX plus scene enhancing Soundtracks. 3D positional audio is a nice thing when it comes to 3D action. Having a look at UBIsoft's XIII, the "3D FX" are done on the screen, and it worked great ... Even today, it's neglected a lot. This isn't a purely technical commentary. Too many games have a mediocre soundtrack or weak sound effects. Even in a modern game the tone of the scene is set as much by the background as the foreground. Asteroids is a perfect example. The "heartbeat" effect is primitive, but effective(one of my favorite background "musics"). Make it easy This rule is nonsense, isn't it? It inhabits the todays problem of heavy wasting resources by easy writing a game (or any other Application) on the PC. On the other hand, many modern applications wouldn't exist if they were done in a harder method. I blame it more on skipping rule 1. No one optimizes once it works. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Shawn Jefferson Posted February 23, 2005 Share Posted February 23, 2005 Make it easy This rule is nonsense' date=' isn't it? It inhabits the todays problem of heavy wasting resources by easy writing a game (or any other Application) on the PC.[/quote'] On the other hand, many modern applications wouldn't exist if they were done in a harder method. I blame it more on skipping rule 1. No one optimizes once it works. If there is no reason to optimize, then why bother doing it? Especially considering a commercial product where time spent needlessly optimizing eats away the bottom line. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JB Posted February 23, 2005 Share Posted February 23, 2005 Make it easy This rule is nonsense' date=' isn't it? It inhabits the todays problem of heavy wasting resources by easy writing a game (or any other Application) on the PC.[/quote'] On the other hand, many modern applications wouldn't exist if they were done in a harder method. I blame it more on skipping rule 1. No one optimizes once it works. If there is no reason to optimize, then why bother doing it? Especially considering a commercial product where time spent needlessly optimizing eats away the bottom line. PC software is what I see as the big offender, really. They design it assuming people will upgrade their hardware to play. Doom 3 was a welcome change in that it was optimized to run well on a wide variety of systems, with video chipsets ranging from a GeForce 2 through the topend GeForceFX and Radeon 9800. With no appreciable sacrifices once you get to GeForce 3. It also highlights how much room there really is for optimization, if PC coders cared to do it, thoroughly torpedoing the argument that older video cards just aren't capable of putting out the level of detail the game wants. It's like the NES. Legend of Zelda has serious slowdown issues at several points. Crystalis has none, despite having more stuff going on at any given time, as well as more detailed stuff. Most PC game programmers are working at a Zelda 1 level, Doom 3 is a Crystalis. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
_Fandal_ Posted February 24, 2005 Share Posted February 24, 2005 Well boys, it's really nice we all know how to make cool games. But words are not enough in this case. I've counted only 11 new games for A8 written or released last year as a final version: Achtung Panza!, Astro Road, Atari Greed, Blockers, Castle Crisis, Cosmic Hero, Dyna Blaster, Galaxia, HexxagonXE, Microdash and Rocket Boy. And I think it's not too much, especially when you realize three games from my list were written for 1kB MiniGame Compo. And I think only Dyna Blaster is real "top" product. It's really strange. I've read a lot about making fantastic games in various threads here on AA but I just don't see results of those talks... F. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Goochman Posted February 24, 2005 Share Posted February 24, 2005 Id take 2 really good releases a year - Castle Crisis is top notch IMHO. Burgertime is about to be released also - With the size of the dev community Im not sure what our expectations should be? Did Koffi come out in 2004 or 03 for the 8bit series? That is also a top notch game. hopefully with the new and improved tools from last year we will see more. Did Commando get released in 04? I think we saw more than you give credit for Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
_Fandal_ Posted February 24, 2005 Share Posted February 24, 2005 Id take 2 really good releases a year - Castle Crisis is top notch IMHO. Burgertime is about to be released also - With the size of the dev community Im not sure what our expectations should be? OK, Castle Crisis is very good too. I know our community is very weak. And that's the reason I don't understand why so many talks about "how to make cool games". We can talk about it to the death each day but the result is just big zero. Did Koffi come out in 2004 or 03 for the 8bit series? That is also a top notch game. I don't know this game. What is that? hopefully with the new and improved tools from last year we will see more. Well, I'm pretty sure we can expect something really cool from ABBUC Contest 2005 if Polish coders are going to take a part... Did Commando get released in 04? I don't know if it was realeased in 2004 but it was written a long time ago, in happy years era. I think we saw more than you give credit for May be. But I'm trying to say this: stop talking and start doing something. F. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Goochman Posted February 24, 2005 Share Posted February 24, 2005 Koffi the Yellow Kopter was a 5200 game converted to 8bit release. Its a fun game - The 5200 is also going to get Adventure II and a Zelda type game. We should ensure these are also released for the Atari 8bit also. Space Harrier and Super Mario are also on the drawing board. Boinxx looks promising (Ill design a level one of these days ) For the age of the machine I am happy with the level of effort. If we could get 1 release a month that would be super, just not sure enough folks are out there to make these type of quality releases. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
www.atarimania.com Posted February 24, 2005 Share Posted February 24, 2005 You gotta be happy with the quality of the releases this year Castle Crisis is spot on, Beef Drop looks very promising (though I don't understand why it uses the standard Atari font), Dyna Blaster really shows how things should be done, HexxagonXE is great, Cosmic Hero a nice surprise... Galaxia is horrible though. I can do with five or six games a year if they are polished enough or big projects. With all the tools available out there, the last thing we need is programs with standard 1982 graphics... -- Atari Frog http://www.atarimania.com Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
www.atarimania.com Posted February 24, 2005 Share Posted February 24, 2005 Not forgetting Boinxx, the Super Mario clone and Space Harrier of course -- Atari Frog http://www.atarimania.com Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
_Fandal_ Posted February 24, 2005 Share Posted February 24, 2005 Koffi the Yellow Kopter was a 5200 game converted to 8bit release. Its a fun game - The 5200 is also going to get Adventure II and a Zelda type game. We should ensure these are also released for the Atari 8bit also. I really don't know this game. Where could it be found? Space Harrier and Super Mario are also on the drawing board. Boinxx looks promising (Ill design a level one of these days ) OK. But I was talking about finished projects. Space Harrier, Super Mario or Yie Ar Kung Fu look superb but are you sure they will be finished? Jellybeans, Boinxx and Beef Drop seem to be another story because all these project are under continuous development. For the age of the machine I am happy with the level of effort. If we could get 1 release a month that would be super, just not sure enough folks are out there to make these type of quality releases. I'm really happy too. But I still wonder why so many people spend so much time with just talking about "how nice it could be" or "how SHOULD we do it". But enough is enough. Let's stop this conversation. I just wish to see anything new on my lovely A8 machines and not just to hear still the same talks about "possibilities". We all know them. The only one problem is to turn them to something real. F. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Goochman Posted February 25, 2005 Share Posted February 25, 2005 Heres a link to the 5200 Koffi page: http://www.atariage.com/software_page.html...areLabelID=2374 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
dely Posted February 25, 2005 Share Posted February 25, 2005 Galaxia is horrible though. Galaxia is not finished. This is only preview. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
kenfused Posted February 25, 2005 Share Posted February 25, 2005 , Beef Drop looks very promising (though I don't understand why it uses the standard Atari font)Atari Froghttp://www.atarimania.com Haven't tried any recent demos of the 8-bit version? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Like us on Facebook
Follow us on Twitter
AtariAge on Instagram
Watch us on YouTube
Chat on Discord
Recommended Posts
Join the conversation
You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.
Note: Your post will require moderator approval before it will be visible.