sh3-rg

Interesting stuff. A shame you can't save that stuff out.. maybe one day VJ CD emulation and save states will come to the rescue :0)

How are you editing tracks?

I cannot get into this game. It looks nice, it moves around adequately and it has a weird RE feel with the camera angles and stuff, but... meeehhh... just cannot be arsed. I hate all the characters, I feel like purposely having them all killed just to see it take place. I really don't go for the kinds of movies the game apes, all those jump scares and very little else of substance. I went in expecting something that might have a kind of Heavy Rain feel or vibe, but this is just dull.

It begins... Lewie's thoughts: http://savygamer.co.uk/2015/09/21/please-do-not-give-retro-vgs-any-of-your-money/

Effectively Parrothead already began the process here with his ERQ post and off into the night he went. Apparently there's nothing in these threads that remotely constitutes constructive criticism... I think some of use see things differently, but maybe that's a lot easier from the outside looking in. From as far back as April, there has been much written that could have directly helped their cause immeasurably, but akin to their surprising treatment and failure to capitalise on seemingly their best asset in all this - namely, kevtris - they prefer to maintain their blinkered "we know best" attitude and head off further down the rabbit hole... and it's all the haters and people who have never written a single line of code in their lives or designed a single circuit that are whipping up unrest and ruining their kickstarter indiegogo masterplan. That's pretty damn insulting given that many of the people in this thread and others like it on GAF have designed and realised hardware projects, have written, released, published and gone on to support games and development tools, and maybe don't actually have much to do at all with facebook and other social media where a lot of the intended target audience - the gamers themselves - are making their own feelings known and making comments here look timid in comparison (and also largely being ignored or simply deleted by some reports). But I suppose they are all just blind sheep being led astray by the haters, amirite? Questionable funding practises. Indiegogo over kickstarter. Adding in games and peripherals to pledge results in artificially inflating total and potentially reaching target prematurely. Alarm bells are ringing. Misleading campaign and pre-campaign information How many of the 150 or so people who pledged for a RVGS console are aware that it will only be their unique system and not able to simulate all the others via FGPA unless the $3.8m total is reached? Not many I'd bet. No contracts with 3rd parties to ensure vital elements of project will be in place. kevtris left hanging and only required should their $3.8m target be reached? Amateur hour. No NDAs. Skeletons liberally evacuating closets left and right. And that actually a good thing for anyone not directly involved, as the insight gained through 2 or 3 posts tells more of the story and how this played out than half a year of RVGS's own PR. Spin. They talk of negative spin from "naysayers", but almost every statement the head honcho put out is up there with Don Mattrick circa 2013. The campaign console comparison chart was misleading, ill-conceived and selective. The anti-Ouya talk directly conflicts with his own prior Ouya coverage, etc., etc. Being honest, open and holding your hands up when you just don't know is much more endearing to potential supporters than playing the blame game or making it up as you go along and knee-jerking project-changing decisions without considering how they might affect the wider goals (for instance the lolsome game testing procedures they claim to have in place after being questioned regarding how they might ensure bug-free, unpatchable, cartridge games - completely unworkable and financially impractical). Basically, seems like they have no idea WTF they are doing on any level and have probably long forgotten why as they seek to say or do whatever is necessary to reach that $1.95m target...

Of the three games, Wolf 3D is the only one with any real motion to speak of. 60fps, slick and tidy... I'd have guessed low frame rate games would have been the ones to make people sick, not the other way around. Smaller TVs and sitting further back are definitely a win though, whatever you're playing.

ran out of daily likes pages ago... some of the stuff coming out now, eye opening if not truly surprising.

Getting hot in here...

That's where something like this needs to start. The fun and discovery of "new" hardware for the tinkerers, real oldskool type games rather than "retro" ones with their 64x64 rotating pixels and alpha effects... thire whole concept of an all-powerful "future-proof retro console" is a nonsense for me, that's not where I'd be attempting to approach this from. $30 to make, $75-$100 in a customer's hand, and it's now more in line with real old hardware and you're meeting the expectations of that crowd. RVGS went from something that appeared to be somewhat like this to an industry-serving indie box to further monetise existing IP/software at least that's how I now view it and why it hold absolutely zero interest. That's the sad part. There can't be too many reasons for this, but is it my place to $peculate...? I don't care, ner ner ner? AtariAge should be exactly the kind of place you'd get honest, fair and useful feedback if you were attempting a project such as this. The guys and girls of AA seem to have little positive to say regarding this indie box micro console they refer to as the "retro" video game system... that might be because it's pretend retro on a pretend console with pretend cartridges. And maybe people are too old and cynical to play make believe at an upwards of $300 entry point...? Because, despite their claims of having "...architecture and circuit design they have spent almost a year on..." we know that is stretching things a little. When it was being teased (around 8 or 9 months ago?) all the way through to just a few months back, we know their idea of what exactly would be inside the plastic was all over the place... when was it they were talking about Amiga technology, for example? All the "spend a little more here, and we can do this... spend a little more there and we can do 10x more of that" stuff did more than hint at any design work being of the order you could limit to the back of a cereal packet with a large brown Crayola. It seems shitty and anti-community to have to say stuff like this, but RVGS went, week by week at times, from being something the majority of the really active userbase of a site like AA might at least be interested in, to being this Ouya-besting industry-courting hipster device, with a price tag tailored to just that kind of audience rather than the much more frugal and thrifty classic gamer types.

It was designed to be a CD game, IIRC it'd load in chunks as you progressed, each level followed by a boss section all as separate 2mb loads from separate tracks. Obviously we never got anywhere near that far with it - the age old problems of level design reared their head, even though we planned a pretty simple method of designing them early on, what we later decided to ask of it just wasn't going to be too good to work with, and with 4 or 5 levels with 4 or 5 boss sequences, it demanded a lot of graphics work at a time of year where I got less and less chance to do stuff by the week. Considered remixing what we had as another raptor BASIC exercise.

Yep, the build I last posted, that seems to be the one from the CD, is just a test of various graphics and things I made. Not that it makes much difference, and it was fun to see those crawly things tip-toeing along the sky... I thought they looked crap on the walls, but in the air the comedy value helped for sure.

Here's the one from the CD, I'm pretty sure we fucked up here and used the wrong build lolol as it's got terrible test gfx, the weird rain I mentioned and no waterwheel etc... Reboot - QC at its finest! 08-P2_jiffi.rom

Some of the other builds I mentioned were never versioned iirc, not all of them anyway, so the only chance of getting them might be to go rooting around on my old desktop PC over there --->

That's not one of the latest builds. I remember a version with a little hut in the wood, a version with rain (that linko found hilarious when it stopped dead from one tile to the next, hehe), one with pine trees and a lake with really crappy disting water ripple and there's several builds I have that I don't think I shared with anyone, of a space themed level with huge pulsing pink laser weapon thingy, lol). Anyway, thanks for consulting me on releasing this one, always nice to be kept in the loop Probably should be pointed out, II was around 3 weeks work from IRC chat conception to what you see above.

Psst... decimal points... that's not where they should go... Seems like the Jaguar boys have got it all wrong. You don't sell your game for $60-$80 and let the resellers take $300-$500 on eBay a few months later... you're supposed to do that part yourself, clearly.

It's already evan moar ossum!!!1 So here's a version with the front section of the generated gfx removed and replaced with some sub-pixel positioning of a 2x272-high strip matching up with the 240-high sidewalls. That saved ~400k. There's also an outside world to see (it's a sunny day with a very blue sky, you can imagine the white is the odd bit of cloud if you like). You can see it through some windows as well, those kind of help along the perspective stuff. Normal pad is still in, but it feels pretty meh to "play" with. Spinner just feels right (with zero's instructions you can make a switchable one for a few quid!). Think maybe I'll stick a ton of ching-ching-ching collects in next and see how that feels. boingy.abs boingy.rom (the packed abs in the ROM above is well under 512k) BTW, something fun happens if you leave him boinging away in a tight spot - the OP falls on its arse after a number of minutes. I think I know what it might be, but not looked at it yet.

Knight's Chance, never heard of that. Looking at the video it's got the look of a game that might have appeared if Telegames did Neo Geo games.

Goat Up? I think having lots of collects for *something* is a plan, there's plenty of scope for that. There is actually a full screen particle/text overlay on top of everything, and as I bastardised something else to start this one and just left it there... but it was set to be scaled x2, but there's still a ton of bandwidth and time left more for stuff with that there, so it definitely could get messy I began fiddling with particles again to possibly brighten up the jumping action a bit! But now I really must get back to work and stop thinking about this... thing.

Hah, SCPCD said the same thing, but it's not really because you are in control of the scrolling, it's not something you fight against. But yeah, uFLY is SFDX and this thing is downfall I must be lacking in ideas

It does and it's surprising how adding the tiniest elements change the whole feel and point you in other directions. I wasn't supposed to find time to do this, but added rotary controls last night and it's definitely starting to get the feel of some crazy fast, twitchy 2600 spinner game thing. Very little to it from my end, but GGN had the fun of finding where and how gcc was bringing the pain. Zero's rotary code is very tidy. I fully expected to have to arse around with smoothing and weighting previous readings, but it's a magic box - you just ask and receive bacon. I also added jump cancelling on B-button press and with a short delay timer. Holding B makes the player jump around like he's operating a jack hammer, which feels quite fun. This feature also makes me lean towards wanting to punish for bumping the head on the bottom of platforms, because it's completely avoidable now. SO not sure where this might go, but it definitely feels more fluid and fun on rotary, so I think the regular pad controls will be done away with. Press B on regular pad in left port to start normal game. Press B on rotary pad in right port to start spinner game. Hold B to jack hammer. L/R or spin to steer. boingy.abs

Got back too late for an edit so here's a vidya:

So I started a new game for the Jaguar, preliminary title "Boingy Uppy". That name just might stick. Be warned. http://atariage.com/forums/topic/242697-wip-boingy-uppy/

Not sure if I should post this just yet but it's been a little quiet in here for a week and I've probably not a lot of time to do anything to it for a while, so no point letting it just sit. Boingy Uppy is the name GGN gave this then when I showed him an animated gif someone posted in an Inty programming competition thread the other day, here's the gif: There's something really nice about the movement and simplicity and it just felt like a good thing to try to make a version of during a slow morning. I did kind of get my character moving similarly, then I scrapped that and did the inverse of what I thought it was doing, then I scrapped that and went back to what I had. But none of that is actually included in this version, it's simply set to a very large, um, boingyness, so I could explore how it might feel getting projected into the unknown at great speed*. You can bump your head on the bottoms of the bouncy things, so they should be avoided. There's not really much purpose so far, it's all a bit open ended and no real plan (nothing changes here), but I've been thinking along the lines of chaining higher scores for good clean bouncing, losing that for hitting ones head and also limiting movement a little before recovery (but not disabling left and right as I had before, or GGN will SHOUT!). Obviously there's no proper player sprite gfx yet, there's going to be a little knight with some spinning moves and I'll have a crack at some perspective for the platforms maybe. The backdrop is obviously what I've spent the most time on so far, I've probably generated the graphics with GGN's tool and hand-edited them getting on for a dozen times or more, each time I decided there was another way to make it a bit better or wanted to experiment a bit. This version with the pivot points half way down the side walls and the offset object placement and scaling I'm quite happy with. I've experimented with some frame flipping for smoothing, but it's not 100% and might be more annoying than seeing a few sharp pixels for some people. Anyway, this latest version had the benefit of reducing the player gameplay width limits to about half the full display, which is not bad for a vertical game, the proportions feel right now. Disclaimers: There's no real gameplay or scoring yet, you can just boing, dodge, bump your head and die off the bottom. *On my copies of VJ set to NTSC the game reports 62.5fps and seemingly runs at half speed (not uncommon with my rb+ stuff for some reason). So playing on VJ might feel a bit boring and slow. The screen might be dark for you, it looks dark in a window on the emulator and in the screenshot above, but looks fine on my TV... Give it a try and feel free to offer any feedback/suggestions type stuff and apologies for the tl;dr. boingy.rom boingy.abs