My week in game dev #21

Blimey, January is nearly done already. I seem to have been working hard but I’m not sure what I’ve achieved? (Reads task diary…) Okay, well, the last two weeks have been mostly spent coding up weapons in the form of the egg-bomb - a jar of rotten eggs that explodes, taking out anyone stood nearby — and half a dozen different magic potions. These were all more work than expected (‘No, really?’ - reader’s voice) and I still need to port some of these potions to the Z80 engine, next week.

Having that stuff done is actually a decent milestone. Soon I really really will have to address the Next’s flickering sprite issue which is a side effect caused by the sprite-cacher. I think the fix is easy, but have been sleeping on it for weeks now. The Next’s memory footprint is also broken, with the game overflowing into the extra memory which only the Kickstarter 2 machines have. I can probably fix it with some compression.

I’m also thinking about future platforms for UrbX and what to do first. In theory it’s the Amiga, but Switch is also quite an attractive proposition. Hilariously, I was rejected for a Switch developer account the other day - no relevant experience perhaps? Or no hope for the future? Maybe both :) But I do now have a very well connected ‘new friend’ who has given me a path to follow to get this fixed which I will do as soon as we have a decent gameplay video to show — this being an important requirement it seems. I like the idea of doing a limited run of 3000 (the minimum order) physical copies. Sounds perfect for a Kickstarter.

I also like the idea of a PSOne version. There’s a lot of love for PSOne but the problem is that you can’t just get a bunch of CDs duplicated because, well, Sony copy protection. While there’s millions of machines out there, not many are modded. On the other hand, there are emulations and fpga solutions a plenty. And this from Taki Udon looks terrific.

From a C based Switch or PSOne codebase would easily come a DreamCast port, and so on.

Game dev question time —

What are you reading?

Always too many things at once. I have the brilliant J. W. Rinzler ‘The Making of StarWars’ that chronicles the whole thing in amazing detail. I thought making games was hard but this is on another level. Not surprisingly, perhaps, the movie was terrible until very near the end which is much like every game I’ve worked on. It got real when the audio went in - every Broken Sword was the same. But StarWars was a huge undertaking and almost no-one believed in it until it was released and became the great success that it is. How Lucas got through it I can’t imagine.

As I tweeted the other day, I also have Robert Nystrom’s ‘Crafting Interpreters’ on the go. Back in 1990 we were (probably) one of the first to build our own interpreted language which we used to implement the content side of Lure, Sky, Broken Sword, and the rest. I wrote the spec, but much-better-coder-than-me, Dave Sykes, actually implemented it. Now I’m thinking about how a variation on that theme could be super useful in implementing game objects and their logic. It would be super-tight, so it would work on the kind of low spec machines I’m dealing with at the moment. Given how hard writing interpreter/compiler pairs, this is a very long term project.

Also, the Beano Christmas Special. Yonks!

Will Cecil write another text adventure?

Text adventures were great — especially the ones which had the occasional line based rendering of the current location. They were often far richer experiences than the Point and Clickers than came later. I keep wondering if there is a way to get that richness back? Given we are credited with doing the first 2 button UI — in Steel Sky — it’d be super ironic to find a way to make a more complicated UI! But… I wonder.

As to Charles, I doubt he’ll do another text adventure, but I keep bugging him to do something new… something super simple. Just go back to a blank sheet of paper and try and innovate a new way to blend narrative and gameplay. He should be the one to do it. I know he wants to. I’d prototype it for free.

I keep saying it…

He doesn’t read this newsletter :)

What do you get distracted by the most?

Everything. Especially interesting things on the internet, of which there is unlimited supply. Only coding can calm the madness.

Why?

This one from my coding pal, Aaron. Well, what else to do? The only thing that feels like a real achievement to me is ending the day with a game having moved on a little way with some new feature or refinement implemented. It doesn’t have to be much. It might even be some optimisation which has led to the program getting smaller. Smaller but better.

I’m sure it’s the same feeling for anyone making things of whatever kind.

Also, it’s human nature. If we stopped coding, we’d sit down for a day then get up and start doing something else. It’s what we’re meant to do.