My week in game dev #22

Music, PSX, Kickstarter, bespoke joypads...

I knocked a couple of big tasks off of my to-do list recently. The first was getting audio to play on the Next. I assumed it would not be too difficult as the code must be out there and is fairly standard and that pretty much turned out to be the case. I looked at Michael ‘Flash’ Ware’s sample code and lifted out what I needed. There was a bit of faffing around as my usual trouble with memory banks complicated matters but I pushed through and got it going. We also found someone to compose the ship-tunes and now have a nice sample piece for the first level. Like I always say about the Rev games; they only came to life when the audio went in. And so it is again with UrbX.

The other big thing was save and restore functionality. I’ve done this enough times to know what the problems are, and indeed I had it working in a day on the Lua version of the engine. UrbX saves the state of all the levels - as the player sometimes has to return, like a MetroidVania - so there was a bit more to it. The idea is to have save points that the player runs into and then that is where you will return on subsequent death and ‘Continue’. The code will be slightly harder to do on the Next, but that is tomorrow’s job!

Actually, Tuesday’s job. Tomorrow I’m going to meet my Ukrainian coder friend, Ruslan, to discuss the PSX. Yes, the Playstation 1! As you will already know, the plan with UrbX is to port it to lots of platforms, playing to the strengths of each machine as we go. I did have the Amiga pencilled in for the first of these but now we’re thinking PSX. The reason is that Ruslan has written a nice sprite based interface that I can use without having to dig down into the hardware side of things. I really just need to write the C engine without too much else to worry about and this will fit that bill.

But is it a good idea?

Well, it might be. The machine is popular still, and there’s a bit of a thing for PSX style graphics at the moment. There’s also a lot of machines out there, plus emulation and a new crop of FPGA based machines — like this recent machine from Taki Udon, for example. The problem is that it’s not possible to print new CDs, so people need to have chipped devices. Shame that. But still… My approach to the games industry — e.g. a scene of total carnage — is to do the opposite of everyone else. And this would be that.

Strangely, perhaps, I have a good feeling for the PSX. Strange… because at the time it was very problematic for Revolution, and a lot of devs. Suddenly it was in with polygons and out with 2D. Broken Sword was now ‘dated’ and Tomb Raider was waiting to take its place. We never mastered the transition, although we almost did with In Cold Blood. That game was very close to being something special. We also did very well with both BS1 and BS2 on the machine, despite both ports ducking the important task of establishing a proper way to do an adventure UI on the DualShock. A missed opportunity perhaps. But those two ports saved us when the corporates tried to starve us to death. So there’s that.

Anyway, I’ll have a play with the code and see if I get along with it. If so, I’m tempted to go for it! And there’s a lot of extra colours for Stoo to play with, too. Happy artist, happy life!

We’re also planning for the now-quite-soon Kickstarter. We will shoot some film for our UrbX themed video next week. I also commissioned a custom Joystick themed to the game. It’ll likely be an add on item for Kickstarter backers.

How great does this look?! It’s backlit, too.

Right, I have a snooker final to watch…

Please like and share if you got this far :)