Could I make a living being an Indie Game Dev?

You are very unrealistic for expectations, for what has been advertised. Despite the good price.
For me, either you don't read what is on the label, or looking for a rant.

 

About the talk about tank control and fixed camera ...

Most re fan like re4 which is totally different, and they like re7 too, which have different control and view, but re5 and re6 which are close "mechanically" to re4 aren't? so What's the difference?

I think this explain very well why latching on that is like treating the symptom and not the cause.

We should be careful with surface level analysis in replicating things and trying to capture market.

Here is a recent high profile failure, can you tell why?

 

I'll check out those videos after work. You reminded me I wanted to share this video I found at lunch break. It is an analysis of why the classic RE games are the best.

 

Well of course we cannot tell why a game failed by looking at a video of it. Need the context of who was the game made for and what did that target audience expect. There are two primary reasons a game can fail imo: (1) poor marketing including not targeting the right audience and (2) not matching the expectations (that were in part set by marketing).

I watched the trailer for STARLINK and all I see is a video of a game that as far as I know could be any AAA style game (although for some reason parts of the video remind me of No Man's Sky). Which might also have been made in Unity or whatever. I just mean from the video it has that AAA kind-of-a-wanted-to-make-a-movie-and-we-made-a-game-instead style to it. I don't know anything about it. Never heard of it. I see clips of what seem to be toys in the trailer so guess this is based on some line of toys or something maybe.

I just did a quick search and see the Switch release is the most popular of the platforms and the most common complaint from players seems to be "just another grinding experience relying on microtransactions". The Switch version is recommended by players as the best due to it including more stuff as part of the core experience without needing to spend money on them.

That's all I got. Need to get to work on my game tonight. I hope to get it wrapped up for release sometime before I am dead.

 

That said you might be able to get more on average per copy than if you had developed for a modern platform. I stumbled upon this a few days ago thanks to YouTube. It achieve just over 2,500 backers for just over $110,000 which surprised the author.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1973096722/planet-x3-for-ms-dos

 

Nice, pledged near 4 times the goal

 

I wish many super simple pixel games had better work put on ... pixels lol

 

More pixels? That will be pixel HD then

 

...not sure how I feel about this, as Hammerwatch 1's development ended up kinda abandoned iirc.

edit: or not. Looks like the started updating it again a little after I stopped playing due to a lack of updates.

 

It's still pixel work, not really HD, the character is not as detailed as those in a game like Ori.
They have good color palettes and great sprites and pixel design.

 

If you can't tell that from the video then isn't that the issue in a nutshell?

 

I don't think it is. Just because I didn't find the video interesting doesn't mean it isn't interesting to other people. There are lots of trailers & gameplay videos for games that I don't personally find interesting but they definitely appeal to a lot (sometimes millions) of other people.

 

I'm not a fan of the graphics which seem overly detailed for pixel art but I definitely get it. You like this high detail kind of art. You'd probably appreciate Owlboy's graphics. Seems like they were along those lines.

My next Steam purchase sometime this week will be Lonk's Adventure. It looks interesting to me in that there are 100 different endings (I assume maybe 90 of those are your death... but maybe not) so you can replay again and again to get the different endings. Also the dev seems to have a great sense of humor and put it into the game. And I appreciate this low-fi presentation style.

 

Wow! That's awesome. You know as much as I like this kind of thing (new games for classic hardware) I never thought about DOS for some reason. Never checked if there was a market there. After seeing this I did some searching and seems to be some demand for new games here as well.

That's very cool. Honestly this is even more tempting to me than doing C64 or Amiga game dev because I greatly enjoyed developing with the DJGPP (I think that is what it was called) C compiler and the Allegro game library for DOS long ago and more raw speed is available.

It's fantastic to see this stuff has held on and actually (in some markets anyway) interest is growing! More options for a person to find the thing that is the best match for their game dev interests.

 

The guys above already explained why Receiver isn't exactly a fantastic game, but I'd agree for the price it is pretty cool.

BUT, what nobody seems to have mentioned...

The developer of "Overgrowth" made that game in a game jam, and that game is pretty freaking cool. It may not be for everybody, but its a very unique indie title that has a huge cult following. Check it out here:
http://www.wolfire.com/

It is basically a "Anthropomorphic Ninja Bunny Rabbit Battle Game"!? - which is... odd sure lmao... but I think a great example of what kind of stuff makes indie game great, being different and unusual.

You might have even heard of the old game they made, "Lugaru" which was basically the same thing but with less cool tech. Many moons I've wasted on both games

EDIT: Also, when you buy Overgrowth you get a free copy of Receiver.

 

I was referring to your statement that you needed the context of who it was meant to be interesting for, not whether or not you found it interesting yourself.

Most of the time, even when I don't find something interesting myself I can see the appeal oteher people could find in it. I was suggesting that a lack of clarity there could be indicative of the underlying issue. If an informed viewer can't tell who it's meant to engage, either its audience is outside of that person's familiarity (always possible) or it's just not effectively hitting a particular audience.

 

Ah my bad I completely misunderstood. That makes a lot of sense. When I saw the shiny bits, movie-like stuff, etc I figured it was something many others here probably connected with and I just didn't get anything out of it. Maybe it is more than that though.

 

Unfortunately i didn't liked the color palette and style of Owlboy lol
I think it's not overly detailed pixels, i think it's a whole.

Looks good, while i found it too minimal pixels, the black outlines doesn't fit because they are too big it's because the game is very low on pixels, another think i don't like is there is no contrast like highlights and shadows about tiles.

For example Batman on Nes, is low pixel, but tile size looks higher with more details, better contrast play with colors



The tiles are a lot and varied, this make it look detailed but it's nes low res game, low res characters.



Zelda is very low pixels, but it's well designed with great color palette and contrast



Or recent indie games

 

I have never understood the thing with pixel art. Though this game loooks sooooo nice

 

These all look good. Very good color choices and layout. Color is very important I think. Not just color choices period but NES games were masters of color layout too. Well some of them. A lot of rough looking games on NES too.

I'm happy with Lonk's simply because everything is readable from what I've seen in the game. That's all I need. Functional graphics mean "they work" and I can focus on the gameplay. That said I think the graphics are quite good overall in that I can imagine them being a lot worse.

Lonk's not going to win any awards for best GRAPHICS but a game doesn't need to.

 

Regarding Receiver: I don't understand why people get so hung up on the price of a game. If I don't like something, you can't lower the price enough to make me like it. If I do like something, you can't raise the price enough to make me not like it, but I sure as hell won't buy a 299$ game. Imho it's just a supply/demand thing.

I also don't understand why some people seem to assume I automatically must be an illiterate idiot if I'm disappointed by a game. Who said I bought it because I expected to like it? I didn't. If I had expected to like it, I'd have bought it long time ago, because it was on my radar for years. I was perfectly aware of its gamejam origin, and of the fact that it has received at least one post-gamejam-patch. There was no specific content element in the game, or absent from the game, that came as a surprise to me. I bought it to find out if the concept of the gun micromanagement warrants further exploration in a personal project of mine. I don't think it does. I enjoyed that aspect less than I thought, but that is not at all why I'm complaining. To the contrary, for just 2 bucks and minimal time-investment I was able to quickly answer one gamedev question that I had, that otherwise would have taken me a long time of prototyping. That's a no-brainer, 10/10 investment, would buy again, don't feel the desire to refund it!

The thing that I am mad about, which was not apparent to me from looking at the store page or the number of positive reviews, is how much gamedesign potential this game wastes. I think this could easily have been an objectively much better and more fun game with like a day of work added to it. E.g.:
- add two distinct particle effects for hits on enemies (one for causing damage, one for death)
- pick starting loadout and first-room loot from a list of presets that are somewhat on the same level (right now I could swear there are situations where you spawn with less bullets than there are insta-kill sentry turrets on your way to the next bullet - so no chance to progress)
- don't spawn enemies in the starting room
- make loot & enemy spawns in rooms to have some roughly linear connection to create a risk/reward choice of entering that area or going elsewhere
- make turrets drop 1 or 2 bullets to incentivize combat and add some kind of reward
- tweak the parameters for loot and enemy spawns per room based on the distance from the starting room to get some feel of progression and a tension arc
- don't spawn the glock with full-auto enabled because that's just a noob-trap

I've said all I wanted to say about the game. Feel free to have the last word but I won't reply.


I own both Lugaru and Overgrowth through bundles, but never felt the desire to try them. Overgrowth was in development for 9 years according to wikipedia, I'm not so sure that makes it a great example for sustainable indie gamedev...

Great video, thanks for sharing!


P.S.:
I'm taking a break from all forums and social media sites till (at least) the end of the year. Bye and happy holidays everyone!

 

Enjoy the peace & quiet and happy holidays to you as well. I should probably leave again myself. Hadn't noticed how active I've been until just now. It "sneaks up" on ya. Lol

 

The style you follow looks like Micro mages nes kickstarter




A low pixel resolution game, with great usage of colors and animation effects is Environment Station Alpha

 

Yeah those are interesting as well. I have ESA. Blasting Agent, Rush to Adventure and Kero Blaster are good examples too. There are many very good low resolution games.

I actually like the lowrez simple visuals for two reasons. First as a player it is an interesting aesthetic. The chunky pixels definitely help to give a game its own unique feel imo. Second as a solo developer I think it is a good choice if you are "good & fast" at that style. It's a way to lower the time spent on content generation so it can be spent on other areas of the game.

Basically as a very part-time solo dev I see it as a way to make a better and / or bigger game in the same amount of time it would take to make a "worse" / smaller game with higher def visuals.

Of course that ultimately directly benefits the player. Games such as Environmental Station Alpha, Rush to Adventure, Blasting Agent, Kero Blaster, Necrosphere and I think (haven't played it yet to know for certain) Lonk's Adventures are great examples of this. These aren't low effort "junk" productions and have a lot of work put into them. Quite polished and fairly large works overall as well.

I do view the aesthetic in these games at least in part as a strategic choice that allowed the developers to create interesting visuals in a way that didn't take up all of their time. If any of these games had been hd they'd probably still not be done and maybe never would have finished them period. I noticed the developer of ESA struggling with that in the sequel. He decided to increase the resolution and detail and as a result was spending many times longer on each piece of content and it basically burned him out. He put it aside to create a smaller and lower resolution game. Hopefully he picks it back up at some point. I wish he had just stayed with the same visual style of ESA and simply used that engine as a base expanded on it and made an even better game from a play experience.

Anyway it is a win-win kind of thing for me. If you don't like the lowrez / ultra lowrez style or find it very challenging to create then you'd have to find your own way to make interesting visuals in a way that means you can spend less time creating any one piece of content so you have more time to spend on game design, mechanics, playtesting & fixing bugs, polishing, creating more content for a larger experience, audio, marketing, etc.

 

Well, if you view every game for what it fails to do, I don't think you'll ever enjoy gaming.

Also, you can't fault people for their decision making when you weren't there. It's easy to say, "they should have particle effects here or there," but how do you know they didn't want to do that but simply didn't have time? Or that they had a different goal for the thing entirely and "juiciness" was simply beyond the scope of the project. Maybe no one knew how to do particle effects. Maybe getting the gun management system to the polished state it is in took up all the time. Personally I felt the randomness of new game generation gave replay value and led to some fun emergent moments. But really all the experience was about for me was mastering the gun play. Once I did that, I felt satisfied to uninstall the game.

In any case, they accomplished something with the project, so the wise thing to do I think is identify what was good about it and move on. Certainly you can identify faults too and this is useful, but identifying conventional AAA features missing from a game jam entry seems like a waste of effort to me.

 

Speaking of starlink: They tried to ape old tv show (which is also the premise behind starfox), now go compare the opening of old tv show like, capitain future, cobra space pirates, ulysse 31, Jayce and the wheelers, thundercat, and tell me it it that nerve ... Then look at the starfox addition on switch, and old starfox teaser and compare.

The game is marketed as if we know the character, don't hit any narrative except the toys, in a genre highly predicated on very colorful character with high energy mise en scene, you can't go down on foot and you have a weird hover mode. It also don't adress the other market of space exploration by not aligning to the militaristic nasa inspired or pulpy sci fi adventure. It's in a weird bland middle ground of competant graphics with zero charisma and universe.

 

Every recent Ubisoft game in a nutshell. It's just fast food.

 

Yeah even back in the ps2 days they were know as the 7s machine, it's lik all their game was basically just seven, good not incredible. The incredible game they made was generally a person of the team pushing things beyond what was asked and intended, which then create a breakaway success, get fired or leave, then they milk the franchise until the souls is out and have to resort to random idea dujour to get more life.

Farcry 2 is still remembered for its bold choice while others are just forgotten as soon as there is a new one. Farcry 3 got a slight bump due to an actor going out of is way to bring Vaas. Splinter cell didn't survive past 3, prince of persia was forgotten after 3 and 2 and 3 were heavily criticize, assassin's creed director got fired ... ALL these project had messy twisted origin and lots of arguing, they initial offering are rough but full of spirits, but the sequel sands off those edge and they turn into indistinct mush.

I always thought that UBISOFT is the product of the french touch crisis that happen at some time, france is a very culturally snob country (or at least use to be), which gave strength to artistic input but also fuel big ego and huge mismanagement, so there was a huge part of their video games industry where france was on the map internationally, with strange original world, beautiful weird poetic visual, technical achievement, but crumbling gameplay. I like to call this the CRYO era, from the society that exemplify all that excess.

It turns out that way of doing things wasn't sustainable as teh industry professionalize and became an industry indeed. UBISOFT was the first to rationalize and distance itself from the french touch, downplaying crativity for rational game design, which mean they had gameplay that works but safe, it attracted a lot of "humble" craftmen who had a real anger against the artistic cryo type who led many awful project with no real direction.

Funnily Quantic dream is kinda a poster child of that cryo era in spirit, with big claim, big artistic ambition that often isn't followed, but this time with the technical omph to actually pull a working product and none of the artistic flair some of these old product had.

 

I don't know a lot about the industry, but from what I have gathered Ubisoft is one of the only major game companies with stable long term employment. I think I read somewhere that they haven't had any major layoffs for quite some time.

And here is probably the crux of the thread -- it's just basic rules of life. If you want to eat everyday, you have to be a farmer. Sure, being a wild, free hunter is more romantic and exciting, but chances are higher you'll be maimed or killed that way. Most people prefer security when it comes down to it. And those who do take the romantic path seldom are ready to make the drastic personality changes necessary to survive on that path. If you take a dog and toss it into the tundra with wolves, it's not going to survive. It hasn't known how to do that for a long, long time. Likewise, if you, a spoiled wealthy person who are accustomed to having things your way, and hard work has always been enough to succeed, and all of a sudden you throw yourself into a situation where your hard work doesn't mean jack if you aren't humble enough to wipe away everything you thought you knew in a split second, how will you survive?

And let me clarify -- if you have running water, and nobody you know directly has died of worms or starvation, you are a spoiled wealthy person, okay.

The problem is when people get taken by fantasies, and start believing they can have the wild freedom along with the security. People think they will be their own boss, hammering out staggeringly beautiful masterpieces and thriving from nothing more than their sheer genius. The irony of game development is that many of us are self-professed nerds with poor social skills, and yet, what is a game? A game is a work of art, not a mechanical apparatus. It's a means of direct communication, less abstract even than words. If you cannot do social and aren't willing to learn, how will you make a successful game??

As always, humans suffer for their pride -- but those who survive know humility and are always ready to make whatever adaptations necessary to do so. It's not, "this is what I want from life!", it's "I have to know what is, so that I can make use of it." What is is constantly changing, so the hunter always has both eyes and ears open, mouth shut, and is ready to make their attack with conviction whenever opportunity arises.

 

At the same all that safety comes from wild fantasy of a few creators they had.

All their big franchise had a out of step origin, rabbid bunny where offshoot of rayman made by teh wife of rayman's creator for example, it wasn't planned at all, it wasn't rational.

edit:
That's kinda the problem of starlink, it look rational to a tee:
- no man's sky's hype -> market demand -> disapointment -> filling that market-> apply ubi soft structure.

Problem is you need to apply that "annoying" structure on a core with spirit, which they hadn't yet. They applied the old cartoon show formula (villain, hero, diverse cast) without understanding how it works, everything so rational, even the toys is that old shows where based on toys line.

It's bureaucratic. "Bureaucratic" can't create sparks, it can only sustain it.

 

Yeah, it seems then that recognizing the extraordinary creatives and giving free reign to get a franchise started is necessary, but putting the cattle to the yoke is what keeps the whole thing running.

So, the question is to recognize, "am I the cattle or the extraordinary creative?" And the answer is, whatever you make the effort to be. One path is more secure and would be more than enough for most people to live a happy life, and the other path is only for those willing to reinvent themselves many times, starve sometimes, and accept great risk without it affecting their performance.

 

Yeah , it's the best way to focus on content, not be overwhelmed by super detailed graphics.

This is what makes the difference between crappy fast made games , and polished low rez pixel games.
You can also combines amazing shader effects into low rez pixel games to make them even better while staying low rez.

Nice game

 

Shaders are cool. I've been writing some just very simple ones. In my defense game I have a shader giving a subtle retro scan line fx. The enemies and player turrets use a shader for the "hit" indicator. I use them when they make sense basically and simplifying or reducing workload while getting the same result makes good sense.

 

Speaking of Ubisoft, I found this in my closet the other day...

Spoiler

 

Must admit I had to YT this one didn't remember it. I like the focus. One of the best vampire games I've played is the old Dracula on the Intellivision. Doesn't seem to be that many where you can just get to the point like that one and this one (apparently). Very focused well balanced game. Can bite to kill or bite to turn (although it turned humans into zombies). The zombies can wipe out the constables for you. Etc.

Do you have your Amiga up n running?

 

In general I agree with your analysis, but I think you underestimate how many cattle we need. The robots are fast taking over. It won't be long before their are essentially no humans required to produce all of the basic necessities of human life. At least for those of us that are spoiled wealthy persons. We are already seeing the rise of a generation that doesn't really need to work. Barring some exceptional disaster, pretty much everyone is going to be working at the extraordinary creative level.

 

Now I'm sad again that I had to leave behind all of my C64 stuff in Hungary when I moved to the US.

 

It has already happen long ago, you don't work on a field to make some random plat to feed yourself, 16h a days, 7 days a week. It's mostly "robot" with a human brain "operator", the new thing is that robot are growing a brain too. Hence why so many starving game dev that aren't actually dying of starvation, just can't afford modern luxaries nobody had access in the past anyway.

To be frank the problem will about how well ownership of the "mean of production" will be distributed, if I can buy my personal "autofarm 3000" that can feed my family and self repair and self recharche with solar, yes. But if all robots are own by big corp trying to sell you cheaper product you can barely afford despite the falling price because the work economy don't need human anymore, no. Can be worse the rich can just be pampered by superhuman AI skynet the butler, and cull any low class human in a perpetual militarized gentrification, that push you to all crappy area where you will stack in poverty with the rest of humanity, with no education, no access to resources, ie no mean to resist in anyway, and you will be a luddite anyway so you can't leverage an anti skynet AI.

/

 

@Kiwasi , yeah, it's a complex issue. I don't think it's a good thing when the majority of people have mostly leisure time and more wealth than a king. Look how much countries like america consume. What will happen when India and China catch up? Earth will look like mars.

It's not doomsday speculation -- humans have already desertified (yeah, I made that up, can't remember the proper term) the middle east. American farmlands are dangerously acidic. A few smart people care, but for every concerned scientist there's a million people who can't think beyond whats in front of their face.

Also, if everybody is a fancy arteest, what happens when they realize that, in fact, they are rather ordinary and the rest of the world doesn't care about their contribution? They get depressed. Suicide rates rise.

Just like when you turn cheat codes on and your favorite game is suddenly ruined, so is the case with life. Humans turned on too many cheat codes, and all over the modern world you find mental illness and drug abuse rampant. People who would be perfectly happy spending their life mastering a trade and growing a family are left to twiddle their thumbs and have constant jealousy inducing media bombarding them. What are they gonna do?

This is why it's very important to know where we came from, and what normal is. If people cannot learn what normal is and embrace it, the only other options are infesting the rest of the solar system or a chaotic death.

 

Honestly figuring out how to get past mental illness and boredom is going to be a cake walk compared to figuring out how to get past the plauge and famine. I for one know which set of problems I would rather face.

The luddite attitude has existed for generations. So far the dystopyian future where big corporation own everything and nobody has a job because of the economy has not materialized. For the last several centuries, the average material possessions of individuals has increased year on year, despite corporations also getting bigger and more powerful year on year.

I work in low level management at one of said big corporations. Have done for a few years now. What most people don't realise when making these predictions is that the corporations are totally dependent on their customer base. Owning the means of production gives you no benefit if you have nothing to produce, and no one to sell your production too. An impoverished population would quickly cause these corporations to implode in on themselves.

 

I know that they're the claims made, but I'm yet to be convinced by either of them.

Sure, if you don't care about graphics then pixel art is straightforward and functionally uncomplicated and makes a lot of sense.

If you do care about graphics... well... looking at the beautiful pixel art games I don't think they'd have taken any less effort than beautiful games in other styles. I suspect that The Last Night probably took just as long to make beautiful pixel art as they would have taken to make beautiful art in some other style.

 

Basically, regardless of art style, if you want your art to look noticeably better than average then you need to put more deliberate practice into getting that good than other people. Once you're on that treadmill it doesn't matter if you're competing in pixel art, 3D modelling, photography, painting or whatever else, the amount of effort required to get that good is going to be in a similar ballpark.

The Last Night doesn't look gorgeous because it's pixel art. It looks gorgeous and it's pixel art.

Also, it's not using pixel art as an excuse to take shortcuts. It's still 3D, it's still using shaders and lighting, it's blended with other art styles, and it's not sticking to arbitrary limitations from the style. It's just owning that as a part of its overall aesthetic.

 

Definitely it always takes effort. And high resolution (say 640x360 resolution instead of 160x180) hand animated pixelart is almost certainly the most time consuming graphics there are to make. Every object, every frame of animation needing to be drawn. Heck even in ultra low res it is a lot of drawing depending on the number of frames and amount of content of course. And ultra low rez has its own challenges where things have to rely more on what's not really there because there isn't room to show "everything".

What I meant is doing ultra low resolution / so called low fi pixel art is of course less time consuming than doing high resolution pixel art. As far as the actual drawing including animation frames are concerned.

Like if it takes me say 7 minutes to make a "good" 16x16 image it may well take me 2 hours to make that same drawing in a 64x64 image at the same quality level. I mean the larger image will be more detailed of course because I had 16x as much area I had to fill in. And this is a massive difference. I could create about 16 frames of a 16x16 image animation or simply 16 images of other content in that time. So in that way it means I can produce more content in the same amount of time.

The reason Rush to Adventure uses ultra low rez pixel art for example is because the guy is a programmer and said the only way he was able to be able to make the game was creating all of the graphics in ultra low rez.

Again I am not saying this is a lack of effort. It's not. I still do multiple iterations to make the graphics better and I know he made many passes to do the same and I think Rush to Adventure is a superb looking game.

But if he had made everything higher resolution he would have either had to cut things from the game reducing the scope or never have finished it. As it is he spent 5 years creating it. Imagine if the resolution was increased by 4:4 meaning basically graphics workload has increased about 16x (but let's say 12x because the higher resolution made some things easier). That's just massive. It's fine if you have one or two (or more) dedicated artists.

Basically pixel art is something where the time required scales with the resolution if you are doing the same quality level of work. I think it is the same for using flat shaded ultra low poly vs high poly modeling. When I make a 3D game it will always be in ultra low poly modeling for the same reason.

It works well for me personally because I also like the look of both ultra low rez pixel art & ultra low poly models.

Anyway hopefully that makes it clearer. I just mean if you are making the same level of quality graphics this work scales more or less directly with resolution of those images whether 2D or 3D. Now if I was just doing fast scribbles like stickmen or whatever then it would likely be much less work to do it in HD but that isn't pixel art.

 

I sold my original Amiga 500 back in the early 90s, but I have another one on the way (coming next week). I've been using WinUAE (Amiga emulator) in the mean time to learn Assembly Language.

I'm also learning Assembly Language for the TRS-80 Color Computer 2 at the same time, sort of going back and forth. I do have a TRS-80 CoCo2 here already; got it recently. It has twice the memory my first computer had, a whopping 64k(!) and damn it's sweet.

Hey, have you seen the Gigatron computer? It's awesome!

Aw, sorry! I also sold my C64 way back in the 90s and I'm thinking about getting another one at some point.

 

Awesome that has to be a lot of fun. A year or maybe two ago I wrote my first C64 assembly language program since 35 years or so ago. It was a lot of fun and was surprised I remembered the instruction set quite well and many of the hardware addresses as well. I did the same as you basically. Used a c64 dev kit for Windows and then ran the program in a C64 emulator.

I remember those TRS-80 computers well but never had one. Does it even have hardware sprites or only character graphics / bitmapped graphics?

These are the books I used back in the day... still have them out in garage.


But I'd guess these days there is more information available for free online. Lol How times have changed, right? So different now when it comes to information.

Do you have a blog or something where you are logging your journey back into development on these machines?

 

Nice! I tried to learn Assembly when I was about twelve or thirteen but I could never wrap my head around it. Had a huge book, "6809 Assembly Language" but it was all gobbledygook to me no matter how much I tried, haha.

No hardware sprites, no, lol. But there were some fund games that came out for it! Even today there are new ones coming out from the community.

Drool. I've been on eBay looking for 68k and 6809 ASM books and Amiga hardware books, but everyone wants $40 and up per book these days because they see that there's a demand. There is a bunch of info online, yes, and several of those old books are on archive.org, actually, but I much prefer the actual thing.

Not yet but thanks for asking. We're actually going to bring our old game dev site into the current day, and keep a development blog of sorts on there. We registered the domain in 1998 (Creation Date: 1998-03-18T05:00:00.00Z) and it's what I use for my email addresses, but there's been nothing but a logo on the main page for the past 15 years.

Once we went into adult games we shuttered the windows on that original web site, but now that we're going back to our roots it's time to let in the light. Going to put any of our new games on there, as well as the blog and whatever else. Looking forward to getting that going, so I'll let you know when it's ready.

 

+1 for you guys learning assembly language. Even if it's just for fun it'll help you when programming in higher level languages.
68000 is a thing of beauty (especially when paired with a Megadrive, but that's another story!)

 

Lol yeah I am the same way. I don't want to be attached to the computer or cell phone continually. Much prefer having actual paper books.

I get it about the price gouging. It's this way with classic games as well. A lot of people jumped on YT as so called "experts" reviewing old games & promoting it's great to pay crazy high amounts of money for the original games; others set up shops buying, trading & selling them. Some NES carts now sell for hundreds; a few over $1,000.

I think it's cool about the lack of sprites. Have thought many times about making a retro style game using tilemap based movement inspired by all of those older games that used character graphics.

I definitely think a great game can be made in any visual / tech limitation. A top down adventure/rpg/roguelike would work very well.

What are you making anyway? I mean is there a certain genre you are specializing in out of interest or are you seeing where you can find the greatest demand? Or maybe just make a small "any" game and test the market that way? I don't mean exactly what you are doing just high level. Lol

Definitely! I will be interested in reading about your development adventures, challenges, breakthroughs etc as well as seeing your game dev work. I imagine celebration posts such as "I now have my level showing up on the screen!!!"

I think I'm going to spend some time tonight and maybe tomorrow checking out a few more games for folks on the WIP, MWU and GD forums here and giving them feedback and then probably "leave" here again for a while. I imagine most are burnt out by all of my rambling at this point anyway. LOL!

But just shoot me a message when you go live if you don't mind. I will still visit occasionally to talk to some folks just probably won't be posting in these threads. At least that's what I have been thinking past few days.

 

Absolutely agree with that. Graphics advancements are nice to have but they also quickly lead down very difficult and possibly dead end paths.

Right now, yeah, I'm just trying to get started again on this stuff. I've got a few of my old games I'm playing around with, adding AI and stuff like that to games I made when I was a teen. Kind of fun going in and adding "juice" to thirty year old games. With that said, I do have some ideas taking shape and plan to start playing with those once I get my bearings with ASM.

Super cool, well that's one person I can put on the "might actually read this!" list, haha. Thanks!

 

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Oh, the trip down on the memory lane.