I watched this entire video with my 16-year-old daughter in the room. I thought she wouldn't be into it, but she found it amazing how limited computers were back then and how good the game looked. She really liked the walking animation on the character-based player graphic.
this reminds me of my reaction to re-playing Deus Ex after a long time and disabling all texture filtering in game for the 1st time, couldn't believe how good it looked... most developers these days put this heavy coat of filtering on top of everything, it loses character... seeing the raw pixels is so intriguing and engaging, it's like you're there in another world
A QA Engineer walks into a bar. They order a beer. They order -1 beers. They order a asdfjkl;. They order 0 beers. The first real customer walks into the bar and asks where the bathroom is. The bar explodes, killing everyone inside.
If this game had come out in the later 1980's, we'd have gone nuts over it! I remember how excited we'd get about a new game and all my computer nerd buddies would talk about them. This would have been a hit back in the day. I'm sure it will be today.
You should make something that game Tyrian did. It detects if it´s december and then ask you if you want to enable christmas mode. I don´t know if it work on Every machine with Real time Clock ;)
1970s: I see you own land and are hardworker, you can date my daughter. 2000s: I see you are educated and have your shit together, you can date my daughter. 2020s: Hey kid, test this game for bugs and we are cool, lol.
To be fair, he has a financial motivation to complete these projects. Seems to be very lucrative, too. That's not to say none of this isn't to be admired, of course.
@DamnMerasmus Think about how pleased you’ll be when it’s done. I have a little project I am working at. It’s tedious in places, but I visualise showing it off!
@@ACoustaDC That's because David popped a handy cap in they ass. (It is my firm considered opinion that the AOTPR player figure is David. He even looks the same in the C64 version.)
Most Amiga games were just ports of existing C64 games with jazzy graphics. I used to go to the house of a kid from school who had an Amiga. He'd never let me play it, just watch. But I enjoyed watching the graphics anyway. I had all the games on my C64, so it was interesting to see games like Test Drive and Defender of the Crown in high res graphics...
I've been trying to port a tile based game from the Archimedes to a custom z80 + tms9929 board i made, the original had full 50hz smooth scrolling, it did this by having many tiles for each object in an animation to smoothly scroll from one position to the next however i found that there's no way it would fit into the 256 char positions i had by about 5x, if i removed the player (and just load that couple of chars each frame) and halved the number of frames (to 25Hz) it would fit, originally the code ran 10x too slowly, after a lot of optimization got it to run at about a third of the speed. The point is that is really hard to do stuff on these old systems even if it seems simple so what has been achieved here with this game is amazing!
@@Antireality I didn't write the original game, I went through the disassembly of the code to figure it out. The game logic is very simple, most of the power of the ARM was used to render the entire screen 50 times a second! Since I'm using a TMS9929 then all the rendering is done in hardware so I thought it would be easy, turns out I very much underestimated the speed required. The games is Rockfall by Eterna.
Hey David, Please do a part 3 if you can and have the time. I find these videos really inspiring for my own game making and love hearing your story from start to end and the things you learned. Keep up the great work!
Love this! The graphics were amazing on the PET-version, which makes the enhanced C64 graphics positively out of this world. And the music and sfx are lovely.
I'm so impressed with this work! I can definitely see Ultima 6 roots in this effort, and the early Ultima games were some of my favorite games ever made. Well done, sir!
I'm amazed by the amount of effort and knowledge that goes into this. I'm a programmer myself, but I do mostly web development, such as Node.js. This low-level stuff of squeezing every possible byte of memory and CPU power is beyond me. The music part by Noelle is also fascinating; she obviously knows her stuff.
As someone who's watched a lot of Let's Play videos of old or modern-retro games, I appreciate the effort taken to make the screen shaking visible at 30 hertz. So many games use 60 hertz flicker to indicate I-frames, and the result when recorded has often been that the character just straight up disappears for a second or two.
I hope you continue creating games like these! I just love watching the videos where you explain all of the games developement, how it works and how you optimize it for each platform!
FINALLY... a new video... i was going to withdrawal..needed my fix AND you delivered (as usual) i am not into gaming (anymore) but this toke me back to my childhood,on the c64 and the amiga , those graphics with the sound effects and the 8bit music , very cool !
Wow, as soon as i finished watching a new video by one of my favorite youtubers, this came up in my recommended! Today is just awesome, all the best youtubers are uploading.
@@taliakuznetsova7092 Other people already modfied it. Some new video modes were integrated. I also hoped that this game would eventually become open source because I always wished to see an actual game in assembly. Most i386 assembly code you find online is only tutorials or operating system stuff.
Awesome work. I have always loved working within limitations when modding/game designing, it really forces you to think about every element and how best to implement it. You gave a great example with the chair graphic, modular tiles that can be reused in multiple configurations to form different graphics vs unique graphics that just eat up character space/RAM. It is a real challenge to think this way but also very rewarding once you get it right. Nothing I have done is anywhere near this level of modularity/restriction but I am well familiar with creating pixel drawn textures that tile to form different objects, faces, landscape etc with little more than a color switch. Just looking at this game makes my mind run wild thinking about all the different ways you could reuse characters and tiles to do more than is obvious. Love the series on this game, the VIC20 was a staple in my home as a kid so seeing this level of game design on something so restrictive is just brilliant!
What you say about submitting your software for testing is so true. My experience is in productivity software but the same rules hold true. It is amazing how the author (and designer) of the software can use it all day long without any issues but when you give it to real users it just falls apart. It becomes quite an art in anticipating what stupid things the user/player will do with your software. That 6052 assembly really takes me back to my teenage years (I am 50 next month)
I agree. Should you _ever_ make an Amiga version of this game, please hire LGR for some voiceover work! 😍 I'm sure he'll do it for free. I certainly would.
Don't feel bad about people "well actually"ing you that the game is not isometric. From a technical standpoint they are right but isometric has been used so much to refer to something with that type of view style that it communicates to the player the type of style the game is. If you tell someone you have a 'cavalier' type game no one will know what your talking about.
If it was another axonometric projection, like the 116.6-116.6-126.9 dimetric projection used in a most tile-based "isometric" games, I'd agree with you, most forms of Axonometric projections *are* just called isometric by gamers, but oblique projections are a completely different category of projection, and I don't think most gamers who play a lot of "isometric" games would consider this just another example of the category--Earthbound is another oblique projection top-down game and I don't think I've ever heard someone mistake it for isometric; in fact most reviews of the series I've seen specifically point out its use of a "weird" projection instead of an isometric one part of the quirky charm OF the series. Anything more specific than "oblique" is clearly asking too much, and I don't BLAME the 8-bit guy for not knowing the right term and just calling it isometric, nobody knows everything, but I do think the correction was reasonable too.
@@IONATVS lol your the person I'm talking about exactly. I have heard earthbound called isometric also. To a normal person for a 2D game all they know is top down or side view, and sometimes they know enough to get themselves in trouble and call it isometric. It's like how people call magazines clips in video games and the gun person has to come out and explain it when it doesn't really matter.
You really are inspiring, great work!!! I coded for C64 as a kid, 25 years ago but now - forgotten art (mostly). Nice to see the machine is still in use and hell, yours looks like a brand new toy...
@@filmer197 Shows how little you know. Having the discipline and ingenuity to make these games on such constrained systems would actually work massively in your favour when looking for programming work, especially for embedded systems using microcontrollers. As long as he knows a language such as C++ or C#, then he's as good as hired.
@@filmer197 I won't resort to name calling but come-on dude... You follow this channel (if you don't then you are trolling) so you must know a thing or two (or at least have an inkling) about making slick code with zero bloat. Unless you work for Microsoft that is....
Here's a tip: Back in the day, since most VIC-20 games were on cartridge, and since many people might not want to use a proper disk drive while also having to get a 35k RAM expander, maybe a cartridge version could actually be a viable option. Of course, having an FPGA in every cartridge to simulate a ROM banking chip is expensive, so you could instead make a limited edition cartridge. Or, you could even make a tape version (still with the 35k expansion for the VIC-20), but of course that would require some sort of turbotape software as well as making you have to do the following all the time: _Please skip to count 53 and press play_ 19:12 You made a smart decision to use aftermarket controllers. No need to sacrifice any real ones! 21:51 And there goes the ol' apple notification sound...
Seems like a great game! You can be proud. Also thanks for all the explanation. Non-developers like myself almost fully understood what you meant by all of that. Also like the workarounds you mentioned. I hope you will keep developing games! I already liked all of your content, but creating games, that is a whole new level!
Since the demand is higher than the indie production capabilities, maybe sell it as an auction? For instance you make 20 copies a day, those copies get 20 auctions on your site starting with your target price, and people buy them this way? And of course a few of these auctions can be surprise gifts, so whoever first bids on them, actually insta-wins them. This way people who want the game the most will be able to get it first.
This seems very smart but also makes me sad because I have a much better chance of seeing it's for sale and snagging one than being able to win an auction. They would go for soooo much, especially if there's a limited number planned to be produced. The surprise insta-win idea is a very clever compromise. I would imagine difficult to implement though. Unless you just put stuff on ebay with a few on Buy It Now, but then there's no surprise.
Well i’m sure some companies still prioritize graphics over other things, but it seems a lot of games try to do both graphics and gameplay well. Doom 2016, Black Mesa, and Final Fantasy VII Remake are good examples of games where effort was clearly placed into the graphics, as well as the gameplay
David is a genius. Someone to look up to. A down to earth guy who is making a lasting contribution to retro computing. Much respect and thanks to you sir.
4:06 this really sounds how modern games looks for me. Yeah, they have great graphics but a lot of them are boring and similar to each other. Funny how history repeat itself... again.
You have to remember that these companies operated in a cut-throat market and wowing the consumer and getting the sale was more important to bean-counters. It got to a point where it wasn't about the gameplay, and I'm sure Psygnosis rightfully didn't give a shit if it would 'stand the test of time'. Also as the poster above me said, you're not thinking of the thousands of amazing indie games. What is really at play here is your love of games dying as you get older. Happens to all of us.
i honestly disagree with the Amiga mostly going for the graphic/sound wow effect though. There were so many amazing games that are still a blast to play but my guess would be that the US side was more barren then the EU side (Europe esp. Germany was Commodre land) and later pc releases of the games that started out on c64 and Amiga and are still played today looked and sounded better leaäving a bigger impression online
I feel like it comes and goes in a cycle, with new technology bringing dips in game quality as developers race to create the best looking game. Very few 5th generation console games still hold up gameplay wise to this day, since most developers cared more about making an impressive game than making a fun game. But the 6th generation is home to plenty of games that still hold up to this day, after the novelty of being in 3D outstayed its welcome. Even today, the majority games made specifically to run on RTX compatible graphics cards are merely glorified tech demos. So I would agree with the sentent that we are in a rut right now, but I'm sure games will get better again eventually
cool passion project my guy, you have partially inspired me to make a game of my own it truly shows how most of the time game development knowledge grows more than hardware itself, creating an advanced game is very much possible on outdated hardware
(0:48) Loved that segue, the text appearing terminal style. (5:58) Gotta have exploding barrels / cylinders. _Into the Eagle's Nest_ had exploding crates, though shooting crates of dynamite results in instadeath. (12:25) The VIC-20 graphics looks like an improved version of the CGA graphics in _The Great Escape_ for MS-DOS. Yourself and those involved, have done an amazing job with the game-very well done.
Only a few people will catch this /s but, if you watch the last planet x3 video and then watch this one you can see that our friend the composer has made big life change since then, congrats Noelle :) /gen
I really enjoyed hearing from the composer. The music style was like a spot-on hybrid of amiga MODs and C64 SIDs, and even had filter effects. To top it all off, it was only two channels 😮😮. Even back in the day that was very impressive.
