To do a game on any of the new consoles you need a huge team of people. I'm sticking to apps for now, unless I think of some crazy new puzzle game that makes me millions! lol.
Heathen: Glad you liked it. Look on the high scores you will see my initials! The 2nd high score was Lyndon Brooke (the gfx artist) - we weren't allowed to put our names in the games!
If you can manage to track down a NES Trakball (yes, they did exist) then the game recognises it and the control becomes like the arcade. I had a prototype of the controller with Japanese instructions on how to code for it!
DoubleDutch wrote:Heathen: Glad you liked it. Look on the high scores you will see my initials! The 2nd high score was Lyndon Brooke (the gfx artist) - we weren't allowed to put our names in the games!
If you can manage to track down a NES Trakball (yes, they did exist) then the game recognises it and the control becomes like the arcade. I had a prototype of the controller with Japanese instructions on how to code for it!
That's really cool man. I found it at a yardsale and played it almost every single day. Even after I got my Sega Genesis and snes my friends and I still played it! It's a perfect example of how a simple idea can lead to infinite fun. I would never have thought it was written by someone on the PB forum, it's a small world.
How much time and coding was involved in a game like this?
Paul Dwyer
“In nature, it’s not the strongest nor the most intelligent who survives. It’s the most adaptable to change” - Charles Darwin
“If you can't explain it to a six-year old you really don't understand it yourself.” - Albert Einstein
It's a long time ago, but it was under a year from what I remember. It was my first (and only) NES game so I had to get used to the console. It's programmed in a hybrid 6502 with some instructions changed slightly, others removed and I thnk a couple added - I was used to the version of the 6502 in the 8-bit Atari.
We had good devkits (for the time) - I think it was called PDS, the cpu time for each instruction was written in the left hand column of the Editor. It was a macro assembler/editor. The documentation for the NES system were written in fairly badly translated English with with extra pages inserted still in Japanese, I think there were notes from Chris and Tim Stamper in them - the game was written for Rare, published by MB Games (Zippo Games was eventually "bought" by Rare after I left to join Tiertex).
DoubleDutch wrote:To do a game on any of the new consoles you need a huge team of people. I'm sticking to apps for now, unless I think of some crazy new puzzle game that makes me millions! lol.
Hmm.. make a flash version. Wii - Opera accepts flash. Or easily just JavaScript like this one:
I think that the Amiga emulator they were using had a couple of bugs with the hscroll/vscroll registers as they appear to be off by a few pixels at times. My initials are on the default hi-score (ATB) along with my first son (only son at the time) Joseph (JAB). They missed loads of "secrets" - the secret garden (contains the clowns face mega weapon! - it fires clowns noses that kill anything with a single hit) and the boats mini-game (this provided us with hours of fun when developing the game - you can get in the boats on the swap level and you can spend hours just speeding around the water). I wrote the ST version too, but it was released unfinished!!! I had the day off when US-Gold picked up the master, they grabbed the wrong disk and release an ST version that had rough scrolling and the clowns face in the 1st level water (to the far right!).