Quick Updates Early Dec 2022

Posted on

By Kodiak


New Major Article: Game Development Options

This article was written largely in response to a thread on Lemon concerning the scene's reactions to an Alf Yngwe SEUCK game being given a commercial release (not the first such case, by the way).

In the article, I cover alternatives to SEUCK and state my own position on the rectitude of using SEUCK to make commercial releases.

Seawolves WIP

I continue to close in on finishing Seawolves, which I mentioned in my previous blog post.

I am posting occasional snippets of gfx work for that game over on my Ko-Fi page but I also wanted to give some more development notes here:

  • The game is being developed for 1-2 player modes; the multiple player modes would all entail simultaneous gameplay, rather than annoyingly taking successive turns to play. I am also hoping to expand this to 4 players before release, assuming we have the raster time available. The coedbase for that is all in place, including collision-detection and scores.
  • Speaking of raster time, in its present state the game cannot be ported to NTSC (which lacks enough scanlines to get all the time-sensitive stuff done each frame). A gracefully degraded workaround might resolve that issue, however.
  • While I have produced most of the gfx work, the brilliant artist that is John Henderson has also contributed with some pretty sensational sealife designs and a few other items.
  • Gameplay is much more expansive than the simple fare of the clunky old Seawolf game which inspired Seawolves, now with kinetic threats posed to the players' submarines, but I want to keep details of that classified for another little while...
  • Most of the in-game visual effects are genuine real-time effects; I am aware there has been a bit of a discussion in recent times about real-time versus pre-calc / pre-drawn effects in the C64 demo scene, but none of that has coloured my decision to use a lot of real-time effects in the game; rather, it was the only way I could achieve the various water warping / ripples and other game-critical visual effects, and the methods used should also make their way into Parallaxian's water levels.
  • In addition to joystick, keys and maybe the Protopad, I am thinking of making the game controllable via paddles, as a nod to the original Seawolf, so kindly get in touch if that is something you think should be included.
  • As with Parallaxian, Seawolves has more than just one type of explosion when enemies are hit... As of the last count, there are 4 unique types, not for the sake of being "different", but because the game needs it.

Kodiak Ko-Fi Page

Anyway... I must get back to finishing this game and hopefully I will have a preview video uploaded in the next few weeks.

And like I said, check on my ultra tiny blog over on Ko-Fi, such as this iceberg design post for Seawolves.

Enjoy!

Parallaxian WIP

Since my previous Parallaxian WIP update, I have devoted most of my coding time to Seawolves (although some of that work is also to be transplanted into Parallaxian).

I have, however, added ground object collision detection in an efficient, fast way, which was one of the to-do list items.

I won't deny that I prefer working on Parallaxian to any other project, but I just want the Seawolves game wrapped up ASAP and since it's close to completion, I thought I should just push on with it first.

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