 Developing a modern retro inspired game I grew up playing Videogames throughout the 80s and 90s. Starting with the Atari 2600 VCS, then various home videogame consoles and micro computers through the ages. But with a particular fascination for games in the arcades, as that is where the most impressive ones were. I remember my parents taking us to the seaside towns like Southend and Margate. Where I spent more time playing in the arcades than actually being outside on the beach. It was always the big deluxe cabinets that really caught my eye, and Sega were the kings of this. Outrun, Super Hang-on, Space Harrier, Thunderblade, the list goes on. These were Sega Super Scaler arcade games. Games that took amazing 2D sprites and scaled them effectively to simulate a 3D environment, way before 3D polygons became the norm. With our first computer, a Sinclair ZX Spectrum +2, I decided I wanted to make videogames. I learnt to code in Spectrum BASIC, upgraded to an Atari ST with STOS the Games Creator, then a PC with Borland Turbo Pascal, followed by C and Assembly as I started coding for the Nintendo GameBoy. I got a job working in the games industry, a year of coding for the GameBoy Color. I then had to take 8 years out, away from all computers. But returned to making games in 2007 and started Asobi.tech, with help from my brother Viet “Veepixels”. We both relearned our craft, making mini games and taking part in many game jams. Jump forward to July 2016 we took part in one of these game jams, located at Castle Ôrebro Sweden. For those that don’t know, a game jam is where you have a limited amount of time to create a videogame from scratch, usually based on a given theme announced at the event. This was Castle Game Jam 2016, the theme was “Dimensions” with a bunch of sub themes in different categories to choose from. We chose the following: Design - Castle. Audio - Chiptune. Graphics - Minimalistic. Code - Procedural Generation. I had been wanting to recreate the look and feel of those old Sega Super Scaler arcade games for a while. Create a Love Letter to those arcades of old. But how were we going to do this in the five days? We brainstormed ideas, talking about our favourite sprite scaling games. What we liked about them, how they made us feel, which ideas would fit the theme best. We wanted to incorporate Castle Ôrebro, where we were working, in some way. Studio Ghibli’s Laputa - Castle in the Sky, gave us the idea of a floating castle as the goal. Setting the world of our game in another “Dimension”, lead us to fuse the dragon Uriah, from the bonus stage of Space Harrier, with the Cat Bus from the anime My Neighbour Totoro. Be a flying cat-dragon avoiding obstacles, while picking up passengers hanging from balloons. I had never actually made a sprite scaling type engine before, but theoretically it should be simple. Take each sprite and scale its X and Y dimensions by the Z distance it is away from the screen. After messing around with this for a day, getting the vanishing point and scaling values correct. I managed to make the sprites Vee had drawn on his iPad, in his minimalistic pixelart style, scale towards you in a convincing manner. We added the MaoMao and its multi segmented body, with a bit of collision detection and that was the start of a game. The next few days we took it pretty casually, working from about 10am to about 10pm each day, getting a good nights sleep. Grabbing food mostly from Burger King as that was the only place that stayed open late. Elements in the game were added, removed and tweaked. Like adding the speed dash to smash through obstacles, and removing passenger collection, which became just collecting rainbows. Our high score arcade chaser was taking shape. The very last evening, I decided to implement a short level system, which I called waves, each would require you to perform a specific task. This is what it needed to break up the monotony of the endless runner it was becoming. Also it allowed me to create tutorial waves to teach the player what they could, could not, and needed to do. I stayed up and worked throughout that final night to get it functioning, and in the morning Vee arrived and agreed the game now had structure and flow. For the remaining hours of that day, we play tested and tweaked what we had to make it as polished as possible. I had it so, as you chased the highest score, you randomly went through procedurally generated waves, faster and faster until you ran out of lives. For audio our friend Cain “Fishy” McCormack, who has done tracks for OCRemix, provided us with a suitably catchy chiptune inspired song. This was squeezed in at the very last moment, I had not even had time to listen to it, before the deadline. Showcase time had arrived. Voting for favourites happened while everyone played all the games made in the game jam. MaoMao Castle was playable on a computer, and on mobile devices. Its reception was excellent, people really enjoyed playing it. Then we got to the final ceremony and they called out the winners. To our surprise. Best graphics, MaoMao Castle. Best music, MaoMao Castle and Best overall game, MaoMao Castle. We had won three of the six awards. Even though we were working on another game, people loved MaoMao Castle so much, we were compelled to make it a full game for commercial release. So we started developing it in tandem with Dr Harrison and the Blood Crystals, but quickly found it was impossible to work on two projects silmultaneously in only our spare time away from day jobs. DHatBC got put on hold, while our focus turned to MaoMao. From day one, we decided to showcase the game as much as possible to get feedback and to spread the word. While taking it to shows, I wanted to give the players that arcade experience, like the ones we had as children. We could not build a moving deluxe cabinet, like Sega. So using a large projector screen with a hand tracking LEAPmotion controller, and me in a tiger onesie acting as hype man, it became a bombastic arcade experience that people would look forward to playing at events. From conception to launch, roughly four years has passed. I have learned so much along the way. We have put so much love and attention into the game, and hopefully we have managed to capture some of that old 80s and 90s arcade magic in MaoMao Castle: A Magical Cat-Dragon Fantasy Adventure. Asobi Quang DX Back |