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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PS: Don't forget to check the home page regularly for more articles like this.

And of course, kindly subscribe to my YouTube channel!

Last of all, for additional short snippets of content, check out the posts on my Ko-fi page.

Kodiak