Future-shock is here! The first of a brand new generation of games
to combine state-of-the-art programming, design and graphics.
The results are simply astounding. Get ready for the fight of
your life!
Allegedly.
You may come across
this game while searching for "worst game ever". In
fact, matt91486 described it as "Perhaps the worst game on
the worst system ever".
This is quite possibly
true.
But you may like
to hear about some of the fun we had developing it.
Originally we were
told that we'd have a 256k cartridge. That sounds like a lot,
but bare in mind that the PC version had a 256k data table just
for the AI of each individual robot. We'd have to include AI for
every robot, and also graphics, code, data, and sound. But that
wasn't the first problem...
Due to the width
of the robots on the screen, it took every single sprite available
(per scanline) to draw just ONE robot. With hindsight we should
have ignored this and reversed the order of the sprites every
alternate frame. If the flicker was too bad we'd have tried something
else - but there wasn't enough dev time to experiment.
So to create a second robot
we redefined some of the background graphics. By scrolling
the screen around we could move the enemy robot. But we
couldn't add any background graphics because they'd move
whenever the enemy robot moved! That left us with something
like this: |
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By using horizontal interrupts
we could scroll part of the background independently, so
we could make a panel.
Using multiplexed sprites we could add some small details
to the floor and create a parallax effect. But we still
had no background: |
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By changing the background
colour every scanline we could add detail to the wall -
but only made of horizontal lines. Even though we made the
lines animate, pulsate, and rotate to add some variety,
it was still very basic. But we'd finally managed to create
some rudimentary backgrounds.
Phew. |
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And then we had
to squeeze some AI in. On the whole the game was rushed and could
have been far better. With extra memory we could have had better
AI and flipped graphics so the robots could turn. Probably nice
backgrounds too. But unfortunately all the memory had been used,
and development time had run out. By polishing turds very carefully
we'd created something, but I'm not sure what. Perhaps
matt91486 was right :-)
And I bet you're
wondering why, if memory was so tight, there were animated cutscenes
in the game? Well at the last minute... after the game was finished...
a day before it was due to be delivered... we were told that we
COULD have a 512k cart after all :-/
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