Space Pants Games

 A bit of editor tooling: Tile Editor. OK, there are a lot of tile editing tools out there. Also I have no idea how many of these I have made over the years, on Amiga, ST, DOS, Win32, and even a simple editor on the Megadrive itself! But, this project is about making as much from scratch as possible, and learning a bit of Unity on the way. So, here's the Genesis Tile Map Editor! One of my favourite tile editors was the Rainbow Arts one, on Amiga. Sadly, and surprisingly I can't find any reference to this on the internet! I dont know how we came to use it either. I suspect it was some dodgy hacked copy! Anyway this program used a lot of keyboard shortcuts from DPaint, and so was quick to pick up for anyone in game development in the 90s! It's all based on Brushes. Grab a rectangular brush with B, and place it with your cursor. (while applying any transforms or effects on the way).  The other important feature is that of tile rules. This enables us to draw out a basic shape f...

 Getting The Data So, having decided on using Unity to create the data (levels, sprites, definitions. etc.).. how to get it in to the game? A common way when using assembler is to dump out binary files and #incbin them in to the code base. This always had the advantage of being quick to assemble, as all the assembler needs to do is to copy the binary contents of a file to a particular location. The downside is that it's not so easy to debug. Now that my PC is probably 100000x quicker than anything I used in the 90s, assembler time isn't an issue at all. Assembling the entire project takes way less than a second! So instead, I opted for the other common technique, which is to export files with asm code and data in them. All data is now exported as labels, tables, and declarations in source. This has the wonderful advantage of being much easier to debug. Here's an example of exported level data: As all the assets are given labels inside the editor, the labels get recursed dur...

 A Proper Project? So, after playing around with demos, and Xmas getting in the way, i thought I'd make something a bit more substantial. The main reasoning behind this was once again to build up the tool set.  So.. what to make?  I've made Thrust-type games a number of times, on different platforms. Even one in 68000 on PalmPilot 20+ years ago. So that was an obvious choice. Not too much to think about gameplay-wise, so I could concentrate on engine and tools.  I drew a rough quick map in Paint.Net, and some test sprites, and hard coded everything in.. sprite positions, movement code, etc. After that, the first thing I wanted to do was 'linked sprites' - that is going to be a big part of making Genesis games going forward. This is simply making larger graphical objects out of multiple Genesis hardware sprites, and linking them up and animating them. Made a little tool in Unity to put frames together, and used the exported data in the Genesis code to get animations i...

 First! Space Pants Games - that's me, Julian / LongAnimals, and Ben / Asute deciding to make some games for the Sega Megadrive / Genesis. Why? Pretty much for fun. I wanted to get low and dirty after using Unity for so long. I made Genesis games in the 90s, and it's one of my favourite consoles to write games on. I wondered how much easier it would be to make games these days compared with using the tools available in 1994! More on that later, but here's a taster: it's MUCH easier now. I started playing with the Genesis in early December 2020, taking some time away after a major release for the Day Job. I found SDGK by Steph, and had a play with it. It really is some great work, a full C engine for Megadrive. Whenever I'm asked what game to make by people learning to code for the first time, I start with Pong, and work up to other old games, including Asteroids. So I put my money where my mouth was and made a little Asteroids game in C, in SGDK. Something  like thi...