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 in.



The next stage was to get larger maps and object placement in.. this needed some more tooling, and some more Programmer Art. Added a bunch of new object types and a way to place them in the editor, and once again export to the Genesis. I'll write up the export process in more detail in another post.
So here we have Object editor in Unity, being reflected in the game:



This was now a basic system in place. Obviously I'd need proper art though, so at this point Asute got involved, and we decided to make Rocket Panda. Here's a mockup:


From then on, Asute had to get up to speed with the technical aspects of making Genesis art, while I carried on with the Editor tools so that we could both end up adding content quickly and easily.




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