Hat tip to https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Llamatron
The greatest homage and tribute to the original.
The Development of Robotron
11–20 of 26 posts
Re: The Development of Robotron
#12This is available on archive.org to play in the browser. It's the most like riding a bike of any video game I've ever played. One hand chooses shooting direction, other hand independently moves the character in a direction. Even by the 4th level there are too many enemies to track. I basically got crushed until my independent hand coordination "clicked in," then started progressing to much further levels without any…
> Even by the 4th level there are too many enemies to track. I love this game. The flashing colors are very stimulating, but the beauty of this game is that it's about judging tradeoffs in a constantly changing environment. Yes, starting at the 4th wave there are too many enemies to track. The zen of the game is this: you will lose some lives every wave after a certain point. But the game is generous and you will ear…
> but the beauty of this game is that it's about judging tradeoffs in a constantly changing environment.
Exactly! It's even dynamic by the standards of early Williams games which typically had a surprising amount happening at once.
Re: The Development of Robotron
#13This is available on archive.org to play in the browser. It's the most like riding a bike of any video game I've ever played. One hand chooses shooting direction, other hand independently moves the character in a direction. Even by the 4th level there are too many enemies to track. I basically got crushed until my independent hand coordination "clicked in," then started progressing to much further levels without any…
> One hand chooses shooting direction, other hand independently moves the character in a direction.
This style of game is called twin-stick shooter.
Re: The Development of Robotron
#14An office where I once worked had an arcade cabinet and we developed a little rivalry to see who could reach 1,000,000 points in Robotron first. I never quite made it -- topped out around 900,000 or so. The game required an intense kind of zen focus, and every time I got close to the goal I could feel that concentration slip ever so slightly, just enough for the game's later screens to sap my remaining lives.
This was my game of choice to unwind from classes. I think I played way too much because it was one of the few games I was as good as my brother. In two player mode my brother and I would each take a joy stick and still easily beat who ever was the second player! What fun! And truly to get into the upper levels you needed to enter a zen state.
Re: The Development of Robotron
#15> we spent four out of the six months of Robotron’s development PLAYING the thing Wait, what? You didn't create epics and attach story points to all of your JIRA tickets and estimate your development time down to the nearest 15-minute increment before you wrote a single line of code? Preposterous, you could never develop functioning software without pre-planning each and every single hour in a spreadsheet and reporti…
It is a two-people company. Those still happen, you know.
In this particular case, the "viz kids" group was created, released 4 games, and got disbanded 3 years later.
Re: The Development of Robotron
#16"It was based in Dresden and employed 68,000 people (1989)." Wonder if more people think about Robotron-the game vs. Robotron-the company (and all their products).
I just openened the link to read about the company :)
Re: The Development of Robotron
#17Eugene Jarvis gave an in-depth Robotron development postmortem talk at GDC 2014. It covers a lot more than TFA, though I appreciated the scanned photos. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=90GuCjmNzVI
I don't know if he mentions it in this video but one of my favorite parts of Robotron lore is that they had a bug in the movement code for Enforcers, which were supposed to just float towards the player. There was some type of overflow bug which would cause some of them to hug one end of the screen for awhile and then quickly dart to the other side, and it ended up making them more difficult so they left it in.
Re: The Development of Robotron
#18"It was based in Dresden and employed 68,000 people (1989)." Wonder if more people think about Robotron-the game vs. Robotron-the company (and all their products).
I just openened the link to read about the company :)
That reminds me of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intershop vs https://www.intershop.com; I'm still not sure whether the latter emerged from the ashes of the former. Given the tangled web occasionally woven by privatization of socialist enterprises, I would not be entirely surprised.
Re: The Development of Robotron
#19This is available on archive.org to play in the browser. It's the most like riding a bike of any video game I've ever played. One hand chooses shooting direction, other hand independently moves the character in a direction. Even by the 4th level there are too many enemies to track. I basically got crushed until my independent hand coordination "clicked in," then started progressing to much further levels without any…
> Even by the 4th level there are too many enemies to track. I love this game. The flashing colors are very stimulating, but the beauty of this game is that it's about judging tradeoffs in a constantly changing environment. Yes, starting at the 4th wave there are too many enemies to track. The zen of the game is this: you will lose some lives every wave after a certain point. But the game is generous and you will ear…
Have you seen some master-level playthroughs on YouTube? They do sometimes die, but not every wave. It's still an insanely hard game.
The crazy thing about the lives is that they wrap around modulo 128 (maybe it's 256), (and you can't see the count beyond 3 or 4!) which means that if you are unlucky when it wraps around and you die, then it's game over, even if you have been absolutely killing it wave after wave. Haha. Exciting!
Re: The Development of Robotron
#20No discussion of Robotron is complete without Christian Gingras' brilliant reverse engineering. He even submitted patches!
http://www.robotron2084guidebook.com/technical/christianging...