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How I failed to make a game: Raycasting on the GBA
21–30 of 36 posts
Re: How I failed to make a game: Raycasting on the GBA
#22The takeaway that "content" can be the hard part in making a game is why I think its so important to make games with teams. There are some folks out there who will produce art the way an engineer produces code; all they need is to be empowered.
The best games are developed as a technical-artistic partnership, with both sides pushing and enabling the other.
Re: How I failed to make a game: Raycasting on the GBA
#23As someone who has tried and failed at many points throughout the years at building a game I couldn't agree more with "Build a game, not a game engine" it's hard not to get sucked into the game engine black hole though.
Its depends what you like. Usually programmers focus more on game engine part, while designers on the other. And thats why is hard to make game solo :) Galaxial developer fall into that hole too. Too bad, because alphas looks absolutly super great.
Perhaps that explains Chris Roberts
Re: How I failed to make a game: Raycasting on the GBA
#24Shockingly enough it is actually possible to do decent ray casting and much more on the GBA despite the incredibly minimal compute budget. Joshua Barretto has been working on a GBA port of Super Mario 64 with entire 3D levels, characters, and movements. In my opinion just incredible work: https://youtu.be/9mUsgJ-HiDM
The one that blew my mind as a kid was Need for speed underground: https://youtu.be/36U2xN-196c?si=T7xSCeKxss_at3S0
I'm more impressed with the song "Get Low" ending up in an E-rated game.
Re: How I failed to make a game: Raycasting on the GBA
#25It's funny to me when people apologize for not being artists when they've produced actually nice looking art. It's like a host saying "excuse the mess" when entering their nearly immaculate home. I wish I had kept some of my game development experiments because then I could show you what actual bad art looks like!
It was the censored radio edit version in north america though
Re: How I failed to make a game: Raycasting on the GBA
#26Not sure if you care at this point, given that you stopped working on project, but there's a better way to find the ray direction for each column than using sin/cos for every one, which will also get rid of the slightly warped look: Calculate the two vectors from the camera at the very left and right of the screen (using your fov angles and sin/cos, that's fine). Then, to find the ray direction vectors for each colum…
Of course I still care :) Thank you for sharing this technique, I will try it out.
Re: How I failed to make a game: Raycasting on the GBA
#27> generate a C++ header with the compiled data
So many human years have been wasted trying to avoid this simple solution.
Re: How I failed to make a game: Raycasting on the GBA
#28It's funny to me when people apologize for not being artists when they've produced actually nice looking art. It's like a host saying "excuse the mess" when entering their nearly immaculate home. I wish I had kept some of my game development experiments because then I could show you what actual bad art looks like!
I should have included a disclaimer -- I agree that textures and sprites are excellent, but they come from asset packs (for this same reason I cannot redistribute them in the source release). Only the crossbow placeholder is self-made. I don't have any issue with paid asset packs, I would gladly build the entire game with third-party art, but there is only so much of it in the necessary style, resolution and quality.
It might look much better if you picked a palette with a mood (https://lospec.com/palette-list). The resolution mismatch between the foreground crossbow and the sprites and background textures could be made less apparent too by reducing the resolution. For the monster sprites there's always scaling and palette flips. But yeah, with those sprites (and sound) defining the game's identity it's a bottomless pit.
Re: How I failed to make a game: Raycasting on the GBA
#29Tangentially related, I've been extremely impressed following 3DSage's work. I've only dipped my toe into GBA programming ("hello world"-level stuff), and the fact that they built a real-time 3D level editor is mind-blowing to me. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=msM_oYqUMT0
I'm personally a bit more impressed by the Tomb Raider port mentioned in another thread, the linked game is doom/duke3d-esque and the GBA cpu should be roughly on par with a 486sx both in terms of clock speed and instructions per second (assuming you spend most of your time in code using the fast-ram).
The editor and looking at another video from sage3d also the rendering method, seems extremely reminiscent of duke3d. You can see a review of the duke3d rendering and sector setup on Fabians page.
Why the Tomb Raider port impresses more is because Duke3d-like renderers can work on straight spans and only interpolate textures in on direction and also get "free" hidden-surface culling (ie they never draw more than is seen), Tomb Raider on the other hand seems to have arbitrary texturing probably more overlap as well.
Re: How I failed to make a game: Raycasting on the GBA
#30Shockingly enough it is actually possible to do decent ray casting and much more on the GBA despite the incredibly minimal compute budget. Joshua Barretto has been working on a GBA port of Super Mario 64 with entire 3D levels, characters, and movements. In my opinion just incredible work: https://youtu.be/9mUsgJ-HiDM
In my opinion, the most impressive 3D game for the GBA is still the unfinished port of Quake by Randy Linden: