Game Developers Refuge

I'm posting this in hopes that I'll actually get off my ass and write something. I had intended to do this write-up while the project was fresh in my memory, but alas, the desire to slack was so strong I just had to take a few months off.

I'm going to break this down into sections, and maybe do one-two sections a week or something. I'd like to have screenshots, and various annotations while I talk about scene composition, debugging, design, etc; essentially whatever interesting moments I ran across during the development process.

SECTIONS:

1. IN THE BEGINNING
2. TITLE SECTION
3. SUPER REVISION ISLAND
4. LOADING SCREEN
5. SCROLLY TV
6. SIGNAL TUNNEL
7. MEOW'DIB
8. PYTHAGOREAN CHANNEL
9. YEWTOOB
10. GEOPARTY
11. POP UP TENTACLE
12. DAGON SUMMONING
13. IT'S A SECRET TO EVERYBODY
14. FINAL THOUGHTS

SECTION 1 - IN THE BEGINNING



How did I get here? Well, it all started with a really fucking dumb idea, which is, as one might imagine, about the only way I ever get anything done. I just sort of whimsically decide to "do" something. Sometimes this ends well (Moai, 4x, Assembly 2015, etc), and other times it just crashes and burns (insert a litany of half-finished projects here).

The demoscene had been calling me since 2015, and I was also looking for a way to collaborate with people again. I had been half-jokingly threatening to go to Revision for the past few years, and never really committed. Going is one thing... taking a demo is another thing entirely. We'll come back to that in a minute. As I was watching the live streams for Revision 2023, I was overwhelmed by the flood of entries, and general outpouring of support and emotion the event was getting, having been remote only for several years in the wake of the pandemic. More than a few people wondered if it'd ever occur in person again.

Aaaaaanyway, around halfway through the event, I had firmly decided I was going to attend Revision 2024. I put out a few feelers, but decided that I'd make the pilgrimage alone if need be. Procrastination be damned. Amusingly, about a day after the event wrapped up, I had somehow talked myself into making a demo for the event. I had an entire year to work with, and was just going to have some fun, rather than attempt to make anything truly impressive. With that in mind, I figured I could make it happen.

Spoiler Alert: I did, but goddamn the last two months were a miserable, stress-laden slog.

I started by taking my existing game framework and gutting most of it, which was fine since it was in more or less a chimeric transitory state between SDL 2 and Raylib 4.x. This would be the code base I'd start with. It had a functioning set of math and logic routines to handle modestly large sets of 2D assets (some scenes approached 2000 entities at a time). It also had all the screen scaling, asset loading, and logging/debugging stuff set up that I'd need to get moving quickly.

In the end, I had a blank Raylib project I could start working with. I was beginning to cobble together ideas each night after work, but I didn't have a solid feel for the demo -- and wouldn't for several months. There was also the issue of music... 0xDB was working on his own projects, and I didn't feel like bothering Bentacle as he was a fairly recent father, so I was going to be on my own for this one. I had been doing some simple music study and banging out shitty practice tracks in the first few months of 2023, so I had a vague idea I could pull it off, if I limited the scope. I'll come back to that later on.

My initial idea was to set up a Yoshi's Island-style scene, as I'd always wanted to make something in that vein. And thus, I began putting some things together...

SECTION 2 - TITLE SECTION

Placeholder...

SECTION 3 - SUPER REVISION ISLAND

I was still throwing stuff together, but eventually settled on the first actual 'scene' being a homage to Yoshi's Island, specifically the near-iconic title screen. Of course, I also wanted to evoke some other memories, so I mashed up some Genesis love in there as well, with a well-executed parody of the Sega logo from various titles (it changed from one title to the next; I think this version harkens from Sonic 2 or 3).



I used an emulator to capture a screenshot and get the colors and basic composition documented, then popped into Moai and drew up my own version. I didn't bother using palette rotation or anything special, just a few colored bands that change colors via an internal timer. In retrospect, it was quite amusing to see a Sega intro being parodied, leading directly into a parody of a Nintendo title screen, with NES music. And in wide-screen, no less. And in 32 bit color. Well, I never set out to achieve any sort of accuracy

... More to come as I think of it.