So, this past weekend I participated in the 22nd Ludum Dare competition. You have just 48 hours over the weekend in which to create a game. The crux of the competition is that you create all code and content within that 48 hour period. No re-used assets at all. Only engine/middleware/framework code is permitted to be prepared beforehand.

I wrote my game with Unity. It’s the first project I’ve ever undertaken in Unity, and I had very little experience of it. I came out of the other side with a very positive impression, I really liked using it. As much as I love C/C++; given the time constraints, it seemed a good idea to go with Unity. The other big upside is that you can deploy the game to be played via a web browser. This was definitely what I wanted. I didn’t want people to have to go to the hassle of a download-and-install, just to play the little toy game I made over a weekend.

I wrote a turn-based strategy RPG game. My inspiration was the “Shining Force” series of games. The theme of Ludum Dare this time was “Alone”; every game submitted had to follow this theme. This obviously doesn’t fit the team-based gameplay of Shining Force, but mine has a twist. You just play as a single character. It just takes the combat part of those RPG games, there’s no walking around and talking to villagers. There is a shop to purchase and sell items between battles, but that’s it.

The Game

Here’s a link to play the finished game:

“Adventures of One”

I was disappointed with what I ended up with, mostly due to how much work I had to squeeze into the time. In my eyes the game had two major failings:

• A lack of polish. The art is my placeholder art, and the GUI is the default-Unity GUI.

• Little game balancing. The first world is decently balanced, but after that it gets way too easy. The game is completely procedurally-generated. I just didn’t have the time to playtest it.

The biggest achievement though was:

• I wrote a game in 48 hours, that’s actually playable; and a little bit fun!

That’s my introduction out of the way. Now, onto the postmortem…

What Went Right?

• Choosing an idea which I’d see through to the end. I actually lost most of the first two hours to thinking over what type of game I’d do. The theme ‘Alone’ was tricky for me, as most of the ideas I had before it was announced didn’t fit it. I ended up taking one of those ideas and simplified it. In retrospect doing a full-blown party of player characters would have been ridiculously hard to do in 48 hours. But yeah, I was excited by the idea and that helped me keep my motivation.
• Using a higher level language like C#. Considering the game didn’t make too much use of Unity-specific ‘scene’ features, and was mostly generated in code; I could have had similar results using something like XNA instead. Either way, this sort of rapid development lends itself to something higher-level like C#. Out of habit, I think I would have been too anal about my code if I wrote it in C++. C# just lets you throw caution to the wind that little bit easier!
• Enemy AI. Pretty close to “Shining Force”’s enemy AI. It slotted in well to the turn system I had set up; so it followed the same rules and states the player had. The turn system I wrote had its positives and negatives, but since I left the AI to pretty late on, I’m happy I spent the time earlier making the turn system generic.
• The UI. I left it to pretty late on. I hate coding UI. I’m glad though I just used the stock Unity functions and didn’t try any fancy rendering techniques. I went for the basics, and that was the right decision. I’d hoped I’d get the chance at the end during the polish phase to ‘skin’ it, but I had no polish phase.
• Save and load. Lost close to an hour implementing it, but it’s a pretty cool feature. It autosaves after each battle (Unity stores web-app info on your hard-drive, so it’s transparent). I also got in a crude Base64 load/save screen, to bring your save to other computers.
• Bug free? Well, it seems to be for me. I kept it in a pretty stable condition, considering the game’s complexity and reliance on procedural generation, and AI.
• Food, drink, and breaks. I think I was sensible with what I ate and drank. I took pretty regular short breaks. Even if it was to just chill on the sofa with a notepad for five minutes, and plan out my next coding session. I’m not a coffee or energy-drink guy, so just cups of tea kept me going. I’m unsure how I wasn’t totally fatigued by the end, I’m guessing it was adrenaline.
• The ‘all nighter’. It saved me from not finishing. I’m an optimist when it comes to scheduling time. Re-reading my journal log, I hardly meet any of my set goals (but to be honest I did surprise myself with getting ‘unscheduled’ stuff done really quickly). If I’d had lost say, another five hours to a second nap, there is no way I’d have had a functional game come submission time.
• Placeholder work. Crappy art, blocks instead of characters, a checkerboard playing area for 90% of development. These sorts of things meant I had systems playable sooner. This helps my motivation, there’s nothing worse than building up to a point, where you’ve seen nothing on screen and hoping ‘everything will work out at the end’…. And then it inevitably doesn’t. My longest blind-coding run without actually seeing anything on the screen working, was about half an hour; for the turn system. Everything was short and sweet to rapidly iterate on.
• The audio. I think it went well. I dropped in the sound effects just after the halfway point, which provided good battling feedback, with the lack of particles/visual effects. The music I also procedurally generated. I lucked out with some good classical piano pieces which fit the style of game well. The voiceovers by the wife I threw in at the last minute. They worked out well, but I’d have liked to try and fix the audio balance between her and the music a bit more.
• Not caring about the code quality. It’s awful. Terribly hacked-about stuff that reminds me of the sort of thing I’d have written in college. I however still coded pretty defensively though. I just didn’t worry about things like commenting, and whitespace/indentation being off. Fix something ‘properly’, or throw in a sure-fire hack? A no brainer. I also committed many cardinal sins with global static singletons, instead of jumping through Unity’s component hoops. My typing fingers thanked me!
• Stand-up desk. I have an IKEA Jerker desk. It’s not adjustable, but I have a high stool which I use when I need a rest. Being able to constantly switch between two was awesome. When I’d feel lethargic in the chair, I could stand. When my feet got tired of the standing, I’d be able to take a load off and sit. I probably was about 50/50 in each position, time-wise.
• No internet distractions. I know some people who do these completions regularly like to use Twitter and IRC extensively during the dev time. I’m a bit of a procrastinator; those sorts of things can be a big timesink. I told myself I would just check my emails on my cellphone, and do nothing more than that. It worked out well. I’m real surprised that I didn’t feed my Chaos Engine addiction, throughout the whole 48 hours!

What Went Wrong?

• I left some important features until way near the end. In particular the attack logic I rushed through, such that it doesn’t scale into later battles. Enemy placement and the map terrain generation I did with less than two hours to go. I should have had all the procedural-generation stuff done very early, and other risky things like the battle logic calculations too. Instead I did the bread-and-butter stuff that’s hard to get wrong first, and did the risky stuff later.
• Very little playtesting. It’s a slow game to play through to test leveling into later battles. I should have made leveling stats deterministic and had some way of starting myself off in the later, harder battles to test balancing.
• Graphics/art. I spent hardly any time at all on the graphics. I can’t draw for shit, but I can usually fudge things to look very aesthetically pleasing despite that lack of talent. I didn’t even get any time to try that.
• A lack of preparation. I’d planned each day during the week prior to “look at Unity tonight”. I hadn’t got around to it. So I had to learn as I went. Some aspects like hooking up audio took a little longer than they would have, if I knew how to do it beforehand. I also found myself dropping in and out of the ‘component’ model that Unity has for objects, because it didn’t ‘click’ for me until a few hours in. I think I would have likely pen-and-paper planned out my components to be better organized, than the ad-hoc mess they ended up as.
• AOE (area-of-effect) magic; stuff that affects more than one tile. Probably lost a couple of hours spread over the whole period, to implementing it, and dealing with fallout from it. I envisioned it as being useful in later battles when there are tons of enemies; which drove me to add it in the first place. It’s a shame later battles are such a walkover, which kind of renders it just a time-saving device.
• I started working at about 11am on the Saturday, after about five hours of sleep. I took it easy in the morning, and watched some football as I coded. That time was actually pretty productive. I then carried on for well over 24 hours and worked up to the 6pm deadline the next day. I really didn’t feel too tired, but my productivity certainly slowed. I didn’t have many bugs to fix, but one in particular was niggling in the last four hours. I only fixed it shortly before submission. I think with a fresher head, I’d probably have not caused the bug in the first place.
• UI and state machines. I hate coding UI. I hate coding state machines. This game had plenty of both. I’m surprised it didn’t demotivate me. State machines always seem such a chore. So much code for what has very simple intentions. Scripting languages can make this a lot easier with their micro-threading capabilities. I remember reading something about C# and the ‘yield’ statement lending itself well to state machines, but it’s a little less straightforward to grok. I should have probably checked that out again.
• The scope. Too big. Too ambitious. Given my lack of preparation too, it was silly to think I could do the idea justice in less than 48 hours. I had a good stab at it, though.

“Picasso” – Look at that work of art!

My TODO List At The End

I had to prioritize the last few tasks, so I inevitably had some on the cutting room floor. Here are the features I really wanted to add:

• Particle effects on attacks. I’d seen some demos of particles in Unity, and they looked really simple to set up. A good bang-for-buck. Didn’t even give it a slight look.
• More/better character graphics. I also rushed through naming and giving stats to the enemies that did make it in. The art in the game isn’t good, and I don’t think I’d have made it that much better; but I’d have liked to added more varied enemies for sure. I think I probably spent a grand total of about twenty minutes the whole project (if that), making art.
• I had functionality to ‘slow’ the player movement over harsh terrain, and collision for impassable squares. I always planned to procedurally generate the terrain, but I didn’t get the chance to hook this stuff up. Impassable squares would have been tricky, in order to avoid blocking the player out of areas. ‘Slow’ terrain though wouldn’t have been much work.
• Healing spells for enemies. ‘Buff’ and ‘debuff’ spells for the hero player, as well as the enemies. Similar ‘buff’ and ‘debuff’ items to use as well. Some of the turn-logic for this sort of thing was in place; it would have probably taken less than an hour to add these.
• A better looking GUI. I’d have liked to try changing the font and colour used. I did Google search at one point, but it looked pretty involved, and would require me to go through all my UI code and hookup references to a ‘GUISkin’. Probably not much time to do at all, but every minute counted at this stage.

Of course, all of these things still fall way below ‘fixing the balancing’, and some other things mentioned in the “What went wrong” section. The Perlin-noise, colored and textured terrain was actually a wishlist item for me originally. I wonder if I’d have left that on the wishlist, I would have been able to fix the balancing?

Final Thoughts

In all, I enjoyed the experience. I was disappointed that the game I was intending to be challenging and provide seemingly ‘endless hours’ of battling, only holds up for about ten minutes. But I had fun coding something that quickly under a time pressure. Sure, the code looks absolutely horrible, but it’s a thrilling experience just churning out stuff at that speed, and having it all come together.

I would consider doing another Ludum Dare in future, but I’d definitely want to do more preparation. I’d also certainly scope my idea much better. I think a shorter, tighter game is the way to go. Something that would be doable with two ‘sleeps’ in there as well. I’d like to get a good twelve hours of sleep next time, instead of five!

My Journal Log

You’ll notice the log ends at about 2pm, four hours before my 6pm deadline. That last four hours was just a whirlwind, the time flew by ridiculously fast!

log.txt

I found it pretty useful to keep this log. It helped with motivation, and helped me focus on what I should be doing next.

I also have half a dozen mini-notepads full of ramblings about movement, AI, and the turn system. Taking a break from the computer and sitting down with a pad and paper is pretty valuable. Just gives you time to refocus, so you don’t just sit there coding down a blind alley.

My Time-lapse Video

~38 hours in ~4 minutes:

The first session was about 10 hours; the second session was about 28.

So, it’s been quite a while since I last posted on this blog. I’ve been pretty busy the past few months with various things. At work we had an important milestone during that time, which thankfully passed with flying colors. Outside of work though, I actually got married a couple of months ago! My wife and I eloped to Hawaii, just the two of us, and tied the knot.

So it’s been quite a busy period recently for me. Starting on vs-android back in January probably wasn’t the best timing. Getting it done wasn’t too bad; it was more the follow-up support email period that was tougher to deal with. More so, given the marriage preparations and what have you, which I was going through at the time. So vs-android got left by the wayside a while, and rightfully so!

A couple of weeks ago though, I picked up the project again. I was determined primarily to fix the dependency issues the previous version had. After looking again at what Microsoft had done with their Win32 toolchain, I decided to massively change my approach. I went from a system that was built primarily with MSBuild, with a little C# to sanitize pathnames and switches. To a system which had almost all of it’s moving parts in C#, with MSBuild just ferrying the project data into it.

That was pretty much the basis for the latest iteration of vs-android. I bolted on a few other things along the way, but for the most part it was just about getting it into a stable and reliable state.

vs-android v0.9

So yeah, I’ve just wrapped up a new version of vs-android. I didn’t bother posting about the last couple of version revisions I did in the past, but this one is a little different. It got a pretty major overhaul. In my eyes has moved from an experimental toy, to something people can actually write production code with. So this is why the version number jumped up to point-nine.

To get an idea of the extent of said overhaul, here’s a list of the changes made:

• Verified working with Android NDK r5b, r5c, and r6.
• Much of vs-android functionality moved from MSBuild script to C# tasks. Similar approach now to Microsoft’s existing Win32 setup.
• Dependency checking rewritten to use tracking log files.
• Dependency issues fixed, dependency checking also now far quicker.
• Android Property sheets now completely replace the Microsoft ones, no more rafts of unused sheets.
• Property sheets populated with many options. Switches are no longer hard-coded within vs-android script.
• STL support added. Choice between ‘None’, ‘Minimal’, ‘libstdc++’, and ‘stlport’.
• Support for x86 compilation with r6 NDK.
• Full support for v7-a arm architecture, as well as the existing v5.
• Support for Android API directories other than just ‘android-9′.
• Separated support for ‘dynamic libraries’ and ‘applications’. Applications build to apk files.
• Response files used in build, no more command-line length limitations.
• Deploy and run within Visual Studio, adb is now invoked by vs-android.
• ‘Echo command lines’ feature fixed.
• All support SDK/libs (NDK, SDK, Ant, JDK) are okay living in directories with spaces in them now.
• All bugs logged within Google Code are addressed.

Well, my posting on here has hit a bit of a lull. Overwork isn’t my excuse this time, since my last post things have been pretty crunch-free at my day job.

I think I’ve just chilled out a little more at home, not so much coding. Been actually playing games a lot more than usual; enjoying “Fallout: New Vegas” right now, and played a ton of “Dead Rising 2″ as well. To hark back to an old blog post I made here about Dead Rising; I can confidently say that Blue Castle Games did a great job on it, you guys do indeed rock!

Recently I did just move my blog to a new domain. I felt the old website name “Music To Make Games By…”, and it’s really long domain name wasn’t to my liking. The original aim for my blog was to talk a lot about the Guitar Hero games I’m working on. That sort of thing is pretty difficult to do though. For obvious reasons I can’t talk about games that aren’t announced yet. Also, to talk about anything with any sort of meaty ‘behind the scenes’ content I’d need to run it by Neversoft first. So yeah, all that fell by the wayside and I mainly ended up covering my foray into XNA and C#; with a few distractions on the way.

New Domain

So yeah, this site is sitting at ‘http://www.gavpugh.com/‘ now. Plan to continue it in the same vein, still plodding along the XNA-path when I code at home. Likewise I definitely intend to write some more articles about the more esoteric areas of C# and XNA, as I was doing previously.

Releasing the source code to “XNACPC” is still on my agenda too. A little after XNA 4.0 was officially released, I managed to get audio working in the emulator using the brilliant new DynamicSoundEffectInstance. Was really awesome to hear those old games chiming away their little 8-bit tunes. Even back when I worked on this emulator in plain C many years ago, I never got round to getting the audio working before.

So for this site, it’s pretty much business as usual then. Slightly new paintjob; shorter URL. The thing I’d really like to change next is my frequency of posts!

New Game

The last game I worked on: “Guitar Hero: Warriors of Rock” was released a couple of months ago now. It did okay at retail, nothing spectacular. The sales are like night and day compared to around the time our studio started working on them. “Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock” sold numbers in a different league. Across all the SKUs it actually broke $1 billion in sales. Apparently it is the “first single game ever to surpass $1 billion in sales”, whether that is still true I’ve no idea. It has an advantage over most other titles though in that they very likely count the hardware bundles in these sales figures.

Anyway. Since that game is finished now, I’ve been working on something new.

Looking forward to Christmas, hopefully it’ll be a good time for game sales across the board. For all companies. “Black Ops”-aside it seems like we’re all hurting a bit right now.

New Book

I’ve been enjoying reading industry-related books as of late. Not technical books, but more stories from the trenches. I recently finished a very good one, it’s not specifically gaming-related though but it’s not too far off. “Founders at Work: Stories of Startups’ Early Days” contains interviews with founder members of various notable startup companies. Actually there is one gaming-related reference in there; Steve Wozniak is interviewed and talks a little about his early work at Atari.

It’s very good. There’s a ridiculous span of different companies covered. From “Hot or Not” through to the guys who wrote “Visicalc” back in 1979, the very first spreadsheet app. A spreadsheet app from 1979, how is that interesting to read about? Yeah, I thought much the same. It was back to back with a chapter about “Lotus 1-2-3″ as well, I thought I was in for a bore-fest. However, it’s riveting stuff. Reading about the highs and lows of these companies as they developed through the years was surprisingly fun. What was also news to me was how incestuous the ‘regular’ tech company world is, almost to the same level as the games industry. So much cross-over where competing startup founders are ex-colleagues.

Definitely one worth picking up if you like inspiring stories. The vast majority of them are generally about coders being part of the initial startups. They detail the problems they faced in a decent bit of detail too. One common thread was scalability, that “Oh shit” moment where everything has gone a little too well and the servers aren’t coping with the demand. Usually some interesting stories on how they dealt with those periods.

There’s the odd one or two that read as “everyone else is doing the startup thing, so I thought I should to”. Which seems a pretty tenuous reason to go for it. But those from what I remember tended to be more the management-school grad types; family with connections and money. They almost read a little like it’s just a plaything, to give them something to do. If it works out that’d be cool, but they’ve got a nice parachute to escape. Been a while since I put the book down though, I think this was only isolated to just one or two stories max. Despite the glistening silver spoon, they did still have some interesting stuff in those too.

Me, a class warrior? Never.

I’ve always been fascinated with game industry stories. From the first day I started in the business, I’ve always been eager to hear anecdotes from other people that had seen and heard so much. Many years on now, I’ve some of my own stories. Some of which I’m actually part of myself. It’s kind of surreal to feel like I’m on that other side of the fence now.

Recently I picked up this book again: “Masters of Doom”, by David Kushner. It’s the third time I’ve read through it. Nuts eh? I don’t think I’ve ever read any kind of book that many times over. It’s just a very well told account of id Software‘s birthing, and what happened to the key employees up until around 2003. I’ve recommended it to several people over the past couple of years, since I first picked it up. In fact it was suggested to me in the first place by a coder colleague here at Neversoft.

I think what had me going back to it again, was how inspiring a story it is. From being a kid who downloaded the Wolf3D shareware originally from a BBS, and picked up the Doom the same way. The stories in the early half of the book are amazing to me. These people created their own genre, they created groundbreaking tech. To a kid fascinated with videogames, and computer programming these people were my gods!

As someone now who’s all grown-up, and has coming up to a decade of time in the industry under my belt. These stories still resonate with me, they’re extremely inspiring, and make you believe that there’s still room for innovation in the future. I think these days with conservative big-time publishers, you only see that innovation in the indie scene. I really can see something very special coming out of that section of the industry soon.

 

What else is out there?

Well, that’s what prompted this post really. There really isn’t anything that comes close to this book right now. There’s a real gaping hole here for this stuff. You might say that people interested in the inner workings of the games industry are a very small group. But really, I don’t think this is the case. Even if you remove the gaming part completely, it’s a great account of a technical-led success story. I’m sure books about Steve Jobs and Bill Gates fly off the shelves. I can’t see why the same can’t be true about this material either.

There are a couple that I managed to find that I thought could be good reads. The first one looked initially very promising, but on reading the Amazon reviews I was greatly turned off. The book in question being: Rogue Leaders: The Story of LucasArts. I adored playing the old point-and-click LucasArts adventure games, so reading about these seemed a real treat. The reviews however mention that these games are only discussed very briefly, and in no sort of detail at all. So not my cup of tea, I’m not much of a Star Wars fan.

The second book I actually did pick up, and have got just over halfway through. It’s SmartBomb. It’s been a bit of a slog and I think I’m going to give up on it now. The story about how Atari started was a high-point, interesting stuff that I’ve not heard about before. But on the other hand you have a poorly-researched version of how id Software got big, and lots of fluff about gaming tournaments and CliffyB’s visits to trade shows.

The id mistakes were odd. They mentioned their key titles which “started it all” were “Return to Castle Wolfenstein, Doom, and Quake”… Doh! To spare their blushes though, they do refer to the correct name “Wolfenstein 3D” later on in the chapter. The other doozy I remember was saying that they were told to “make three games, we’ll give away the first two for free and sell the third”. They then referred to that as being Shareware. That’s probably how my mum would try and describe how Shareware works, if in some bizarro-world she was researching a book like this.

The CliffyB stuff could have been so much better if they had talked some about how he got into the industry in the first place. I still have no idea if he ever wrote code himself. I mean take Sid Meier, he actually coded Civilization as well as designing it. Not that it takes away from his designer skills if he’s not a coder. I’m just curious, I enjoyed ‘Jack Jackrabbit’ back in the day. In the book his early days are relegated to one sentence that mentions he sent off a floppy disk in a ziploc bag. MobyGames actually says he did some games before Jack, but his role isn’t clear. At least one seems to indicate he did the whole thing himself. Anyway, this is a far more entertaining CliffyB story. Even though it is completely made up.

 

Engerlund, Engerlund!

As I tend to do when I write these blog posts, I’m going off track. The real point of this post, and the namesake of the post itself is about British game developers. Why is there absolutely nothing written about them in books? I also feel whenever I read any sort of modern game website about the ‘good old days’; it’s always just Atari, Nintendo and the Apple II. There was another golden-age of gaming, from the mid 80′s through to the early 90′s. This one occurred and originated in Britain. Take the Spectrum, the C64 (and the Amstrad!). Then you’ve got the Amiga, and in turn some PC and console conversions of the same games. There’s so many good games for those systems. Nowadays though whenever a modern site like Kotaku gets misty-eyed, it’s like these games never existed.

Elite? I don’t think I’ve met an American who knows what that game is. Manic Miner? No chance.

Manic Miner is a good one to pick up on. It pre-dates “Super Mario Bros.” on the NES by almost two years. Whilst it’s missing the scrolling element of Mario, it was at the time a revelation in the British home computer market. The author, Matthew Smith famously dropped off the face of the planet after the follow-up: “Jet Set Willy”. He apparently joined a commune in The Netherlands, and stayed there for a number of years. Take a gander at this YouTube clip for some nostalgia. The gangly-guy on the new “Doctor Who?” is the Matt Smith eh? No, Mr. Manic Miner is the Matt Smith, and always will be.

• Elite. Just mentioning this one again. Braben has his own company now, curious as to why Ian Bell didn’t join him. The game itself was a groundbreaking use of procedurally-generated worlds on a huge scale.
• Mythos Games. Laser Squad, Lords of Chaos, and the X-COM/UFO games of course. Turn-based strategy joy.
• Imagine. No really outstanding games I remember, but there’s a very interesting backstory about how piracy killed the company.
• Codemasters. The Darling brothers, and the Oliver twins. Redefined the pricing model for games at the time, selling (mostly) quality newly developed games at budget prices.
• The Bitmap Brothers. Speedball and The Chaos Engine. Outstanding art-style. Best looking games out at the time.
• Psygnosis. Nuff said. They are now SCEE Liverpool.
• Rare. Killer Instinct, Goldeneye 64, Donkey Kong Country. They used to be ‘Ultimate: Play The Game’. Sure there’s a good story there. Throw in some ‘Mr. Pants’ and it’s gold.
• Molyneux and Bullfrog; Syndicate, Populous, Dungeon Keeper, Magic Carpet. All groundbreaking, classic games.
• The GTA guys up at Rockstar North. Tie in the DMA design days too, and you’ve quite a story. Lemmings is an all-time great.

Anyway, just some food for thought. There’s a gap in the market here for someone willing to put in the research time. Can’t see why it wouldn’t sell well. The GTA stuff would probably sell it in the States!

A few weeks ago I mentioned on twitter that I was working on an Amstrad CPC emulator, written in XNA. There are plenty of the things for the PC and various other consoles, but not one for the Xbox 360 yet. So it seemed a cool little exercise to undertake.

A long time ago, I wrote one of my own for the PC. The website I setup for it is still live, here. I developed it initially around 1997. Back then I’d pretty much just gotten it to be able to boot, and be able to type things on the keyboard. I revisited it a few years later when I needed something flashy for my portfolio, around the time I was trying to break into the games industry. With that version I managed to get a handful of games running nicely.

Little bit of history

I used to be really into the emulation scene back in the day. The first one I stumbled upon was on a BBS, some random BBS I found in the pages of Computer Shopper (wow, that mag is still going!). My father used to go to his work to wash his car on the odd weekend here and there. I used to use his Apple Mac computer when he was doing that, was one of the old Mac Quadras. This would have been around 1993 I think, so I’d have been a spritely twelve or thirteen years old at the time!

Anyhow, I’d use some terminal software on the Mac, downloading various interesting programming bits and bobs via the trusty ZMODEM protocol. One weekend I was stunned to see something called CPCEMU. This was the first Amstrad emulator ever to see the light of day. I didn’t even know such a thing was possible at the time; I’d pretty much figured that it could well be a joke download. So after copying my weekend’s haul to a floppy as per-usual, I was excited to give it a try.

This software and much of the rest of the stuff I downloaded was PC-only. I didn’t have a PC at home at the time; I’d just use the ones at my school during lunchtimes. It was really cool to see the emulator fire up on that PC at school. Unfortunately though the Amstrad ROM wasn’t included in the package, so all that worked out of the box was a single sample game written to interface directly with the hardware. That year I remember my ‘big’ Christmas present was a 3.5” disc drive for the Amstrad, primarily so I could dump the ROMs from the machine so I could get the emulator working! What a nerd.

Around the time I’d also written in to the only remaining Amstrad CPC magazine in production: Amstrad Action. They had some feature where they asked readers to write in with any sort of Amstrad-related article, and they’d print them up in some sort of ‘readers articles’ feature. This never actually happened though unfortunately; they never did run any reader articles. I’d written one in about CPCEMU, whilst it never appeared I did get a mention in the magazine. After a little googling, I managed to find it:

Amstrad Action – #104 – May 1994 (click for larger image)

Brought a smile to my face seeing it after all these years!

Other emulators

There were a number of other emulators I ‘followed’ back in the day too. GenEm; the first SEGA Genesis / Megadrive emulator out there, was one in particular. Was really something to see it improve over time. From humble beginnings where only a handful of early-era games are only playable. Through to audio emulation working (the Genesis/MD has a second processor; a Z80 funnily enough, which is primarily used for audio in games). Around this time was an explosion in emulators in general, for all sorts of other videogame systems of similar eras. There was a bit of a race between coders to get their emulator to be the most fully featured, with the highest game-compatibility rate. Competition drives technology, I guess?

Some other ones I remember too were KGEN and DGEN. But the real leap at the time I recall was Genecyst. It was really leaps and bounds above the other ones out at the time. The same guy (or group) that coded it also wrote the impressive Callus, and NESticle. Both landmarks at the time, particularly Callus which I think was the first Capcom arcade emulator that ran at a playable speed.

The UI for Genecyst, all emulators for the era were in DOS. Unlike most, this one had a GUI too

I also remember Executor well too, an Apple Mac emulator. This one took an interesting approach of not making use of any System ROMs at all. They essentially reverse-engineered the Mac. The emulation effectively emulated the services/OS calls that the system ROM would have provided. This I think was more of a legal choice than a practical one, but it must have been an interesting technical challenge. They updated it pretty often, it seemed like every week there was a new one to try that had a new slate of improvements. Unfortunately it was a paid-for emulator. I think it had a time restriction on it, it worked for ten minutes and then quit out. That was a rarity back then in the emulator scene.

Screenshot of Executor in action

As I was looking for stuff for this article, I was surprised to see that it’s now open-source. I think now there’s probably several other Mac emulators which take the more traditional approach, and have a near 100% compatibility with a real 68k-era Mac. I wonder how well it sold throughout its lifetime?

An XNA CPC Emulator

Christ; I do go on like an old woman, don’t I?

The point of this article was meant to be about the Xbox 360 version of the emulator I’m working on. I did most of the work for it over a weekend, about a month ago. The missus was away for work, and I had a nice block of time to tackle it. I essentially just used my previous emulator I wrote a few years prior, in plain C. I rewrote it in C#, in a much more OO-way.

It was as a pretty straightforward process. As I’d done with my older emulator, I took the Z80 CPU emulation from an existing source. Someone has already coded a ZX Spectrum emulator in C#, so I took the CPU code from there. The Zx360 project. I had to make a few modifications though. One was based on how memory is accessed on the CPC, to handle the ROM and RAM banking. The other was for the way interrupts are handled. I know very little about the Spectrum, but it seems like they do behave pretty differently in that regard.

So, dusting off the cobwebby corners of my mind, I got to implementing all the various bits of hardware of the machine. Using both my old source, and the Unofficial Amstrad WWW Resource for reference. The code quality was like night and day compared to my old plain-C implementation. That’s I guess what thirteen years experience will help you out a bit with! It a joy to debug too; all the little components of the machine browsable in the Visual Studio debugger, in a nice OO-d tree!

I worked on the actual XNA-specific parts last. Getting the screen drawn, and getting input working that is. It’s just as cool as I remember when you get that startup screen rendering the very first time. This old thing:

XNACPC bootup, the Amstrad CPC 464 startup screen

I then went on to get snapshot (.SNA) support working so I could load up memory snapshots of games. That was awesome to see as well. It had the exact same level of compatibility as my older emulator. I was a little worried the new Z80 core code could have some bugs or issues, but it seems solid now. So anyway, the same games that ran fine worked fine on this too. But of course the same ones with issues, also had issues on my new emulator too. Once I’d played a few games on the Xbox itself, I took a break from the project for a while.

The classic ‘Roland in Time’ running on XNACPC, on an Xbox 360

A bit later on

What I really wanted to add was proper audio support. I dabbled for a while using XACT; playing a sound and messing with the pitch and volume of it. But it had pretty hideous results. It was encouraging to hear the tunes in there somewhere, but it really didn’t work well at all. What led me to stop bothering with this method was news that XNA 4.0 has nicer audio support. Specifically the class DynamicSoundEffectInstance. This class allows playback of raw audio data, not just samples. Exactly what an emulator needs.

The other avenue I wanted to make improvements on was to how I emulate the video hardware. My older emulator took a very naïve approach. It didn’t make any effort to emulate vsync, hsync or tie in the CPU interrupts with any of it. Over the past few weeks I’ve had some time here and there to mess with this stuff, and attempt to get something better working. I’m pretty pleased with the results. I managed to get split-screen working. Which means ‘Sorcery’, one of the classic CPC titles is now fully playable and looks just like the original.

Sorcery on XNACPC – A CRTC-splitscreen game

I’ve still a way to go though. My CRTC and video emulation isn’t quite up to par with some of the more accomplished emulators already out on PC. Well, that’s an understatement; it’s truly awful compared to most of those emulators! But it’s something I can improve at my leisure.

I plan to release the source code for the emulator, specifically once I’ve got my video code a little more stable. Whether that’s a matter of weeks or months, I don’t know. I’m pretty busy at the moment with work, so it may take a fair while. I’d probably expect it to be after XNA 4.0 is released too, since I’d probably get some crude level of audio support in once it’s out. I’d dabble with the CTP version that’s out now, but I’m really targeting Xbox which is not supported just yet. Yes, I could write the code on PC. But I really like firing up the emulator on the Xbox, and seeing the cool stuff running on there first. I can be patient…

That said, I’ve started to code a little in my free time. I got a block of time over the Christmas break and I decided to have a good go at doing some stuff with XNA and C#. Was a good experience, I feel a lot more comfortable with C# now. I’ve learnt to live with some of the annoying differences between it and C++. I code in the latter every day for my day job; for another language that’s so close to it, it takes a bit of a leap to leave the old ways behind.

So, hopefully I’ll give this blog a bit of a new lease of life soon with some tidbits from my XNA adventures. I’ve got a couple of ‘in-progress’ articles going already.

Anyway, Metallica…

The last time there was rumblings of a Metallica game was back in 2003:
http://cube.ign.com/articles/422/422960p1.html

… and I would know nothing about such a game at all of course… *whistles*

Damage Inc. [Metallica car combat title] (PC/PS2/GC/XBOX, Climax/VU Games)*

http://www.destructoid.com/surfer-girl-is-back-with-a-cancelled-game-list-50625.phtml
Seems like a very long time ago now… I’d like to say more about it, but it’s probably not a good idea.

Like Aerosmith last year, my involvement is pretty minimal; I’m working on something else right now. The Metallica game is based on the World Tour engine, so all four instruments are playable. Unlike with the Aerosmith game, where you were limited to just guitar and bass.

As per usual, with the press-situation for these sorts of things I really can’t say anything in more detail. It looks fantastic and I think the fans are going to be dead impressed with it.

I learned how to code on the Amstrad CPC 464. Used to be mad for the system when growing up, read and re-read magazines, and spent hours playing a lot of very bad games. Plus a few good ones, mind. I think I only stopped using it in 1994, when we got our first PC.

Fast forward fourteen years, and things are very different. Whilst I used the CPC well past it’s best (commercial software dried up in 1991), since then it’s only had a passing interest. Cool stuff going on with it on the internet like SymbOS, CPCZone and CPCWiki kind of passed me by.

It was a couple of months ago that my interest picked up again. I was showing a colleague the CPC3D emulator I wrote a few years ago, on one slow night whilst we were waiting for a build to be approved. I then spent a little while seeing what’s going on with the CPC. SymbOS I first read up about a couple of years ago, a very impressive coding feat. CPCZone is kind of interesting, mainly just nostalgic reminiscing about the old machine. What sucked me in though was EBay.

I remember in the early 90′s when the 8-bits were coming to the end of their life, you had labels like Codemasters releasing budget games. For usually two or three pounds each. A godsend when you’re on pocket money. Many of them were very good games too. By this stage of the machine’s life though older software from around launch time was hard to come by. The machine was initially released near the end of 1984, with a bunch of software from Amstrad’s own publishing label: Amsoft. The internet consensus is that some of the worst games were released on this label, but I beg to differ. Many of the ones I had were real enjoyable, fun games to play.

Having old magazines listing the Amsoft games, I’d always wanted to get a few more, ones I’d liked the sound of. “Oh Mummy” was one that I’d always wanted. I first got to play that game on an emulator, in the late 90′s. No store near me whilst growing up stocked the old Amsoft titles. Once I remember there was a place that sold the disc versions of them, but at a ridiculously high price. But that was it.

Disc version? Yes, the vast majority of stuff I had wasn’t on disc. It was on cassette tape. Games took ten to twenty minutes to load, and you had to endure the modem-like screeching noise of the data being read from tape. Yes, I’m that old. Retelling this to some of my younger colleagues here, I felt positively ancient. Reminded me of teachers at University letting us know about the early days of programming with punch-cards. Ghetto stuff.

So yeah, after seeing some cheap Amsoft games on ebay I thought I’d like to try buying a few. From the image in this post, you can see though that the high-end price is a little ridiculous. Remember, this is for a cassette tape! I bought a number over the past few weeks, ranging from a few pennies each up to I think maybe $20 (USD) for the most expensive one. They have pride of place in my little bookshelf at home now, quite unique items to have in the United States. The CPC was never released out here.

By the way, the $67 game is ‘Roland Goes Square Bashing’. It’s actually one I wanted to purchase, but I really couldn’t justify spending that on a cassette tape that would sit on a shelf.

So, updating this site hasn’t gone entirely to plan. Fortunately though my workload has eased up a little now, there’s a number of things I wanted to write about so hopefully I’ll get the chance now.

Speaking of workload, the last ten months or so I’ve spent working on the now announced: Guitar Hero World Tour. It’s the first Guitar Hero game I’ve been involved with properly, having previously worked on the ‘Tony Hawk’ series at the same studio. I’m really proud of what we’ve done with the new game, and I’m sure everyone’s going to enjoy it when it gets released. Really hoping we can get into that 90-100 range on Metacritic, it deserves to.

It’s a double-edged sword working on something so popular. On one hand it’s nice to read the buzz about your game on the internet, people looking forward to new tracks being announced, and seeing how much some people can’t wait for it’s release. On the other hand, there’s the ‘fanboys’. I probably shouldn’t go into it too much, but our game tends to get a bit of rough treatment by commenters on various game websites. Our competition, Harmonix makes great games and has a very loyal following.  Some people have invested heavily into their product, both finanically and emotionally. It’s a shame this clouds objectivity of what we’re offering at times.

It’s widely publicized that our guys at Neversoft used to play the first two Harmonix-developed Guitar Hero games at company parties. In fact I think one of the first times I had beers with the guys I work with now, was over a game of Guitar Hero in our warehouse. We have massive respect for what those guys did with those games, they’re a quality developer. The first game prompted me to get my first console since emigrating to the US (I left my old ones back in England). I remember lugging that PS2 and the guitar bundle a few blocks back to my apartment from the local Best Buy, in the days before I got a car.

Most of my game playing time in this country has been on Guitar Hero. I’d played a decent amount of Tony Hawk before working on those games, but only casually on a couple of games in that series. GH though is a totally different story, one of my favourite games of all time for sure. I remember excitedly bringing my PS2 and the game in my luggage to Simon’s place in Colorado, for his birthday weekend in 2006. Went down a storm. I’d never have thought in a million years that I’d end up working on it.

Dream come true.

I’ve never heard of Crave, nor that they ever published my game. A bit of googling later, and indeed it looks like they paid $120k for rights to the game. I’m not sure what to make of Crave, with such titles as The Bible Game under their belt, I’m dubious as to whether they can be considered a quality publisher.

It looks like they only ever re-released it on Gamecube, I can’t find any for the Xbox or PS2. The copy I ended up purchasing from eBay was the Crave one, for $10. I’ll be curious to see what the manual looks like. But I guess until I get a Wii (again), I won’t know what the actual game differences are, if any… There was a bunch of movies and legal screens which had Acclaim logos in. But I’d be really surprised though if they managed to get hold of the old code and data and replace that stuff.

One thing is for sure, I didn’t see a penny of royalties!