During the last coding competition a new member going by the nickname Red Metal joined planetvb. He planned to submit a VB port of Snatcher, a game that I had never heard of. After 7 post he stopped writing updates. Almost exactly one year ago someone else posted that Red Metal had passed away.
That post choked me up quite a bit. I had never talked to him but from his post I could tell that he was a very nice person. I felt like I missed my chance to get to know him. I tried to express that in a post but somehow my words felt meaningless to me.
It sparked an idea though… I could create a Snatcher port in his memory. So I started learning about the game and all the different versions. After playing it for a bit I came to the conclusion that it’s too complex. But somehow I couldn’t let the idea go.
One year and something like 200-300 hours of work later I have a first demo done. You can play up to the point where you leave for Alton Plaza. The Jordan Computer, inventory and shooting games are fully working. I had to skip the save feature and the video phone for now. To my knowledge it is furthers a homebrew Snatcher port has ever gotten.
Here are some features:
– Dynamic dialog system with alternating answers
– Dynamic inventory (Select button) that reacts to people in the room
– Every image has been converted to 3D
– PCM music and sound effects
– In game Jordan computer fully working
– Shooting games fully ported
Special Thanks go to:
– Bigmak and Minestorm for testing.
– Horvat for sharing his PCM code. In the end I wrote my own but it sure helped allot.
– Benjamin Stevens for testing and helping out with the transcripts.
I’m well aware that there are some imperfections in the game. I will continue polishing what is there and extending it until the game is fully completed. Even if it takes till the 25th vb anniversary.
I hope this is something Red Metal would have enjoyed playing.
Happy 20th anniversary everyone.
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Thanks allot for all the comments. I highly recommend everyone to play it on hardware. The music has less static on the emulator but the stero backgrounds look much better in 3D. The pixel distortion looks somehow wrong when you only see the left eye image.
KR155E wrote:
I was a bit surprised though that Jordan didn’t have anything on file when I entered “Thunderstruck”. 😉
There is actually one easteregg in the Jordan computer because I forgot to take it out.
KR155E wrote:
That’s some amazing sound quality! And some of the best stereo backgrounds since Virtual Bowling, did you 3D-fy them by hand?
Writing the sound engine was surprisingly easy. Looking at DogPs and Horvats code helped allot though. There is still some static sometimes which bothers me a bit.
The image conversion is a half automated process. The conversion to redscale vb images happens automatically, but I need to draw a depth map for the stereoscopic images. I got quite fast at drawing those with photoshop. My converter uses the depthmap to generate a stereo SBS image.
