http://youtu.be/ordTjzfduDk

Some of you might remember that I made this video month ago but I decided to combine the 2 parts and reupload it, so enjoy 🙂

PS. maybe one day I will make a better version where i record the emulators in full screen, add text to the gundam game…

sorry double post…

____________________

I’d be happy to help Chris with any art related tidbits, though I feel Morintari and Virtual Ben have this covered.

I didn’t necessarily want to mention before – but I work in the video game industry professionally and can help with a base project if we do it properly from the ground up with a full GDD made up and all sorts. It’ll take time but if you’re going to do a project properly it really needs a producer, artist, writer, coders and testers at the least.

I struggle to find the time to finish my own home projects so I will bear this in mind for a future project, but right now I’m not much use.

If you look at something like Fez, a good indie benchmark – it’s taken these three guys years on their own so far. It would be a year-long project at the least to get something worthwhile. Cave Story took Daisuke Amaya independently 5 years to develop and test so I would suggest picking a good demo up like VBRacing or TRON and going from there, but that’s just my two cents.

http://www.cavestory.org/

Before I get any questions asking – I don’t have a high-profile job or anything, but I am familiar with how some AAA projects are started and run and common factors of success and failure (or so I’d like to think)…

Ok so now we have L___E___T for graphics and I’m assuming story. It looks like the winds are changing and you guys probably won’t be doing Insecticide. But we have enough artist and programmers and story writers to get started. Id like to see more people on Music IMO. Who here thinks we should have our own post called The Unifed VB Game?

Programming
1.HorvatM
2.RunnerPack
3.
4.
5.

Music
1.VirtualChris
2.
3.
4.
5.

Graphics
1.Morintari but only if we go with Insecticide
2.RunnerPack (I’m no artist, but I can do stereo conversion and such like)
3.Virtual_Ben
4.L___E___T if were doing something other than Insecticide
5.

Story
1.Lester Knight
2.L___E___T
3.
4.
5.

Heh, I’m no writer – I wouldn’t want to even judge on story I’m afraid, sorry for the misunderstanding.

I can help out with graphics, but I’m not a professional artist or anything. I’ll post up some VB-related art when I can for people to see if they like.

Oh – the reason I didn’t want to assist with Insecticide is that right now I’m way, way too busy and this is VirtualChris’s pet project. I’d love to help if I could but I know I can’t do much this time around. If there’s a new project built from the ground up, I could definitely assist and pre-plan accordingly.

I would defiantly put this in it’s own post under the development board :).

Some people were trying something similar last year (?)..but they were waiting to have a standard library built. I think dogp (?) was working on that ? Can’t remember, but that sounds right. I can’t code, or draw…maybe I can test ? no idea. I might have a suggestion or two if that’s oki.

*update found the other thread about a community based game:
http://www.planetvb.com/modules/newbb/viewtopic.php?topic_id=4103&forum=2

I would start with a demo or an engine that is already built..and try to work it that way. There are several examples that might work out (with the authors permission). Actually, I would contact the author to see if he wanted to spearhead the project.

Some examples-

DanB’s Yeti3d engine – It does things I didn’t think the VB could do 🙂

Jorgeche’s VbJaEngine – he made a Mario entry in one of the coding competitions using it. I think this was built to help people code on the VB.

MK’s Virtual Racing – Amazing racing game.

Runnerpack’s Hover Demo – If this is the ‘bouncing’ demo..it could be made into a puzzler. I remember it looked great and compared it to bound high at the time. Maybe a top-down version of breakout (where you are the ball)…or a bound high type of game where you have to bounce between different levels of platforms.

Again, I wouldn’t want to pressure any of the coders for their code. But, this is some of the examples of some engines that people have made and could be worked on for a game.

As for music..I think we actually had a musician here at one time wanting to code music for vb games. Manicfoot ?

-Eric

L___E___T wrote:

Heh, I’m no writer – I wouldn’t want to even judge on story I’m afraid,

Ok sorry for the misunderstanding L___E___T. Thanks for DogP’s post bigmak. DogP if your listening now’s the time to sign up for this, we could really use your skills.:) No I wasn’t trying to copy anyones post I know that your not saying that I was. I just know that we have talent and akumis’s video proves just how much talent we can pool together to get things done.

Bigmak wrote:

I can’t code, or draw…maybe I can test ? no idea. I might have a suggestion or two if that’s oki.

Were glad to get as many willing people on this that want to contribute.

Bigmak wrote:

I would start with a demo or an engine that is already built..and try to work it that way. There are several examples that might work out (with the authors permission)

Your not the first that has brought that idea to my attention that may be the direction we’ll go with this but I have to ask the team you know it’s a democracy.

bigmak wrote:
I would defiantly [sic] put this in it’s [sic] own post under the development board :).

Some people were trying something similar last year (?)..but they were waiting to have a standard library built.

We already have a standardized library, libgccvb. It’s not perfect, but it’s been good enough so far.

I would start with a demo or an engine that is already built..and try to work it that way. There are several examples that might work out (with the authors permission). Actually, I would contact the author to see if he wanted to spearhead the project.

That’s easy to say if you’re not a programmer. Taking someone else’s code is very difficult if it’s not licensed appropriately, doesn’t have documentation, or is just a plain mess.

DanB’s Yeti3d engine – It does things I didn’t think the VB could do 🙂

Has this actually been released so that others can use it?

Jorgeche’s VbJaEngine – he made a Mario entry in one of the coding competitions using it. I think this was built to help people code on the VB.

It’s poorly documented. The programmer’s guide doesn’t explain much. And it’s much harder for beginners to use. In my opinion, basing a game on a giant engine isn’t such a great idea. Writing your own code gives you much less restrictions on the design of the game.

MK’s Virtual Racing – Amazing racing game.

The source code was never released, was it?

As for music..I think we actually had a musician here at one time wanting to code music for vb games. Manicfoot ?

Yes, I think it was him.
As for sound code, DanB made a MIDI player but I don’t think it has been released for use in projects. VirtualChris uses his own code, based on simple sound code DanB released. For Soviet Union 2011, I wrote my own simple sound engine also based on DanB’s code, capable of playing four sounds at once, intended for music and simple sound effects, and in my opinion the easiest to use, but according to dasi it unfortunately doesn’t work on hardware, which I can’t fix, because I don’t have a FlashBoy.

I’ve just thought what my contribution can be. I will donate a FlashBoy to HorvatM so he can fix the sound engine.

it’s me again i don’t know if you think so but i have an idea for a virtual boy version of tempest 2000 just a little bit different. i guess for a full game its not that exciting so mabey for a minni game in insecticide ?
Wride back

Attachments:

1. 

   project_tempest.png
   

short picture for morintari

Attachments:

1. 

   s_m.png
   

Hi, long time since I’ve came to this site and post in the forums.

Jorgeche’s VbJaEngine – he made a Mario entry in one of the coding competitions using it. I think this was built to help people code on the VB.

It’s poorly documented. The programmer’s guide doesn’t explain much. And it’s much harder for beginners to use. In my opinion, basing a game on a giant engine isn’t such a great idea. Writing your own code gives you much less restrictions on the design of the game.

Just found you’re reference to my engine, indeed it’s not that well documented and is not beginner friendly at all, it implements some high programming concepts (OOP, variadic functions, memory management, etc.) which are not really for the hobbyist but for real programmers and to do so I had to came up with some custom idioms for it, and even more, it requires that you are already familiar with game programming and it’s core concepts (time based update, frame based update, state machines, sprite animation techniques, etc). It’s nothing revolutionary either, most of it’s architecture is based on my experience with successful engines like Playground, Unity 3D, Cocos 2D, and the custom game engine that I contributed to develop while I was working at Blue Lizard Games but shrunk down to fit in the VB. But even then I can be proud of a few sparks of good design in it, like the animation system (that I wrote before doing any gaming at all), which’s concept is something you will find in the official docs of one of the best seller video consoles of all time.

Now, I will try not to sound too harsh but your recommendation
of “just do it yourself” is not a very good one, having by now a few years of professional experience in the game industry (and even more in programming in general) you don’t just reinvent the wheel to be proud of yourself, it has to be meaningful ie: you want to learn the device’s architecture to the bones. But if you intend to really produce something that you want to release even as a free demo or whatever, you better start off with what already has been done, I myself (and no one who does programming) don’t go out to make a iOS game and rewrite all from scratch, I use some of the already available tools: Cocos 2D, Box2D, Corona, etc, usually written by someone who knows a little more than oneself. And my engine just tries to provide similar features to those of the mentioned engines, and by the time of it’s development there were none which did that on the VB.

It’s correct that an engine imposes you some restrictions to the way you design your games, but it’s a trade off, you will come with a very mediocre simulation racing game if you want to get that from the UDK for example but you may get it ready a lot faster than you will if you write from shaders to physics to ai to rendering to…. But if you what to do a FPS or a TPS you have a very good start with it, and even then it will impose you restrictions on what you can and cannot do.

That’s really the problem with the whole VB scene, and I’m not trying to make a promotional campaign for my engine now, there is already a lot of source code around here to begin with, the problem is that all video gamers believe that they are able to create their own game and believe that they are multifacetic enough to design it, program it, produce the assets for it, do the sound, do testing and at the end will come with the best and more content loaded game of the VB’s catalog, instead of trying to achieve something as a team or be more real and use this device as a medium to learn game programming. If you have the time for doing it all by yourself I say go for it, that would be a great achievement, but if you have to work or study like most of the people, you will have to get a little more real. Proof of this is that there is not a single homebrew game to this day which is content complete and is as complex as the officially published games. If you check my Mario demo it’s just a very short level, which took a long time to produce even with Krisse’s aid in the assets department. Or other project while more polished that mines, are not new ideas so no design effort there.

To resume, if you want to learn a little, do it yourself; if you really want to learn or achieve something to share, grab the tools that are already available, learn them even if they are hard and get enough people to make it happen, no way around it no matter what you’re opinion on the subject might be. Oh, and documentation will get you only so far, go check Playground’s documentation, Cocos2d’s, even Unity 3d’s which is really good by the way and it won’t allow you to build anything by just reading it, you will have sooner or later to go deep into the code, and if it’s written clearly enough with good coding standards and meaningful comments, that will teach you more than any documentation about how to use a library of any kind, and as a matter of fact I think that my engines is written that way.

jorgeche

In the end, it’s apparently a matter of choice. The VB has the potential to run games requiring complex engines (DanB’s Hunter proves that), but at the same time the hardware is simple enough to program that you can accomplish a lot without even giving much thought to the design of the code (VirtualChris’ code proves that).

Ok Now as we speak three of us are united by dropbox. A few of you have told me that you would rather not use dropbox and that’s ok. But for the remainder I have sent PM’s and gotten no response. I feel with 2 artists 2 really good programmers and possibly 2 music guys and even a story guy we can get started. We even have a person that signed up for testing. It’s a small team but it’s enough for now. And as always anyone can join in that hasn’t already. Just post or send me a PM with your email so I can add you to the dropbox. OK thanks for your support but were really not getting anywhere until we can communicate.