Adventures in Game Development

[Diablo vt]

You should do a Halloween special of AIGD or something. I don't know..

[Falco Girgis]

Oh snap! I could of sworn that one of the videos said that she was going to do the filming/editing, I dunno, that was too far back and I'm too lazy to go through it all again.

She said that she would do a lot of stuff. She never really did anything and only wanted to be a part of it for the attention to fuel her narcissism.

[Trask]

Ah, then that's what I heard, ok. At least I know I'm not completely crazy. Hehe.

[Arce]

You should do a Halloween special of AIGD or something. I don't know..

Ohhh, trust me, we are.

[sparda]

So, so, so what is peter going to dress up as!?
By the way, while you're doing that Halloween special, you guys should do a counter vid for the fools over at Jforce games. I'll admit though, the most recent vid they have is kinda funny! hahahahahh

[Falco Girgis]

So, so, so what is peter going to dress up as!?
By the way, while you're doing that Halloween special, you guys should do a counter vid for the fools over at Jforce games. I'll admit though, the most recent vid they have is kinda funny! hahahahahh

Our "Halloween special" was our counter vid. It was filmed almost entirely (minus the in-game stuff) on Halloween. Enjoy.

[mllarson]

Question: since you guys are using that SDL book, could I get your opinion of it? There is absolutely no rating or reviews of it on Amazon, and I wanna go book shopping soon.

-Matt

[Falco Girgis]

Yeah. I learned SDL from it back in the day.

It is strongest as a reference. It teaches you how to use everything that you need to know for SDL quite well, and it is organized logically enough that you can get to it quickly whenever you need it.

If you don't know the game development theory behind it, it goes into extremely limited examples. The book is specifically targeted at teaching SDL, not game development theory or logic. BUT, it was extremely useful, because it came with a CD that was full of cool examples. You take the example of drawing a sprite. Then you take the example of input and sound, combine them with the sprite example, and you have yourself an extremely simple game that you can mess around with.

Hopefully it will come with the CD. Without the CD, it's a great book on SDL. WIth the CD, it's also useful for learning game development logic and being able to screw around with different things.

[mllarson]

Another question: Is the game engine gonna be released for others to use to make their own RPGs, like Senile Team did for their Beats of Rage engine, or no? I honestly wouldn't mind not having to write a game engine myself for my own game, especially one that runs on DC, but I prolly should attempt to learn something myself.... On a somewhat related note, is there somewhere I can find the absolute maximums a game could have on a DC (memory available, etc.), like perhaps your own set limits for things? It'd really help me decide whether or not to pursue DC development or just PC... Thanks.

-Matt

[Falco Girgis]

Hey, we don't know about how we are going to handle our engine/editor/development package when we are done. It has been decided that nothing, not even source code, is going to be released until we have created our own game using them. I feel that Elysian Shadows would be able to showcase what our engine and software is capable of.

As for "limits" of the Dreamcast, it all really depends on what you want to do. In my opinion, the largest limiting factor is video RAM if you aren't using texture compression. You get about 4.5MB of VRAM.

Then you get 16MB of RAM which might not sound like much at all, but it is quite a bit for most games. Elysian Shadows uses at least 25MB on a PC, and probably less than 8MB on Dreamcast.

Then you have the 200mhz SH4. I have never once found it too slow for anything that I was doing until I started Lua scripting. If you are writing something purely in C or C++, I'm pretty sure that you won't ever have to worry about it. That 200mhz RISC processor can outperform CISC CPUs of double to triple the clock speed. When you are polling things with Lua every frame, you just need to watch out. As long as you are smart about how you handle it, even that should never really be an issue.

[mllarson]

Cool, thanks for the info. Was just interested about the plans for the engine really out of curiosity. I think rolling my own is the best way to go anyway. Are you guys using palletized art work (like 4 or 8 bit) or high color? Once again, just curious, that's all...

-Matt

[Falco Girgis]

Nah, it's full color. We just rip 8 and 16-bit sprites for the tech demos in the vids, because they are easy to work with.

[Net-Ninjs]

How will you be proceding after you have finnished the game. Another game lined up or do you all walk you separate ways?

[Falco Girgis]

That's so far off that I don't think any of us have honestly even considered it.

[dandymcgee]

Yeah, those are some pretty limited options. I'm sure they can remain friends without immediately beginning such another huge project.