The joy of side-scrollers

[Griggs]

or, where have all the platform jumpers gone?

I am really quite disappointed by the fact that there have been very few Mac side-scrolling "Sonic the Hedgehog" type games, sure we had Ferazels Wand, but even that didn't hit the full potential.

In the heyday of scrollers there were some quite amazing games, despite the fact that I have never owned a console I have played Donkey Kong, Mario, Sonic the Hedgehog. Some at friends houses, some on emulators (don't tell Nintendo!) and the genre, when done right, really offers some great gameplay.

Donkey Kong especially impressed me with the new things they though up (or, new to me anyway) such as riding in ore carts, ice slopes, etc. It proved that side-scrollers can move beyond the tired cliches of blocky terrain and pixelated badguys.

Unfortunately now that we have the computing power to do some really fantastic things with such a game there doesn't seem to be anyone exploiting it.

Imagine a fully modern side-scroller; you hop on top of a bus motoring down the road, avoiding bad-guys flying past. At the end the bus blows up in a shower of sparks, you leap onto a pair of skis and cruise down a slope, jumping over obstacles and ducking under others. You find yourself on a path with a giant monster behind you, thinking fast and knowing this world obeys the laws of physics you run across a rickety bridge, when the badguy steps on it creaks and breaks, plummeting him into the chasm below. Or there's a dam above a badguy encampment, using the C4 explosive you found earlier you blow the dam, the water cascades down, drowning the encampment below.

Everything above is possible today, but it needs to be tried. I'm working on an OpenGL side-scroller, when it's presentable enough I will make builds and complete source available on a regular basis, in the hope that someone will find it useful or even want to work with me on the next great scroller.

But until then, what ideas do you have for revitalizing this genre?

[ededed]

Freazels wand was fantastic is was an arcade platformer RPG (a bit). Is it out for Mac OS X?
Ambrosia software I think.
Jazz jackrabbit was a good one.

[Griggs]

Yes, Jazz Jackrabbit was impressive. It really had a lot of special effects and just overall slickness. And it still ran quite smoothly.

[ERaZer]

I dont know why, but I've never liked Jazz Jackrabbit that much... The first one was OK, the second one was just... rubbish(this is just my opinion, and I dont really know why).
But yes, a modern side scroller would be great... I just fear it might be made to complex(from what I read from Griggs), and scrollers should(IMO) be kept pretty simple.

[DaFalcon]

I agree, Griggs. We have all this technology and we're using it mostly to create Doom III. Doom III is great and wonderful and all, but there should also be more people who are taking advantage of all the possibilities brought about by this technology for "old style" games like sidescrollers. Think about what would have been a great idea back then (and it would STILL be a great idea!) and then actually be able to create it without the limitations that would have existed back then.

[phydeaux]

Macs (and PC's to some extent) aside, side-scrollers are still alive and well on console platforms. Modern side-scrolling games are typically "2.5 d," typically meaning the character control is on a 2d plane, while the world itself is 3d. Some of my favorites using this formula are the old Nights game for the Sega Saturn, and the somewhat more recent Mischief Makers game for the n64. (There are some even newer ones, but I haven't played too many of them.)

I'm curious to hear if you're taking this route (if you're trying to utilize the newest technology we have, this is definitely the way) or going with old skool 2d sprites (or, of course, you could do a combination, having billboarded characters or something.)

I think the reason there aren't a lot of new platformer games on the PC/Mac is that the idea was cloned to death at some point or other, which gives the genre a bad name. (remember when Warcraft got popular and a crapload of garbage RTS games came out? The exact same thing happened with platform games some years before.)

[Chris Burkhardt]

Anybody ever play the Commander Keen (I think that's what its called) games? From ID Software, I believe.... originally a DOS game.... I remember having lots of fun playing it at my friends house a long time ago.

I still have fun playing Prince of Persia.

What about that one with the little green iguana? ;)

Yes, its time for a modern side-scroller/platform game for the Mac.

[Griggs]

Originally posted by phydeaux
Macs (and PC's to some extent) aside, side-scrollers are still alive and well on console platforms. Modern side-scrolling games are typically "2.5 d," typically meaning the character control is on a 2d plane, while the world itself is 3d. Some of my favorites using this formula are the old Nights game for the Sega Saturn, and the somewhat more recent Mischief Makers game for the n64. (There are some even newer ones, but I haven't played too many of them.)

I don't have much exposure to consoles, but even when I went looking for newer PC side-scrollers (just to see what's new in the genre) I couldn't find many at all. I think that the time is right for a new one. (and using OpenGL the cross-platform possibilities are increased too)


I'm curious to hear if you're taking this route (if you're trying to utilize the newest technology we have, this is definitely the way) or going with old skool 2d sprites (or, of course, you could do a combination, having billboarded characters or something.)I'm using good old fashioned 2D sprites. Though with OpenGL I can do rotations, scaling, and more with nice filtering. In terms of graphics it seems kind of a waste to develop a 3D world and then only use two axis movement. A lot of my plans involve new gameplay elements, not necessarily super-flashy graphics.

I think the reason there aren't a lot of new platformer games on the PC/Mac is that the idea was cloned to death at some point or other, which gives the genre a bad name. (remember when Warcraft got popular and a crapload of garbage RTS games came out? The exact same thing happened with platform games some years before.) Yes, you're quite right, for a while every Mario, Hedgehog, Kong and Kazooie were getting into the act. But it's certainly cooled off since then, especially on the Mac (which was never anywhere near as hard hit as the consoles)

Anybody ever play the Commander Keen (I think that's what its called) games? From ID Software, I believe.... originally a DOS game.... I remember having lots of fun playing it at my friends house a long time ago.

I still have fun playing Prince of Persia.

What about that one with the little green iguana?

Yes, its time for a modern side-scroller/platform game for the Mac.Quite so. BTW, I still think the Iguana was a unique character (even if the game itself was pretty pathetic :) )

[hyperzoanoid]

i guess thats more motivation for me :)
im working on a very haloish sidescroller, hopefully due in January latest. believe it or not, it has a form of bump mapping.

[w_reade]

heh, the next thing I'm planning to do is an Abuse-style game with 3d graphicsÖ when I've done everything I'm doing now, that is. So expect it sometime in 2006 :D.

Looks like the side-scroller renaissance is gathering momentum, though. A Very Good Thing.

[furballphat]

The platformers I always loved were the Mario and Donkey Kong ones. Super Marion World was incredible. I spent hours searching but I've still only found about half the secret things. Donkey Kong was good in the way that every level had some sort of twist, wether it was oil drums that spontaneously burst into flames or gusts to push you over that big jump. The snes days were definitely the best for platformers.

[Carlos Camacho]

Good point Griggs. I recall after Sonic was shown at the Expo, Genesis just blasted forward. Going back, remember the BEAST series on the Amiga. There were 100s of platform games on the Amiga, but Beast had super nice scrolling. Sonic was also one of the first scrollers that went at break neck speed. Somewhat in this character was Golden Axe. I really really moved that game. It was one of the few games me and my wife played together.

I have some side-scroller tiles here, but no one has really used them. I am in the middle of moving them all to PNG format. It would be good to see someone write a tutorial for this genre. Like controlling the character and scrolling. Physics, etc...

Cheers

[w_reade]

Super Marion World - best typo ever?

[Griggs]

i guess thats more motivation for me
im working on a very haloish sidescroller, hopefully due in January latest. believe it or not, it has a form of bump mapping. Cool, how far along are you?

[Chrome]

I'm also a pretty big fan of 2d games, and lately, I've been thinking of what kind of game I should get started on once I decide on the computer I'm getting.

(Speaking of which, anyone here use an iBook often? I'm thinking of getting the 12" 700Mhz model...wondering how it performs with OSX...not sure if the rumored new PowerBooks will be in my price range or not)

Anyways, back on topic :)

I've been trying to come up with ideas on how to implement an overhead 2d vertical scrolling shooter, something along the lines of great games such as Radiant Silvergun and Ikaruga (minus of course all the eye candy ^^)

Anyone here worked on such a project, or know where I could get some direction? I've heard people talk about using tiles, which makes sense, but I've got lots of other questions about stuff after that :)

I think some of the principles must be similar to a side scrolling game, or at least a horizontal scrolling shooter.

Any guidance (books/tutorials/articles/sites) would be much appreciated :)

Thanks!
Mike

[OneSadCookie]

[OT Reply]

I have a friend who has a 700MHz iBook, it performs very well in OS X. It outperforms many of the university's servers for Java, and the Radeon 7500 is a pretty fast graphics card.

[GoodDoug]

I love side scrolling platformers. I played hours of Donkey knog on my grandparent's Nintendo system. I remember the first time we made it through the ore cart level, the whole family was cheering.

I'd love to do a good side scroller, gotta file that away somewhere for when I finish with all of my other projects.

[Taxxodium]

I think the 3D game market is now exploited (spelling?). There are way too many 3D games out there. However, while 2D games seem outdated and an endangered species, I do believe we (the programmers) can make fantastic, very high tech 2D games. Sure it may look old school but add some very nice graphics and some smooth animations and you might have a great game.

Don't forget that telling a story is also very important when developing a game. I have come few games that didn't have a story and were good at the same time.

Speaking of Donkey Kong, I played Donkey Kong Country 3 on a SNES emulator. that game just rocks from beginning to end. Yet, there's no 3D engine written for it.

[Griggs]

Hmm, we have quite a few Donkey Kong fans here! GoodDoug, I too celebrated on passing the Ore Cart levels. Those were truly difficult, but entertaining enough to prevent me from giving up.

As for story, we now have all kinds of technological improvements to help with story-telling. A modern side-scroller could fairly easily have a nice scripting system that would make plot advancement quite manageable. Simple in-engine cutscenes could introduce characters, items, and story elements in a non-intrusive way.

[ededed]

I am working on an isometric RPG Just now and it is coming along well. Any ideas would be greatly appreciated by the way.
A good thing about 2D games is that the programmers feel bad about not using a possible 3rd dimension and put loads of particl effects in whic is nice. I dont like half the 3D games out just now too as they all run too slow on my computer. Jedi Knight 2 is good because it is based on Quake3 and it lets you use a console.

if you have quake 3 try:
/g_knockback -200000
that is quite funny.

But who is making 2D games nowadays? Me for one...

[aarku]

Originally posted by Chrome
Any guidance (books/tutorials/articles/sites) would be much appreciated :)

Unless you want to reinvent the wheel, SpriteWorld (http://www.spriteworld.org) is your ticket for all that you're talking about.

-Jon

[Carlos Camacho]

Chrome - I suggest you look at SpriteWorld. It handles tiles and would be good for side-scrollers.

Here's an idea. Why not a ColdStone Engine for side-scrollers. User can select various tiles and build levels. Each tile can have attributes or some AI. For example if character is standing on TILE 001 then he jumps 200 pixels, etc... The user then pops in sprites. They can use some pre-made sprites or import thei own (with frames, etc..) They can set the "goal" of the game, for example most collect 20 of ITEM 023 or REACH position XY.

Such an engine could probably handle Golden Axe, Sonic, Mario, Donkey Kong, Pitfall, Jungle Hunt, Double Dragon, Vampire Hunter, Gods (Great Amiga graphics), Zool and so on...

Who is going to make this product?

Speaking of this game tool. I have long wanted a Shoot'em Up Construction Kit for the Mac. For those that don't know. It was made for the Amiga (and??) and cost about $19!!!! I demoed it at an Amiga users meeting and the store (we held the meetings at an Amiga dealer) sold all 12 copies that night. In a nutshell, it is like the above but made for shoot'em ups. It was limited but had enough of the right ideas that you could make a fun game. And it was SUPER easy to use. For example, to make the enemy move, you simply moved your mouse and clicked to set a path. People made good games and also many bad games with it. It wouldn't compile the game but the runtime was pretty small. When I think of the marketplace, I feel that there is a great number of people who want to make games but will never get into programming. ColdStone Engine is good for its genre, but that genre -- RPGs, requires good story telling. Not to say side-scrollers or shoot'em ups don't too but you get my point?

The Scroller and Shooter Constuction Kits could be distributed as shareware. You can make a game but it requires the run-time to play. Register and you can compile the game into stand alone. (No splash screen by IDE and no royalties.) You also get some extra bonuses like bigger games (ie more levels, more tiles to use, etc..)

I could go on and on about how I envision these products to work.

Cheers,

[Taxxodium]

Carlos,

That project could be made my he inkubator group. I'd happily join. In fact, I'm a bout to start writing a side scroller :)

[jamie]

This may apply to what you are looking for in a side scroller construction kit, it is billed as just such a thing.

http://www.sawbladesoftware.com/

Check it out....

[Chris Burkhardt]

Originally posted by jamie
This may apply to what you are looking for in a side scroller construction kit, it is billed as just such a thing.

http://www.sawbladesoftware.com/

Check it out....

Wow, that's pretty cool, it looks to have many of the features that Carlos described. And only $15 :cool:

It isn't really a game creation tool... it is game with a very open architecture (all graphics, sound, levels, character data, etc are located in a well organized bundle) which can easily be copied and modified to create a new game. (read this (http://www.sawbladesoftware.com/more/closer-look/index.html)). It would be much closer to the tool Carlos described if he wrote some sort of interface for manipulating the bundle... instead of using the Finder.

The system requirements seem a bit steep (compared to the Super Nintendo): 800MHz G4 with loads of RAM... it was made with REALbasic, which might not be the most effecient tool for high-speed games. The author says he gets just under 30 FPS while playing the example game on his G4 867Mhz... which is good enough if computers keep going the way they have.

The author, Jesse Simko, has a post-mortem like article about about the game/engine here (http://www.sawbladesoftware.com/portfolio/writing/division-3-retrospective.html) An interesting read, especially the last paragraph:A secret code hidden in the game copies all of the engineís source code onto the userís desktop. Players lucky enough to discover this Easter egg will be instructed to adhere to the LGPL software license, which allows for the selling of products made with the source code, as long as the base code remains free and open to the public. :)

I'll try to find his e-mail address or something and see if he wants to join the discussion here.

[jamie]

I had download and played his 'demo', its very remenicent (spelling?) of 1980's side scrollers. It did seem to run a little slow at times, but it seems to have alot of potential for someone interested enough to jump in and customize the reasources. And it's hard to beat $15 for anything!

It would be great to see some kind of front end on it though, I'm sure that would make it even more appealing.

[Carlos Camacho]

Yes, this is something like I had in mind. This product is made with REALbasic, and seems to be hindered in the speed department, and other baggage that RB brings to the table. Still it is impressive. What they should do is make the editor in RB, and the actual portions that control movement, logic, etc with CW, much like ColdStone.

Seeing the little movies made me think it was very very good. But then I read the thread that said those were output to 30fps, so I think it is hard to reach our hope of a fast Sonic-like game. Might be super for old style Donkey Kong game where the screen doesn't scroll.

AmbroSW should look into this and bring it up a notch like CSE.

Cheers,

[Griggs]

Hi.

I have decided to release a pre-alpha demonstration of my side-scroller (working title "Xenophon"). Right now it's VERY VERY primitive, but there are still some cool things.

I have also decided to release my source in the public domain, for anyone to do anything with. At it's base the code is fairly fast, running about 120FPS with brakes off on my older iBook, roughly 300FPS on my G4/400. I have tried a number of optimizations, but since I'm pretty much fill-rate limited there isn't a whole bunch I can do. It should run insanely fast on any more modern computer (press Shift to remove FPS governing) and I would be interested in knowing what speeds people get.

Also, read the read me for how to try different resolutions.

Xenophon Pre-Alpha App (http://griggs.idevgames.com/xenophon/xenophon_pre_alpha.sit) - 170K

Xenophon Pre-Alpha Complete Source (http://griggs.idevgames.com/xenophon/xenophon_source.sit) - 280K (no binary)

I would also hope that the code is useful to someone, or if you want to just fix some bugs or add features. You're free to do whatever you want, though if you add or fix something I would appreciate it if you send me the changes so maybe I can benefit too. :)

[Chris Burkhardt]

That is one scary looking girl... I think she should consider investing in an alpha-channel :-)

On a G3 500Mhz iBook (128MB RAM):
* default zoom, 1 sprite: a steady 114.8 FPS
* zoomed all the way out, 35 sprites: about 104 FPS
* zoomed all the way in, 0 sprites: over 160 FPS

It looks pretty good, Griggs, I just downloaded the source and I'll mess with it as soon as I get the courage to go back into X.

[Griggs]

Oh yeah, I should apologize for the sprite. That's from Carlos' Kupie Jump sprites, but I scaled it up and hacked in an alpha channel using the eraser tool. This was before Carlos released the newer versions of the sprites with the alpha channel pre-set.

I just haven't bothered to put in the newer better version of that sprite, since it's purely a test.

[geezusfreeek]

On iMac G4 700MHz with other user processes taking 10% of the CPU (namely OmniWeb), 320 to 360 fps, wavering a lot and depending on amount of activity on screen. Still averaged about 330 with 30 sprites on screen zoomed completely out.

Back to the original topic, I love chaotic particle effects in 2D games! More! More! More!

[Chris Burkhardt]

aww, your computer is twice as fast as mine. that's not fair :-)

Is that a new sig, geezusfreeek? I've never seen Christian salvation explained in Objective-C code before. what a crazy world.

> Back to the original topic, I love chaotic particle effects in 2D games! More! More! More!

ha ha, yes I agree. makes my eyes happy.

Griggs, I had trouble compiling the code... but I always have trouble compiling code so I'll give it another shot. I've yet to update to PB2. Have you made any progress lately?

[Josh]

Good to see you around again, geezusfreeek. I also had trouble compiling the code.

[Griggs]

Well I can't say why you might have troubles. I tried to include all dependent files, and it compiles fine for me.

At any rate, I would really like to hear more about fullscreen OpenGL scrollers that you all might be working on. I haven't seen very many games that do this in OpenGL. I know Wingnuts does, and quite well too, but it's not a side-scroller.

I realize my talents are not very well developed in this area of programming, but I am still continuing development. I really want to see a nice modern side-scroller for Mac, even if I don't make it :)

[Feanor]

Originally posted by ededed
I am working on an isometric RPG Just now and it is coming along well. Any ideas would be greatly appreciated by the way.
Start a new thread! Is it going to be another D&D thing? If you want it to be cool, have lots of dungeons. Running around big flat maps makes me stop playing the game very fast. Ideally it won't be same-old armour/swords/spells, but what else is there? I would love a horror RPG influenced by H.P. Lovecraft. There's a gold mine that nobody has ever successfully transmuted into a movie or computer game yet.

Oh, I remember Donkey Kong on the Colecovision. Too bad I could only play it at the local Towers dept. store. That chain is dead, now, btw. How I wished for a Colecovision. That shurely would have ruined me!

2D scrollers are fun if they have a fun concept. Just like anything, creativity is the ticket. While there are many too many 3D games, there used to be many too many 2D games. The majority is always mediocre.

I still love 3D, and have since the eaaarly days. But I've already talked about my Amiga elsewhere on this forum.

--FÎanor

[Feanor]

Originally posted by jamie
remenicent (spelling?)
close! "reminiscent".