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General Category => Games => Topic started by: Joseman on 13:23, 27 October 16

Title: Hire Hare, new game from CNGSoft!
Post by: Joseman on 13:23, 27 October 16
Just look, no words...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=skP8apzCICU
Title: Re: Hire Hare, new game from CNGSoft!
Post by: Zoe Robinson on 13:33, 27 October 16
This looks lovely!
Title: Re: Hire Hare, new game from CNGSoft!
Post by: Ast on 13:35, 27 October 16
I posted the same thing yesterday on Amstrad plus Forum (http://amstradplus.forumforever.com/t244-The-World-Of-Hire-Hira-CngSoft.htm#p3056)
Title: Re: Hire Hare, new game from CNGSoft!
Post by: Gryzor on 13:49, 27 October 16
This looks quite polished and very well under development!!! Another one to add to the collection, I guess they'll do a physical release :)
Title: Re: Hire Hare, new game from CNGSoft!
Post by: seanb on 13:53, 27 October 16
It seems that every day now there's a new thread that has new game in its title.
I'm loving it.
Title: Re: Hire Hare, new game from CNGSoft!
Post by: Gryzor on 13:55, 27 October 16
Indeed. Crazy times!
Title: Re: Hire Hare, new game from CNGSoft!
Post by: villain on 14:52, 27 October 16
Quote from: seanb on 13:53, 27 October 16
It seems that every day now there's a new thread that has new game in its title.
I'm loving it.

Looks like producing games is something like the new way of democoding. :-) I will need a lot of spare them when my M4 is running one day!
Title: Re: Hire Hare, new game from CNGSoft!
Post by: ||C|-|E|| on 18:21, 27 October 16
It looks amazing! I am really happy that the Amstrad scene is in such a good health. I mean, all what I am seeing lately is something seriously cool, it seems that we are back to the golden age, but with even better games  :D
Title: Re: Hire Hare, new game from CNGSoft!
Post by: Rhino on 20:27, 27 October 16
Amazing!, wanting to try it!
Title: Re: Hire Hare, new game from CNGSoft!
Post by: dlfrsilver on 21:17, 27 October 16
i had the luck to play with it, and also translate the manual in french.


The game is very cute, and plays very nicely :)



Title: Re: Hire Hare, new game from CNGSoft!
Post by: Joseman on 22:41, 27 October 16
Quote from: dlfrsilver on 21:17, 27 October 16
i had the luck to play with it, and also translate the manual in french.


The game is very cute, and plays very nicely :)

How many rooms will it have?

can you explain a little the plot of the game?

Title: Re: Hire Hare, new game from CNGSoft!
Post by: khisanth on 23:52, 27 October 16
This looks AWESOME. Love the graphics and the music is plucked straight from the 80s, got it perfect.
Title: Re: Hire Hare, new game from CNGSoft!
Post by: dlfrsilver on 15:07, 28 October 16
Quote from: Joseman on 22:41, 27 October 16
How many rooms will it have?

can you explain a little the plot of the game?


Ok, you play as the sorceress Hecatia, and you must defeat the warlord Lycurgus.


I prefer to no say more, better let the Author do it himself :)
Title: Re: Hire Hare, new game from CNGSoft!
Post by: Kitty on 15:56, 28 October 16
Looks Fantastic!  ;)
Title: Re: Hire Hare, new game from CNGSoft!
Post by: Overflow on 16:32, 28 October 16
Quote from: villain on 14:52, 27 October 16
Looks like producing games is something like the new way of democoding. :-)
Exactly my thinking!
Also note that 30YMD's menu looks like a game.

Title: Re: Hire Hare, new game from CNGSoft!
Post by: Joseman on 21:28, 29 October 16
Quote from: dlfrsilver on 15:07, 28 October 16

Ok, you play as the sorceress Hecatia, and you must defeat the warlord Lycurgus.


I prefer to no say more, better let the Author do it himself :)

Maybe is a bunny? perhaps the girlfriend of Usagi Yojimbo?  :P
Title: Re: Hire Hare, new game from CNGSoft!
Post by: cngsoft on 12:10, 31 October 16
I'm glad to see that the preview of "Hire Hare" is well received here.

Dlfrsilver is right: the main character is sorceress Hecatia, hired to locate and banish the dreaded and mighty warlock Lycurgus, who lurks in the darkest corners of the dangerous dungeon where the game is set. Thus the main goal is to find nine magical lanterns that will reveal Lycurgus' hideout and let Hecatia fight him. The secondary goal is to find and unlock the treasure chests that will be her payment for her quest.

Unfortunately, the RetroDev 2016 contestants are fierce, and "Hire Hare" itself was delivered with a series of flaws and mistakes caused by the extremely tight deadline (I had to make everything in the limited timespan of five weeks) and only now I'm beginning to patch and amend them. For example, the in-game song is a horrible cover of Tim Follin's "Black Lamp" in-game theme, and it needs many tweaks to sound like its model:



The memory was also a big problem. Unlike "Knight Lore" and "Batman", and like "Crafton & Xunk" and "Inside Outing", this game remembers the state of every object in each room, and this requires memory to keep both their original locations and their current status. This problem was worsened because I was so short of time that I simply copied the whole map data! As a result I ran out of memory and I had to simplify the rooms, remove items and graphics, kill all the sound effects... I ended up with 16 free bytes and a severely simplified 64-room map. Here you have the most complex room and the simplest one:

(http://cngsoft.no-ip.org/HIREHARE-20161025-2311.PNG) (http://cngsoft.no-ip.org/HIREHARE-20161025-1920.PNG)

I tried writing a more clever data backup method yesterday: it only copied the items' locations, everything else (backgrounds, doors...) was skipped. The improvement was noteworthy: the backup ended at $AB00 rather than at $B3F0, thus extending the original 16 free bytes to ... 2304 bytes! Enough room for 288 more objects!

It's a pity that these improvements couldn't happen before the deadline, isn't it?
Title: Re: Hire Hare, new game from CNGSoft!
Post by: Arnaud on 12:15, 31 October 16
Quote from: cngsoft on 12:10, 31 October 16
It's a pity that these improvements couldn't happen before the deadline, isn't it?

Maybe for an enhanced 128k version ? I would be great, i always like games like "Crafton  & Xunk".
Title: Re: Hire Hare, new game from CNGSoft!
Post by: cngsoft on 14:15, 31 October 16
Right now it's in Spanish only, and I have yet to write the second half about the art and the gameplay, but you can read about the making of "Hire Hare" in http://cngsoft.no-ip.org/hirehare.htm (http://cngsoft.no-ip.org/hirehare.htm) ; internals such as the optimal dirty rectangle merger and the insertion Z-sort are explained there.

Quote from: Arnaud on 12:15, 31 October 16
Maybe for an enhanced 128k version ? I would be great, i always like games like "Crafton  & Xunk".
No need for THAT much memory, the aformentioned 2304 bytes would be already good enough to restore many of the lost items and graphics.
Title: Re: Hire Hare, new game from CNGSoft!
Post by: Puresox on 22:09, 31 October 16
Yeah love the graphics , some of the enemy sprites look so appealing . Truth be told ,I am not keen on protagonist . But that is personal preference . And not knocking a great looking production.
Title: Re: Hire Hare, new game from CNGSoft!
Post by: cngsoft on 16:05, 02 November 16
http://cngsoft.no-ip.org/hirehare.htm (http://cngsoft.no-ip.org/hirehare.htm) has been updated with a full English translation (albeit a rushed one - please point me at every mistake you find) but before I write the second part (the development of the game proper) I'd like to know if you have more technical questions than the current article already answers.
Title: Re: Hire Hare, new game from CNGSoft!
Post by: cngsoft on 13:36, 05 November 16
I finished writing the second part of http://cngsoft.no-ip.org/hirehare.htm (http://cngsoft.no-ip.org/hirehare.htm), more relevant because of the drawings and the screenshots of everything that was lost in the version delivered to the contest than because of the text itself, but I hope that it will be enough to at least cast some light on the development of "Hire Hare". Again, the text is open to answer any further questions you may have. (and again, the English translation may need some help and assistance)
Title: Re: Hire Hare, new game from CNGSoft!
Post by: ||C|-|E|| on 13:50, 05 November 16
Lovely article and game!!
Title: Re: Hire Hare, new game from CNGSoft!
Post by: Arnaud on 14:05, 05 November 16
It's really interesting, i don't know you have coded Inside / Outside it's a kind of return to root  :D

How did you create the map ? Did you use an external level editor or directly made in code ?
Title: Re: Hire Hare, new game from CNGSoft!
Post by: Ast on 14:34, 05 November 16
Great article, of course. I love this webpage...
Title: Re: Hire Hare, new game from CNGSoft!
Post by: cngsoft on 17:59, 05 November 16
Quote from: Arnaud on 14:05, 05 November 16
It's really interesting, i don't know you have coded Inside / Outside it's a kind of return to root  :D
Where did you get that I wrote "Inside Outing"?  :o
QuoteHow did you create the map ? Did you use an external level editor or directly made in code ?
The map was manually typed as custom data macros: I didn't have the time to write an editor, and besides, it didn't make much sense because this isn't a game based on hard grids and tilemaps. This is how the starting room looks like:

petiso_room 84,$10
petiso_edge -5
petiso_wall $13,$15,$11,$13,$15
petiso_wall $11,$13,$19,$11,$13
petiso_edge -0
petiso_wall $11,$11,$11,$11,$11
petiso_wall $10,$10,$18,$10,$10

petiso_tile $13,10,8
petiso_tile $13,13,11
petiso_tile $12,10,10
petiso_tile $12,13,13
petiso_tile -1

petiso_door 1,2,0,0,74,2
petiso_door 0,0,6,0,83,1
petiso_door 2,5,6,0,85,0
petiso_door -1

petiso_item $34,6,1,0
petiso_item $34,30,1,0
petiso_item $44,12,0,0
petiso_item $44,24,0,0
petiso_item $40,12,0,2
petiso_item $40,24,0,2
petiso_item $40,12,0,8
petiso_item $40,24,0,8
petiso_item $40,12,0,14
petiso_item $40,24,0,14
petiso_item $44,12,0,20
petiso_item $44,16,0,20
petiso_item $44,20,0,20
petiso_item $44,24,0,20
petiso_item -1

Where the first paragraph defines the room ID and the background tiles (floor and walls), the second paragraph ("petiso_tile ...") defines extra tiles (the little flowers on the grass), then comes the door information (location of doors and the locations they send you to) and finally the object data (in this case, a couple of bushes and two columns made of pieces).
Title: Re: Hire Hare, new game from CNGSoft!
Post by: Arnaud on 19:36, 05 November 16
Quote from: cngsoft on 17:59, 05 November 16
Where did you get that I wrote "Inside Outing"?  :o
Sorry i write "Inside Outside" and i think "Justin"  :D
They have some similar similarity neverless.
Title: Re: Hire Hare, new game from CNGSoft!
Post by: cngsoft on 11:56, 07 November 16
Quote from: Arnaud on 19:36, 05 November 16Sorry i write "Inside Outside" and i think "Justin"  :D
They have some similar similarity neverless.
All iso3D games look a bit the same after all... However, I couldn't actualy reuse anything from the old 3D engine from "Justin", I had to rewrite everything from scratch. The old engine was simply too bad, as I mentioned in the article about the making of "Hire Hare". It needed a scratch buffer as big as the active screen area (12k) and it was also prone to doing redundant, useless work (for example, redrawing a sprite whole despite the next frame only needing a small part of it). It was also less than good in the handling of motion and collisions: an item moving at a sufficiently fast speed could move through sufficiently small objects as if they didn't exist.
Title: Re: Hire Hare, new game from CNGSoft!
Post by: ldaneels on 13:25, 07 November 16
Thanks for the game, it is awesome. As with pretty much every 3D iso game, really - but I might be biased.
At any rate, cheers for the effort and the recognition by Ritman :) I couldn't think of a bigger reward for your work (well, I guess money would be nice, but you can't have it all).
Do you plan on continuing to work on it or are you pretty much done with it? It seems even a couple days already made it better (or more efficient if anything).
Also, do you plan to have a physical edition with Matranet ?
Cheers.
Title: Re: Hire Hare, new game from CNGSoft!
Post by: cngsoft on 18:10, 07 November 16
After retouching the text of http://cngsoft.no-ip.org/hirehare.htm (http://cngsoft.no-ip.org/hirehare.htm) a little further, I also made the game available for downloading.

Quote from: ldaneels on 13:25, 07 November 16Do you plan on continuing to work on it or are you pretty much done with it? It seems even a couple days already made it better (or more efficient if anything).
Also, do you plan to have a physical edition with Matranet ?
Good questions. I intend to amend the game and insert back the puzzles I had to cut from the contest version, now that I can use the memory more efficiently; I'd also like to further debug and improve the iso3D engine, because of a couple of bugs involving picking objects up and several slowdowns I'm not very sure where they're from; but it will take a while, and real life is very pressing at the moment. As for physical editions... I don't know, is "Hire Hare" notable enough as a standalone game? I sincerely have no idea.
Title: Re: Hire Hare, new game from CNGSoft!
Post by: ldaneels on 19:03, 07 November 16
Hey there,
Sounds good, it would be a waste to leave this game as it is. Not that it's bad, but if you can improve it in some ways, that's awesome.
Of course, I am in no rush to have a definitive version, just knowing you will get to it eventually is a nice enough prospect (heck, I've been waiting for a CPCe update for years, so I'm quite patient). No pressure, really.
As for the game being notable enough, I don't think it has to be. I know we have been spoilt these last few months, but anyone programming a game deserves respect and I think your game deserves as much as any other. Plus I'd say a game that got recognized by Ritman (no less !) is good enough :)
I was under the impression Matranet was taking care of all the production aspect of a physical release, so it shouldn't be a burden on you (I certainly wouldn't want it to be). Of course I imagine a release would only happen if you are fully satisfied with the end result, but I'm kind of curious if you would consider it.
At any rate, thank you for all your work, even if I rarely speak up (although I've been adventurous lately).
Cheers,

Loic
Title: Re: Hire Hare, new game from CNGSoft!
Post by: MacDeath on 19:07, 07 November 16
(http://cngsoft.no-ip.org/hirehare-boxart-web-8bit.png)

that's what I call a Bust Bunny...

or busty buns..
or... whatever...  :picard:

Very cute character and sprites, well done César.
Title: Re: Hire Hare, new game from CNGSoft!
Post by: Neil79 on 19:09, 07 November 16
Article is UP
http://www.indieretronews.com/2016/11/hire-hare-cpcretrodev-2016-second-place.html (http://www.indieretronews.com/2016/11/hire-hare-cpcretrodev-2016-second-place.html)
Title: Re: Hire Hare, new game from CNGSoft!
Post by: Rhino on 19:27, 07 November 16
Congrats on the great game and second place in the contest! (it should have been the winner IMHO).
Title: Re: Hire Hare, new game from CNGSoft!
Post by: ||C|-|E|| on 19:38, 07 November 16
Congrats! I think that this game is great as it is but if you decide to polish it further it will be even better. In my opinion it has lots of potential, and you could even think about a 128KB version with all the bells and whistles :)
Title: Re: Hire Hare, new game from CNGSoft!
Post by: cngsoft on 17:08, 12 November 16
One year too late, http://cngsoft.no-ip.org/frogalot.htm (http://cngsoft.no-ip.org/frogalot.htm) is online at last. I wanted to include an article about the development of the game but I seem to have lost it, I cannot find it anywhere...

Quote from: Rhino on 19:27, 07 November 16Congrats on the great game and second place in the contest! (it should have been the winner IMHO).
A la tercera irá la vencida, ¡espero!

Quote from: MacDeath on 19:07, 07 November 16that's what I call a Bust Bunny... or busty buns.. or... whatever... Very cute character and sprites, well done César.
Disclaimer: Disney's "Zootopia"/"Zootropolis"/"Zoomania" had nothing to do with the development of "Hire Hare". You can also forget videogames such as "Legend of Mana", "Starfox" or "Undertale". Like, totally.

Quote from: ldaneels on 19:03, 07 November 16Hey there,
Of course, I am in no rush to have a definitive version, just knowing you will get to it eventually is a nice enough prospect (heck, I've been waiting for a CPCe update for years, so I'm quite patient). No pressure, really.
[...] I was under the impression Matranet was taking care of all the production aspect of a physical release, so it shouldn't be a burden on you (I certainly wouldn't want it to be). Of course I imagine a release would only happen if you are fully satisfied with the end result, but I'm kind of curious if you would consider it. [...].
The poor CPCE is in dire need of a full overhaul, I've learned so much about the machine since I wrote the first version back in 1997. Perhaps after graduation (if nothing goes wrong, in December)
Matranet does commercial releases, and "Hire Hare" isn't exactly a commercial game, at least as it is; it's something I'll have to keep pondering. Speaking of which...

Quote from: ||C|-|E|| on 19:38, 07 November 16
Congrats! I think that this game is great as it is but if you decide to polish it further it will be even better. In my opinion it has lots of potential, and you could even think about a 128KB version with all the bells and whistles
128k are a bit too much, that would deserve a whole new game. "Super Hire Hare"? "Hire Hare 2: the crystal angel" maybe?
Title: Re: Hire Hare, new game from CNGSoft!
Post by: ldaneels on 09:20, 13 November 16
As always, great work & I'm curious to see what comes next from you, whatever it may be.
Title: Re: Hire Hare, new game from CNGSoft!
Post by: Singaja on 09:35, 13 November 16
That's another game from you that looks truly beautiful. You're showing the great potential of the Amstrad palette and some really clever coding. Good luck with your exams!
Title: Re: Hire Hare, new game from CNGSoft!
Post by: Kerrick Sword on 19:18, 14 November 16
This game looks good , but i liked very much the creation document.
So many games those days, and more important made with love.
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