34 new games presented to #CPCRetroDev 2016

[Axelay]

Entries now available for download!


http://cpcretrodev.byterealms.com/2016/11/cpcretrodev-2016-results-and-games/

[ervin]

Dragon Attack ... wow ... just wow.
How is that possible?

The number of bullets on-screen (and at a very good frame-rate) is just amazing.
And it plays really well too!

[Targhan]

I don't know on which of the three threads to put my reviews of all these games, so let's start here.

My Top is:
- Dragon attack: really cool. Simple yet addictive concept. The music is great too.
- Outlaws: nice gfxs, the gameplay is fine despite of the relatively slow animation.
- Maze adventure: I love it! Very slow but quite a bold game!
- Hire hare: I love isometric game. Too bad it's quite hard to know if a monster is going to touch you or not. It's also quite hard to aim and actually shoot at something.
- Hair Boy: our own "super meat boy"!
- Ice slider: nice concept. Especially like the intro graphics.
- Virus attack: nice concept too. Good music again from T&J .


The rest of the games is... Interesting .

[EgoTrip]

Virus Dog was my favourite. Hire Hare is good.

Outlaws looks impressive but it's all show with little else to it.

Dragon Attack is impressive with the amount of bullets on the screen but its really not my cup of tea.

I haven't been through most of the rest yet.

[MacDeath]

Ok so there was already a topic, sorry if I started another one, I couldn't find this one.


Links to the other topics :
http://www.cpcwiki.eu/forum/games/(-cpcretrodev-2016-)-results-and-videos/
http://www.cpcwiki.eu/forum/general-discussion/results-games-from-cpcretrodev-2016/

Also huge congratulation to all the "not so great" other games because we have to remember there are young students trying their hands on those machines oldert han them.
Some quite nice details here and there actually.





>> Oliver Twins actually started with such sort of contest if i remember well (theirs was on TV ) so this is quite touchuing to have them as special guest and Jury.



Also I guess they could share a lot of stories and good advises with student that aim to follow a career in VideoGame production.

Would be nice if more spanish dudes that were there could share more story about the ceremony and the "off-stage"...


Dragon Attack is quite impressive.

First I love the "ascii art" intros and menus, they really have a very nice touch and nice way to have tiles already in the ROM I guess.
while the ingame part looks simplistic concerning graphics, the bullet avalanche is.. just... wow...

Some french purist would say "but but, impossiburu, the burretsu ale supposed to disapeal when dlagon is groliously kirred, you disaclated my danmaku shota, baka baka...."*

Well this one is actually even more hardcore then.


would be nice to check how is it done code-wise (well, other coders would explain I guess, not me but still interested) and the lack of background graphics and the small sprites/bullets also help, but still...


The Grenade Conquest could have quite benefited from more refined graphics but the idea is quite nice and it is 1vs1.

Ice-Slider (or slicer ?) and Virus Dog are soemwhat different approaches of the same sort of game, but both are nice and enjoyable.

I guess Maze Adventure could have had more aknowledgment from Jury because it is actually some sort of "RPG/dungeon crawler".. a very rare style on CPC... impressive in 64k I guess. and soemwhat promising.


Outlaw would have sold a lot in CPC's time because jsut to see a screenshot would cause purchase by kids...
hire Hare to because of those sweet bunny boobs...
And I guess John Ritman liked the isometric a lot... (clever move, César... clever move, you know your stuff).

Hairboys looks quite playable, those jumps seems as fun as RickDangerous'. Life of a Pixel anyone ?

Anyway huge congratulation to CPC-Power team, they won a price yet didn't really expected that actually..
Those "Demoscènes" effects and tricks here and there.


Really are the students winning sometimes ?


*Toto-sama

a legend told :

I'm wondering about Dragon Attack:
Is this a premiere? Is there any manic shooter (|bullet hell|danmaku|...) on CPC? and on other 8bit machines?
Looking at the youtube video: number of bullets is very high, while no slow down seems to occur.
I'm not a gamer, but I'm looking forwards to watching it in action on real machine.

Actually my exact thoughts... too... well done, O. G.

I guess some MSX2+ or PC-Engine games may be considered Bulet-Hells/pseudo danmaku  ?
But real 8bit lowtech computers ?
C64 ?
StarSabre perhaps is the closest thing we had on CPc before ?

perhaps the thing is to not put starfields in background but actual bullets instead... 





But As some told, 2016 is quite an impressive eyar finally...

>> Vector Vault : quite innovative on CPC.
>> Dragon Attack : too.
>> Pinball Dreams : ok it is jsut a "preview" yet...
>> the 32 years anniversary Mega-Demo : long awaited but lots of contents.
>>a tower defence game ? it was another First.
>> quite some impressive adventure games too I guess.
>> MahJonk... seriously ?
>> an enterprise port ? (out of this world ?)

And also quite a huge pile of sometimes well lavished games actually.
EgoTrip did a lot of prods and those spanish dudes can really put out nice platformers.

[ervin]

I just had a look at the source code for Dragon Attack... and now the reason for its excellence (both in terms of playability and technical prowess) makes sense! It's written by Axelay!
Great job from Paul (as always)!

Dragon Attack is easily my fave game of the competition - it's absolutely outstanding, and severely underrated by the judges IMHO. I still can't believe a bullet hell exists on the CPC now - and a REALLY good one at that!
My 2nd place is Hire Hare - a beautiful game with a really clever isometric 3D engine.

Outlaws has beautiful graphics, but I don't find it particularly playable (sorry Toni!).

[Axelay]

would be nice to check how is it done code-wise (well, other coders would explain I guess, not me but still interested) and the lack of background graphics and the small sprites/bullets also help, but still...

For the 'how', most of the cpu time saving on handling the bullets comes from the player collision side of the equation.  Rather than doing a co-ordinate check against more than 250 bullets, one bit of the 4bpp display is reserved for the bullets, so the display also serves as a collision map and player collision takes an almost trivial amount of cpu time in only checking a few screen bytes at the players location.


The movement and display of the bullets is still very cpu intensive.  I've just used whatever small gains I could think of at the time, some partially unrolled loops, page aligned tables, using the stack pointer on some tables, that sort of thing.  Having a blank background also helps a lot of course, but even ignoring the speed cost of background graphics, I'm not sure it would be a good idea for the game-play to go and have a visually distracting graphical background anyway.

[Axelay]

Dragon Attack is easily my fave game of the competition - it's absolutely outstanding, and severely underrated by the judges IMHO. I still can't believe a bullet hell exists on the CPC now - and a REALLY good one at that!

Cheers!     Glad it's finding a few fans.  I have always anticipated it was going to have limited appeal because of the genre.  The game actually came about as a result of this discussion earlier in the year.  Found myself immediately thinking it was a ridiculous idea to imagine the CPC to be able to come close to that kind of game, but then found myself thinking, well, why can't it?  So I 'just had' to find the answer to that question. 

[ervin]

So I 'just had' to find the answer to that question. 

Yep, that's pretty much the same reason I wrote Chunky Pixel Curator - to find out if real-time scaling of large sprites was possible at a decent frame rate (albeit with big chunky pixels)!

I know that bullet hell is a niche genre, but I honestly can't believe you didn't place in the top 3.

[ervin]

I've been playing Hair Boy a bit as well.
It's brilliant - pretty much Super Meat Boy for the CPC (minus the blood!)

It controls *really* well.
The movement of the character is tight and responsive, with just the right amount of inertia.
The simple but effective animation also gives the character a lot of ... erm ... character. 

Great, great game.

[Dubliner]

Would be nice if more spanish dudes that were there could share more story about the ceremony and the "off-stage"...

Ronaldo may confirm it later, but i think their exposition was recorded and it will be uploaded somewhen in the near future. Actually it was quite interesting and it was in English, so everybody should be able to enjoy it.

About Dragon Attack, i simply have no words for that game. It totally blew my mind the very first time i tried it on my CPC and i´ve been playing it very often since i got the games to be reviewed. I managed to progress from stage 6 to stage 9 already, but i think i reached my top there 

[00WReX]

I just placed all 34 games in a folder on the M4 and quickly tried a few games, and they are all great.

Just sitting back and thinking about it for a moment, what has blown me away is the fact that there were 34 enties....34 great entries.

2016 and the support for the CPC just keeps getting stronger. So many games this year. Truly amazing.

We really have been spoilt, and add to that the hardware we currently have. Wow.

Thank you everyone.

Cheers,
Shane

[Overflow]

Dragon Attack is easily my fave game of the competition - it's absolutely outstanding, and severely underrated by the judges IMHO. I still can't believe a bullet hell exists on the CPC now - and a REALLY good one at that!
My 2nd place is Hire Hare - a beautiful game with a really clever isometric 3D engine.
Outlaws has beautiful graphics, but I don't find it particularly playable (sorry Toni!).

Exactly my thougts.

Dragon Attack (...)
First I love the "ascii art" intros and menus, they really have a very nice touch and nice way to have tiles already in (...)

I did recognize that style on Youtube. Very nice ascii-like work Rexbeng! Then, Axelay on the code was an easy guess.
From my POV (which is somehow technical) : congrats to both of you.
Extra-kudos to release on a niche genre, being aware you won't win.

[MacDeath]

It's written by Axelay!

As one of the Olivers told : Nice balls !!!

(at least that's what I heard from the video)

For the 'how', most of the cpu time saving on handling the bullets comes from the player collision side of the equation.  Rather than doing a co-ordinate check against more than 250 bullets, one bit of the 4bpp display is reserved for the bullets, so the display also serves as a collision map and player collision takes an almost trivial amount of cpu time in only checking a few screen bytes at the players location.

not quite related but it reminds me how duck hunt would not turn the whole screen i white but only the "duck" so the result is not "where is player aiming", but just "does he simply touch the unique white-zone target".

The game actually came about as a result of this discussion earlier in the year.

funny how most of the modern projects start somewhere here.

Actually it was quite interesting and it was in English, so everybody should be able to enjoy it.

+40k for this year"s edition having the award ceremony mostly in English... at last we can all somewhat understand it... compauired to other years...
Well, somewhat because we know about the expression "parler anglais comme une vache espaniole"...

I guess that this competition being now a real internacional event renders English mandatory.

[Dubliner]

+40k for this year"s edition having the award ceremony mostly in English... at last we can all somewhat understand it... compauired to other years...
Well, somewhat because we know about the expression "parler anglais comme une vache espaniole"...

I guess that this competition being now a real internacional event renders English mandatory.

Actually Ronaldo did the same last year: english and spanish. I even spoke some german 

[EgoTrip]

I originally did not intend to enter Ice Slider. I got stuck on the game I wanted and realised I wouldn't finish it in time, it was way too ambitious for me really. So I did Ice Slider as its a simple game, I had half the levels already done, and the code was easy enough to port over from the DS version. I knew I had no chance of winning though but wanted to enter something. Was a nice surprise to be nominated for the music category.

The game I intended to enter is sort of abandoned for now. I don't know if I will ever get the motivation to finish it as its really difficult.

[ervin]

I originally did not intend to enter Ice Slider. I got stuck on the game I wanted and realised I wouldn't finish it in time, it was way too ambitious for me really. So I did Ice Slider as its a simple game, I had half the levels already done, and the code was easy enough to port over from the DS version. I knew I had no chance of winning though but wanted to enter something. Was a nice surprise to be nominated for the music category.

The game I intended to enter is sort of abandoned for now. I don't know if I will ever get the motivation to finish it as its really difficult.

Congratulations on completing Ice Slider.
(I couldn't even bring myself to start a game for this year's comp).

Ice Slider is a really nice game - I like it a lot.
The music is indeed excellent.
I think Ice Slider would have done very well as a commercial game back in the day.

Also, nice Camelot Warriors reference on the main menu screen!


What sort of game was the unfinished one?

[trabitboy]

I tried Dragon Attack on real hardware yesterday ,
and I was just stunned ....
The bullet hell shooters I used to play didn't feel busier ! 

I was even more stunned to be able to assemble the game in winape ,
so good the documentation is.
Thank you !

[MacDeath]

The game I intended to enter is sort of abandoned for now. I don't know if I will ever get the motivation to finish it as its really difficult.

perhaps to make it a 128k RAM version may help you then ?


Here's an interview of the Oliver Twins from the event :
http://retromaniacmagazine.blogspot.fr/2016/11/que-fue-primero-dizzy-o-la-gallina.html

scroll it down to have the Ingles version...


Also may I ask a... question ?



Who is this very cute cutie ?


Post Edition :

Anyway, the CPCretroDEV compositions have been implemented into CPCpower's website Database...

really a good CPC year so far and certainly still counting.

[Dubliner]

This year every person who won something and could not make it to the ceremony had somebody to represent him in the ceremony. If i remember well she was one of Ronaldo's students.

[MacDeath]

I'm pretty sure she would look quite good in HireHare cosplay.


Sorry for basic the sexism but it had to be told.

[VincentGR]

I'm pretty sure she would look quite good in HireHare cosplay.


Sorry for basic the sexism but it had to be told.

Not sexism, it's called good taste mate