GoaT included in '20 Indie Must Play Games in 2015'

[david]

YouTuber 'Brydo0' included GoaT in his pick of '20 Must Play Indie Games of 2015'

There are some fascinating-looking games there, including GoaT

[evilkinggumby]

yeah a great list and a nice lengthy blurb on GoaT. The only game I knew much of was SuperHot but a few others I'd seen and opted not to back, but figured would be good. Some great breakout titles coming, to be sure.

This is just more sement in the fact most of the games I buy now are indie and I've stepped away from AAA more and more. I may only end up with a handful of AAA by years end or less, but I'll have dozens of indie/small studio titles. I'm also taking to looking at older ps1 titles that I might like, as a lot of the studio's putting games on there are practically "indie" nowadays. hehehe. I'm also surprised I haven't seen newer homebrew type games for the ps1. guess the copy protection on the units must be too prohibitive?

[david]

@EvilKing.. I also had a PS1, but I rarely got around playing it (Driver is the only game I can remember, it might even have just been the demo but I really liked it).

I guess these days a lot of PS1 units are gathering dust in storage. Though there is backwards compatibility (not sure if this is 100 percent) -with the possibility of digital downloads- on the more recent PlayStations. My PS1 went to a charity shop, my PS2, and original XBox went into storage or charity shop. I think my ancient, well-used Nintendo 64 is at my family home in Ireland, and it maybe still works (yay Goldeneye!)

The early consoles were before my time involved with developing, so I'm not sure how easy the PS1 and PS2 are/were to develop for, even what game engines were used (likely bespoke... custom made by each studio). However, I heard the PS3 had a reputation of being difficult platform to develop on, though I believe PS4 is a lot easier to work with...it was designed to be more developer-friendly.

Sorry EK, I don't have much knowledge about developing on the first two PlayStations, or about the backwards compatibility of the latest two PlayStations (which might -possibly-make the earlier platforms more appealing to indie devs... i.e. there are enough people to make the effort worthwhile).

[evilkinggumby]

Well I suspect there are few people willing to dev for ps1 because it is not in the current "sweet spot" that retro gamers want (nostalgia wise) where pixilated graphics and chip tunes are 'hip' and enjoyable. Ps1 really was the break into 3d, and in many cases pretty ugly 3d with low rez textures, jagged edges to the polygons and shaky/lumpy modeling. There is no real nostalgia for that as of yet..lol

Still we see a lot of retro jrpg's that COULD be done on it, where the characters and enemies are 2d sprites and the backgrounds are 3d rendered and fairly nice. I suspect the difficulty is the old style of the graphical engine, the limitations on memory and cd drive, and the fact you could just as easily make a older 3d game that seems like ps1 and sell it on steam for a lot better success.

[david]

you could just as easily make a older 3d game that seems like ps1 and sell it on steam for a lot better success

@EvilKing... Exactly right, I suspect that developing custom game engine (or licensing someone else's old engine) of that older generation would be quite a technical headache. Also, I just don't think there are enough active gamers on the PS1 platform (including compatible consoles) to make it worth the effort.

So from a developers perspective, it's likely to be more time-efficient to use a modern licensable game engine (the biggest are Unity, UDK/Unreal 4, CryEngine) or even build one (which is also doable, although not technically trivial) for the modern platforms: Wii & Wii U, PS3 & PS4, XBone 360 & One, and PC, where there are a significant number of active gamers.

As you say, if one desires a retro-PS1 look and feel, on the modern platforms, this can be done with the art and gameplay design. Such a game, played on a modern platform and built with a modern engine, but with a relatively simple visual assets and gameplay, would likely perform EXTREMELY well -no worries about frames-per-second here...

[david]

Oops, this one is totally my bad... I just spotted that the '20 Indie Must Play Games in 2015' ... the video on the top of this thread... was made by the thegamesoutfit.com, and likely retweeted by Brydoo. Thank you to TheGamesOutfit and Brydoo for helping get the GoaT word out!

[Alberto]

In the 90's Sony sold a special development PlayStation targeting amateur coders:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_Yaroze

PS2 disc included this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yabasic

As far as I know, a "dead" console that from time to time sees a bunch of new "underground" titles coming out is the Dreamcast. Years ago I found extensive documentation on Dreamcast development.
Never found the time to try it, though.

[evilkinggumby]

In the 90's Sony sold a special development PlayStation targeting amateur coders:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_Yaroze

PS2 disc included this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yabasic

As far as I know, a "dead" console that from time to time sees a bunch of new "underground" titles coming out is the Dreamcast. Years ago I found extensive documentation on Dreamcast development.
Never found the time to try it, though.

fascinating. I didn't know those dev boxes were sold for the ps1, though the fact they blocked a method to burn cd's or go above the base memory of the ps1 makes full on game creation impossible (from the wiki, you would code on a pc and then upload the compiled programming to the grey ps1 and it would attempt to run it in memory, limiting any created game to 2MB).

The other seems to be just released to PAL territories, so it'd be hard to locate in the wild for me in the U.S. but I am sure some folk had it. Hard to say if it allowed for full ps2 game creation, this is more of an alt-OS design which may not have allowed for full graphical functionality and use of all of the ps2's capabilities, but it would have been handy to turn the ps2 into a simple home pc for possible web browseing and productivity software.. hehe.

I guess enterprising folk with enough knowledge might find ways to use these to break through and develop for the systems, and anyone who is deeply familiar with the ps1 and ps2 emulators, but so far I haven't seen it pop up. I guess it is also a manner of creating a game that runs AND can get past typical copy protection on the units without them requring a mod chip or additional hardware (the game would sell significantly better if it just detected and ran on the unit with no secondary means).

It would be kool if Sony actually opened this up for their old consoles so youngish game developers interested in designing stuff could have a market and hardware to work on, even IF the architecture they are coding on is dissimilar to modern systems. I just read the entire wiki on the emotion engine and how it was built and I have to say it was capable of a LOT of power if utilized right, considering the details. wow. Just look at early games vs the last few

[Alberto]

If I remember correctly, back in 2001 I was able to put some graphics on the TV screen with Yabasic.
However, I was already programming in C on a PC, so I didn't bother to really learn that much about that language.
In the end, if someone wants to program games in an "old-school" way, they can always program for good old DOS, then run their programs with DOSBox. While opening a window on Windows and setting a single pixel requires lots of lines of code, going through the Win32 API, in DOS you had access to the underlying hardware, and it was quite simple (again, if my memory serves me well):

Code: Select all

int main(void) {
      /* In mode 13h, video memory begins at address 000A0000h */
      unsigned char* front_buffer = (unsigned char*)0x000A0000;

      /* Enter VGA mode 13h i.e. 320 x 200 @ 8bpp */
      __asm {
            mov eax, 0x13
            int 0x10
      }

      /* Set a pixel to the 128th color of current palette: */
      front_buffer[159 + 99 * 320] = 127;

      /* Return to mode 3h */
      __asm {
            mov eax, 0x03
            int 0x10
      }

      return 0;
}

The previous program is a 32-bit one, so it requires a DOS extender. Back in the day, DOS4GW was quite popular and many games (DOOM, Duke Nukem 3D, etc) used it. I think downloading the open source Open Watcom compiler and compiling as DOS4GW project should do the trick.
Some interesting articles about but not limited to console programming can be found in the archive of Game Developer Magazine (R.I.P.)