Creating Games Back Then

So Jot is a game designer, isn’t that great? We had a little chat about how it all began and he was raving about an ancient program by Europress Software called Klik & Play. And boy, how well and dear do I remember that program! I got it as limited shareware with one of the first PC magazines with CD-ROMs, actually from one titled “PC Spiel mit CD-ROM” that literally translates to “PC-Game with CD-ROM” (I even blogged about it!). With this software you could create simple games across various screens, with your own animations, your own game mechanics and your own story. It was like Mario Paint on meth. To me as a 12-year old it was creative heaven.
The limitation of the demo was only in content, you didn’t have as many pre-animated sprites and backgrounds to choose from and your games were limited to only two or three screens¹. But the successive issues of PC-Spiel mit CD-ROM supplied me with games by other homebrew-creators: There was a real-time Worms clone, a game where you had to break out of prison and escape the police or a medieval fighting game. Best of all: I could open those games in K&P and, voilà, I dodged the screen count limitation of the shareware version. As a kid I obviously was pretty handy levering out that kinda stuff. I even went through the hassle to rework some of the original games with better graphics, sounds and animations. As a kid I was also an obvious smart-ass. But it was fun. Like Mario Paint on meth.

The successor of Klik & Play was the Games Factory and ultimately Multiumedia Fusion, the software that Jot is currently using to make his many games.

Pitiri or the importance of being obsessed

About two years ago Jot started working more or less alone on his awesome retro-styled jump ‘n’ run called Pitiri; although ‘retro’ in the sense of 1970′s hairdo and music, not so much ‘retro’ in the sense of chunky pixels in stunning three colors. No, Pitiri is different, yet so comfortably familiar.

When I visited Jot his room’s walls were plastered with designs of levels and enemies and the game-flow itself, hell, they still *are*! It took him many months and hundreds of hours to create the world and narrative of Pitiri. Apart from the intro, some sounds and graphic assets he did everything himself, occasionally having a fistful of friends as unpaid beta-testers. I was lucky and honored to be among them and gave poor Jot a hell of a time with my many pages of bug-reports for a simple single level. I’m a smartass, at least that’s what people keep telling me. Jot also composed and performed every musical piece in the game and, until I learned about that, I could swear I heard some old but good Neil Young song in the beginning.

The game still isn’t finished but what I have seen and experienced so far from Eli’s quest for his abducted brother I can assure you it’s gonna be great! I mean I talked with a robot, traveled in space and could turn myself into fire! Even at the same time, if I wanted to!

The requests

I am a big fan of independent artists, regardless of their medium. So I like to help out Jot occasionally with my ruthless selflessness … ahem. Okay, who am I kidding? I do it for the fame, the money and the girls²!

For example, Jot needed a “playful, computer-styled retro font” so I spent one or two afternoons with my sketchbook in my favorite café and designed him a font I titled Digital Disco despite the fact that there’s already a font by that name, as I learned much later after a quick Google search.

If you’re interested in my font, you can get it here as donation ware, which means you can have it for free but not clicking either the Flattr, the Kachingle or the PayPal Donate button makes Baby Jesus and Baby Moses cry. And nobody wants that, right?

But there was a new request: A couple of days ago my good friend Jot from ilikescifi.com told me about a new game of his in beta, called “Aratatatt” which will be available in the near future on the interwebz (I keep you up to date). It’s a jump and shoot in a post-apocalyptic world populated by evil robots. Since the game was all retro again (the synth-pop and new-wave soundtrack by none other than Jot himself) it featured a level boss. And Jot wanted 8-bit sound for it and asked me if I could supply him with a loopable chiptune that would last a good 40 seconds at least.

That’s what he told me via Steam when we were roaming our individual irradiated wasteland of the Mojave desert of Fallout New Vegas. As I was in a tough fight in Vault 3 with some fiends I got the guideline from Jot: “I’d love it to be just like a great Metroid-like showdown. I want 8-bit metal!”. I walked in the rearmost chamber of the vault with my companions Rex and Cass as I heard another message come in from Jot: “It’d be great in the next two days or so!” Only two days?! I took down Motor Runner with a skilled headshot and exited the game. I had work to do.

The tune

I switched on my Yamaha keyboard and launched the magnificent FamiTracker, a capable tracker that allows anybody interested and nerdy enough to make her or his own NES-compatible chiptunes with it, and hit some notes. It sounded terrible. I took some more time to tweak on my instruments, to come up with a rhythm and melody, hit the keys and — major suckage again. After an hour I was in grave despair and spent the following hour looking for kick and snare drum samples to use in the DPCM channel. Luckily end-boss-8bit-metal has a fairly straight-forward percussion. Really bland.

Then I tried coming up with a melody or at least a rough direction to the sampled drums, using the noise channel for hi-hats. Nada. I was incredibly frustrated until I decided to listen to some game soundtracks in my vast library. I hit gold when I dug up the soundtrack to Legend of Xanadu. The first part in my tune is largely based on the track JEMEUX MOUVAIS in the game, whereas the intro was inspired a little by XARKAS although my lacking proficiency in chiptuning really shows when you compare my tune to these two songs.

So finally I could start with the first part and it sounded really good and I got really far by my standards: 20 seconds. And absolutely no clue how to stretch it to 40 seconds. So I sat there, in front of the computer, the sun already up again. That’s when I went to bed. Luckily I was on a night shift the next day. So when I came back from work around 3 a.m. the next day I sat straight to my Mac and moonlighted color grading on some another project. Whenever I had graded enough shots for a decent render time, I switched to composing on the chiptune until the next batch of shots was ready to be colored. Despite what anybody’s common sense would imply, this back-and-forth of two totally different demands was highly effective and I managed to compose two patterns of nice breaks for the tune. This helped me out another 10 or so seconds but I still wasn’t very close to 40, and again, out of ideas.

That was when I really took the coward’s exit and after half the song I just transposed everything up one note and repeated what I had so far with some minor variations. I played it and took the time. Almost 50 seconds for the loop. I was free! And the sun had already risen again. But I wanted to be sure that it would sound good enough for Jot, so I copied the compiled song onto a CF-card, popped it into the PowerPak and turned on my TV. I wanted to know what it sounded like on a real NES.

It sounded holey, a lot of instruments weren’t playing and I was pissed. I went back to the tracker and tweaked around the omitted sounds in the hope of eradicating the problem. I don’t know what I did but the next time it worked. Like a charm. And it sounded really thick and familiar. Thanks to the system’s bias to let the song more or less completely clip and apply a rather stringent low-pass filter. But it was an analogue and warm clipping and the low-pass only made it less clicky.

As soon as I was done I sent it off to Jot and awaited his reaction. I was really hoping that I didn’t disappoint him too profoundly but a couple of hours I got his feedback: “shit phil it works so fucking well! you gonna love it. shit! thanks.”

Despite all the profanity it’s still the best reaction I ever got to a chiptune of my own. And since it is now officially Jot-approved I thought I might share it with you. You can listen to it here or even download the .NSF-file below. Enjoy! And you might want to click the Flattr or Kachingle button…

Seph Carissa – Showdown. 2010.
Download audio file (seph_carissa_-_showdown.mp3)
No player? Try this.

³
Download .NSF

Level Information:

• This level occupies 50 MB in your memory and has a time limit of 55:27 min.
• This podcast is EXPLICIT because occasionally the dreaded F-word escaped my mouth. It’s a fuckin habit — I’m sorry

If you like it then feel free to click the Flattr button on this site and/or drop me a comment. Thanks!

So yesterday I finally had the cash together and some time to pick up the heavy packing case with tons of 1990′s state of the art consoles. There was a a black Game Boy pocket, a painted PlayStation (“it glows under a UV-lamp”), a SNES with 50/60 Hz switch (“So you could play Japanese titles as well”), Nintendo 64 with memory extension, a Sega Dreamcast with modem and keyboard and a Sega Genesis with 32x extension and SEGA-CD drive, something so bulky that you just gotta love it. Everything in good to very good condition, complete with many controllers and memory cards (such as the Dreamcast’s VMU).

Holy frick!

And that was not all, there was a bunch of Sega 32 games, some dream cast CDs, excellent N64 cartridges (such as Golden Eye 007, Ocarina of Time or Perfect Dark) and many PS1 games. I don’t know when I have the time to hook all these consoles up or rather implement them into my museum’s grand hall of ludology (i.e. my dorm room), nor do I know where to put all the stuff! I guess for now I put them back into the big torn box they came in hoping that Ikea might sell some day a Billy-shelf that fits my nerdy needs.

In case you are interested in a complete list of the games I own, you can check out my have-list at MobyGames.

Ever played Audiosurf? That addictive little fucker! I’ve downloaded the demo because I was a little bit curious as I always am when there’s some hype ebbing away and I feel “underground” enough to give it a try myself. But what is Audiosurf anyway? It creates from a song of your choice a unique race track resembling the tempo, intensity and dynamic of that song. Nothing really new. But the community connection via Steam evokes some Trackmania United atmosphere: If there’s somebody who’s played the same song as you then the game automatically compares your scores and performance. As a competitive grunting male I am prone to scoreboards… If you already know what it is about please refer to the last paragraphs — there’s a challenge for you…

The tutorial helps you into the game, and introduces new features in a very gentle way so you won’t turn the game down for being too complicated. In fact it’s so simple, even my mom would be able to grasp at least one of the various game modes. Basically it’s like driving very fast on a crowded highway. In one gaming mode you have to avoid gray blocks on the tracks but collect colored ones (“Ninja”), in another mode there are only differently colored blocks which you should collect to form clusters (a little like a high speed variation of Columns, even a bit Dr. Mario.

Mainly the difficulty of a track is based on the song you choose. Whereas Air by J.S. Bach is more or less boring as a train ride, with “Smack My Bitch Up” by Prodigy you are very likely to get (somewhat) epileptic seizures the first time you try it. Interestingly I found out, that I am performing especially well with the “Ninja” mode, avoiding certain blocks while collecting others. I don’t really know why but I suspect my thousands of miles on the Autobahn have paid off.

Dear pro gamers who play Atari Teenage Riot songs with one eye closed: I have the most brutal and fast music for you: Jimmy Caravan. “Who?” 99.98% of you are asking now because I found out about Jimmy’s excellent funk many years ago in a Viennese record shot where I purchased “Essential Funk, Vol 2″ on vinyl. And some months ago I got my hands on a Japanese import of his one solo album “Hey Jude” with some covers as well as original tracks from 1968′s San Francisco.

The song “Cyclops” is one of my favorites because it’s so mellow and funky with a great beat and solos. But now that I have played it I fear the brutal the organ solo in Audiosurf. I’ve made a little video for all of you YouTubsters out there to view a nearly perfect ride — I only hit one gray block. Gaaah!

If I stirred your interest in the game too you can download it via Steam for 10 $ (including the Soundtracks to all the Valve games including one unreleased track. maybe this may change your mind.)

Why am I advertising this game so shamelessly? Because I need competitors! Obviously my mp3 collection is way too eclectic so usually I am the only one on the high scores for most of my music…

Probably anybody of you already saw some if not many of their works, just consider Pirates of the Caribbean, Transformers or, my favorite, Zodiac, as well as a hunk of US commercials and, most notably, the Gears of War commercial trailer that was “shot” in the game engine — high-end machinima if you will.

But why Digital Domain? Extensive story: Nearly ten years ago, in the first grade of the high school, I was trying with two fellow students, Fabian Rüdisser (who is now in Vienna at the Film Academy) and Thomas Hirtenfelder (in Konstanz studying film studies), to realize a “short” computer generated animation. ¹ It was called “Thinkers” with a down-to-earth plot and an out-of-reality-schedule: Scientists bred a special kind of reptiles for the military who act as “thinkers” for combat-strategies and tactics. But one day they escape into space and the government decides to shoot them down again — I don’t remember the details. And we wanted to finish it in three months so it would be ready for the Prix Ars Electronica. Needless to say that we only finished a short teaser.

During research for this little project we gathered in the school’s computer lab where I copied crappy 1 megabyte sized video clips of space shuttle launches from the NASA website on my floppy disks as references for our animation. Then we would surf the web for some cool demo reels and two corporations came into focus: Rushes and Digital Domain. I’ve learned most of the visual-effects jargon back then from a long MS-Word file at Rushes ² which explained everything from an A/B-Roll to dailies to Visual Effects. And then, of course, there was Digital Domain, famous at that time for Titanic and their great animated short Tightrope. It was also the time of my first Digital Production magazine.

“Wouldn’t it be great to work for Digital Domain?” Thomas asked Fabian and me as we were scrubbing through their ridiculously tiny QuickTime demo reel which took ridiculously long to download in those days. “I bet they are already working with 3D Studio MAX 2.5!” I naïvely pondered. “When I finish school, I’m going to work there!” I said then, not even really knowing what would happen the next semester. “Be serious! None of us will ever go there apart from Baustädter!” Fabian said. None of us ever knew Peter Baustädter personally because he had finished school before we attended there, but we knew, thanks to the propaganda of some teachers and newspaper snippets on the walls, that he was responsible for the sky in Titanic and, as the rumors say, the right toe of the T-Rex in Jurassic Park ³. “Well… you never know.” Thomas said and I nodded absentmindedly. ⁴

And here I was: Typing the words of my application at Digital Domain into my gMail web interface, proof reading it over and over, changing the word order again and again and finally, shaking, pressing “send”. I don’t know if they really get back to me, thanks to my incomplete portfolio site, but a man can dream, can’t he?

The internet has established itself as source for cheats and hints; you will find more up to date and more accurate walk-throughs at www.gamestar.de and on many other sites than possible in the magazine. ¹

That is another way of telling that printed media are sooner or later becoming extinct. That’s why I decided to take a look back into the wild and crazy 1990s and my personal experiences with PC-Gaming magazines.

PC Spiel mit CD-ROM

This mag also featured the very funny Space Rat comics series (above) as well as some funnies about the editorial staff (below)

Funny, because 2000 MHz seemed impossible back in the good old days of 33 or even 66 Mhz. Cooling fans usually did not exist for those CPUs back then as far as I remember.

I remember the fond days of when I had collected and saved enough money to go to the tobacconist ² in the district of Straßgang in my childhood and buy another fresh issue of my favorite gaming mag back then PC Spiel mit CD-ROM which means nothing more that “PC game with CD-ROM” — talk about creative magazine names in the days of i-D. Recently I found out that it was known from 1986 as ASM, short for Aktueller Software & Videospiele Markt, “Current Software & Videogames Bazar”, until they changed the name after issue 05/1995. And I think shortly after I picked it up because I was sooo proud of my IBM Aptiva 80486/66 Mhz (see box) with 12 MB RAM, 512 MB HDD, 8 bit sound card and a double speed CD-ROM drive because I wanted some more games than included in the package ³.

PC Games

To the left there is the original article of Amored Fist in PC Games

There are some screenshots from some ancient rendering application and mumbo-jumbo about its making the authors didn’t understand theirselves. Funny. See this footnote ⁴ for a translation.
My IBM Aptiva around 1995. The game would’ve even run on it smoothly, according to the hardware recommendations.

I also bought some PC Games magazines (in fact my oldest remaining gaming mags are 15 years old PC Games issues — without the cover disk though) back then. One of the oldest ones I remember avidly featured some tank game (Armored Fist) with prerendered ingame footage. It looked so realistic! I was completely out of my mind and read every column about its making (with some very early DOS-based rendering application, perhaps 3D Studio 1.0?). Little I knew that this would become my future here at the FH Salzburg. When thinking back… I really loved *any* rendered stills, though. I was a strange kid.
Another PC Games I remember was the one featuring an extensive article about Commandos, which I couldn’t wait for in 1998. I bought it in Linz where I had been with my computer class from school for one day: We visited the Ars Electronica Center and I needed something to read for the train ride back to Graz. What I also didn’t know back then was that I would win in the Prix Ars Electronica an honorary mention in 2001 for my experimental digital music piece http://:
Come to think: I should read more often a PC Games issue to look into the future…

GameStar

According to the C64 wiki PC Spiel [...] blurred its original character completely and didn’t separate itself from its competitors [...] and disappeared in 1997 when I found out about GameStar’s second issue that totally replaced the empty spot in my heart that PC Spiel had caused. And they were funny. I think that I even remember the first editorial staff: The old cowboy Charles Glimm (or “Grimm”?) who launched the magazine with Jörg Langer and Mick Schnelle, who I even met! The first issue I got was all about NHL 98 that I really loved playing against my school colleague and best friend at the time, Martin Mayer. I haven’t heard from him in years though…

Retro

That’s the very first issue of Retro, my version still has the old GO64! logo on it, although the page footer says “Retro”.

At last, he came back: My beloved Space Rat Comics survived the death of PC Spiel and return in Retro. Yay!

Another magazine I got my hands on since issue #1 is called Retro and is a mixture of the old GO64! magazine, that survived 114 issues and the Retro Magazin which existed for 4 years then. Thanks to Hannes Drexl aka. robotriot who brought issue #1 to one Game Design course last year. I just had to subscribe to it because it sounded so lovely. And it still is. With every single page you notice that it is a very small magazine run by a few Retro aficionados that produce about 1 typo or misspelling per page and the Adobe InDesign bug, that re-starts long articles completely from the beginning after turning pages. At first I thought I got a little funny in the head but it definitely happened now three times. I keep these magazines very safe. Because one day they’ll be worth a fortune because of the very rare printing errors… hopefully.