[Asteroite - Original Soundtrack (Chiptune real Atari Jaguar hardware sound)]

18 hours ago, Editorb said:

My brain runs a lyric spool of a song I dislike when the lab song plays: He's the one they call Doctor Feel ... Good ... He's the one that makes you feel all ... right ...

 

Fortunately, this music is better, which makes the lyrics tolerable.

The resemblabce is not obvious, but I actually think it's one of the better Mötley Crüe songs.

[Jaguar vs. 3DO?]

17 minutes ago, zzip said:

FWIW the DOS version of Need For Speed requires a 486 DX2,  (no 3D hardware),  but as far as I can tell,  this indicates it needs more processing power than any of the other Jag games that are also on DOS,  I know it's difficult to do performance comparisons between Jag architecture and traditional single CPU systems though.

The 3DO had one single powerful (ARM) CPU, so much easier for any programmer to take full advantage of its power. Much the same way PC/MSDOS games were programmed before 3D acceleration hardware was introduced.

[Asteroite pre-orders OPEN NOW]

7 hours ago, grips03 said:

So there are 33 missiles in the game?

I don't remember the total number, but you may also have missed a x5 missile pack?

 

Spoiler

There is a x5 missile pack in the Factory area. Another one on an alternative (dead end) path in the Pipes area. To name a few...

 

The x1 missile upgrades are mainly in the lab area, only one outside, which you already found according to the pictures you posted.

 

Also make sure you have visited all rooms in the game (e.g. that all of them is filled on the map), this also adds to the completion status.

[Asteroite pre-orders OPEN NOW]

11 hours ago, grips03 said:

I don't enjoy so much is the factory area due to the lava / flames

Once you are within the flame's trigger range, it will fire after a random time interval. The safest way to avoid getting hurt is to stand close to it (you see the fire outlet on the ground), and wait until it has fired one time. Then you should try to get past it fast, because at this time it is less likely that it fires directly again.

[Asteroite pre-orders OPEN NOW]

2 hours ago, grips03 said:

Can clear lower sewer crab area now.  I think I only found 1x missile there, but hard to remember.

 

Found the the 1x missile using the ball jump at the top of the hill.

 

Was in the The Laboratory Area, and now have 24 missiles, 76%.  I cleared the second area there and now had 28 missiles I decided to move ahead and then ran into a water pit with spiked wall and died. 

 

I do now how to use the ball jump and slowly move on the ceiling.

 

What I like about the game:

Graphics are really good. 

You can save the game progress.

Music is really good.

Lots of variety of scenery, when I first saw the sewer area I thought is was very cool.

Game is very big, lots to explore. 

Great bosses and mini bosses.

Lots of enemy types.

The lush areas in the game are really nice to look at.

 

Couple ideas if there is ever a sequel:

Have a inventory of what has be obtained.

Jumping is a little off, have hero move left or right a little more slowly when in the air or have hero fall a slower rate from the air to control that better.

When hero goes to a knee have him see a little more of the lower part of the screen.  Sometimes you have to just make a leap of faith, but if you could see more of screen in those parts it would reward the cautious player. 

Have save screen replenish hero's health.

Only area I don't enjoy so much is the factory area due to the lava / flames and the jumps seem to hard in this area.

Various guns to pick from, like Gunlord.

Larger font size in the manual, I'm getting old.

Little less back tracking for health near the end.

 

 

Thanks for the feedback. Yes we are constantly refining the game engines and all kinds of input are appreciated.

[Asteroite pre-orders OPEN NOW]

3 hours ago, grips03 said:

should be an area that the destroy boxes comes in handy

Do you mean the red boxes in the organic cave?

 

Spoiler

This area is located at the bottom-left in the shaft of the frozen area. This is where you find the health-bar extension. I wouldn't try to complete the game without it.

 

[Asteroite pre-orders OPEN NOW]

3 hours ago, grips03 said:

I've tried to jump them, but the hero gets hit when doing this.

Have you beaten the Predator minboss?

Spoiler

Then you obtain the somersault upgrade?

Using this skill you can jump over the crabs if you time it right.

 

3 hours ago, grips03 said:

Also if I backtrack to beginning of game there should be an area that the destroy boxes comes in handy.  If I remember right it was red boxes that had to be destroyed.  I think it leads to the front side of the robot crab / sewer / rat area.  Does that sound right?

If you are really good at bomb-jumping you should be able to get to the area beyond the lower sewers (the decayed area) from behind. I haven't tried it myself, but I have seen some videos of people doing amazing things using the bomb climbs.

 

You can also go back up and to the right in the sewer area, to enter the lab area. Here is a good place to harvest before you go down to the lower sewers again.

 

3 hours ago, grips03 said:

have not seen a weakness in the crabs

They do have a weak spot, once you learn to jump over them you will be able to exploit that to defeat them. It does take a couple of hits, so you should make sure they have some room to walk before they turn against you again.

[Jaguar Homebrew VS Megadrive / Genesis Homebrew]

2 hours ago, agradeneu said:

 

Lets not forget to credit some fantastic pixel artists on itch.io like Szadi Art or Pita who provide professionally made tilessets and designs for reasonable prices. There are plenty of gorgeous looking tilesets for RPGs and sidescollers.  

They make the Jaguar shine.   

If you are lucky enough to find everything you need from the same artist, otherwise you may need to design a game based on what was made available by the artist.

 

I would have loved to add twice as many monsters types to Kings of Edom, but Pita couldn't tell me when he was going to continue working on the monster pack I bought.

 

If you use art from different artists, some may have opinions about inconsistent looking art in the game.

 

The best option is of course to team up with a specific artist for your game, then it's also guaranteed that you game will have unique art.

[Asteroite pre-orders OPEN NOW]

12 minutes ago, CyranoJ said:

 

I wasn't stopping them. I don't believe I have that power

Well you didn't have the power to hack your way trough the maze 😀

[Asteroite pre-orders OPEN NOW]

10 minutes ago, CyranoJ said:

 

Because the other sections are tiny compared to that one, which is like 20+ long, near identical rooms, stacked on top of each other. With no health in them.

 

Check the size of that section on the map compared to the rest of the game.

 

Anyway, all good. Other people obviously enjoyed it. I don't want to argue with you about this, its my opinion, and yours might differ.

Well a maze has to be large in size in order to be challanging, right?

Once you know how to find you way in the maze it's easy. Just like it's played in the long play video of Psyhic World.

 

Let people play and judge for themselves.

[Asteroite pre-orders OPEN NOW]

13 minutes ago, CyranoJ said:

It's not a section of Asteroite, it's literally 1/3 of the map - 1/3 of the game.

The game have the following sections:

1. The Planet Surface

2. The Organic Caves

3. The Frozen Paradise

4. The Pipes

5. The Spider infested area

6. The Sewers

7. The Facotry Area

8. The Sewers

9. The Decayed Area

10. The Laboratory Area

(The laboratory area contains the maze you are talking you are referring to, along with other parts)

 

So how this 1/3 of the game?

Do the math...

[Asteroite pre-orders OPEN NOW]

8 minutes ago, CyranoJ said:

That entire video shows variety in design.... not sure how it's a tribute?

It's a very specific section in the video just as it's a very specific section in Asteroite.

 

You ask me why I make games, because I want to make games that I would like to see myself, what I would enjoy to play. If you don't enjoy it, then it's your opinion. No need to criticise me for doing what I belive in.

 

PS. You can also make games you like, I have no problem with that. 

[Asteroite pre-orders OPEN NOW]

2 hours ago, CyranoJ said:

cut'n'paste

What you refer to as the cut'n'paste section is a tribute to the fortress maze section in SEGA Master System game Psychic World:

It is supposed to be hard to find you way trough here, because it's a maze where all the rooms look very similar.

 

I also made a song to tribute this game, but it's the music on the first level (not the music in the fortress maze).

https://achillex.bandcamp.com/track/riddle

[Asteroite pre-orders OPEN NOW]

2 hours ago, grips03 said:

Not complete is the lower bottom section of the map with the long series of rooms to the left.  Is there a easier way to do this section?  The big robots and rats are tough.

 

Is there the plant / spider thing to harvest health in the second to last section that has the long rooms to the left and right?  I always seem to get hurt a little in each room, so by the time I had 26 missiles (started with 20 missiles) I tried to return back to harvest health and I died

 

With 1.4 I only had single issue with music still playing and screen black.  It was near a save area, so just turned off/on and did not have the issue since.

 

Really great game.

If I understand this right, you are not completely at the bottom of the sewers?

Then you have a small room with egg/spiders to harvest in to the lower left. Try to get under the bridges to get to the section below.

 

As you talk about robots and rats I am still not sure where you are. Do you mean the giant armoured crabs?

That's at the bottom of the sewers, if you go further left you will eventually find a room to harvest health along the way. The armoured crabs have a weak point, make sure you exploit that. The trip here is definately worth it, just make sure you find the reward before you leave though. Then you have two options how to get back from here (the main one will only be open once you found the reward, unless you are really good at bomb-climbing)

 

PS. If you are really good at bomb-climbing there is actually a way to avoid going trough the hard part at the bottom of the sewers. Just backtrack and look for a blocks with specific symbols on. You may remember this part from early in the game?

[Jaguar Homebrew VS Megadrive / Genesis Homebrew]

9 hours ago, CyranoJ said:

Why does it always have to be about the monies? As I previously said, if that's your primary motivation for making games, please leave. 

What about attention?

😊

[Jaguar Homebrew VS Megadrive / Genesis Homebrew]

14 hours ago, Clint Thompson said:

Why make games for a system with a user base of maybe 1k active people when you can easily reach a target base of users 20x+ that?

 

Clearly the ones who continue to develop for the Jaguar are sick in the head fumes but there's definitely a passion behind it and that's why they do.

 

Jaguar can easily do everything shown in those videos though, no problem.

Convince some of the Genesis guys to come over to the Jag and see what they say.

There is also different aspect, for example several professional and semi professional development studios are developing games for the Genesis. This also means greater competion between the developers, thus it's harder to get attention on your game.

Even worse if you attempt to release a game on Steam, there are so many other games coming out, it's close to impossible to stand out. Even if 80% of the games are bad, it's still a challange to break trough the noise of constant new releases.

 

Still the Jaguar scene get only a few new unique games per year, and a handful of Atari ST ports. So the completion for the attention among the potential byuers is not huge at the moment.

[Jaguar Homebrew VS Megadrive / Genesis Homebrew]

42 minutes ago, Stephen said:

Which emulator did you use, and what are the PC specs?

I used the Project Tempest emulator and a laptop like this one:

https://meshok.net/item/268708468_HP_Compaq_Evo_n600c_мать_рабочая

 

I used Linux as the operating system instead of Windows. I ran Project Tempest using the Linux Windows emulator (wine)

 

PS. I recently got a new laptop like this. I hope it will give a better capture next time using BigPEmu?

(now I have Windows, but emulate Linux in Virtual Box)

[Jaguar Homebrew VS Megadrive / Genesis Homebrew]

3 hours ago, mdkdue said:

I must say this does look awesome, and I totally get the time involved in creating assets. 

 

Is this getting close to a release soon? 
 

You may also like this project by the same artist?

PS. Sorry for the choppy scrolling in this video. I captured it using an emulator, but someone told me that my PC in not powerful enough to give the game justice when both emulating the game, and capturing video on the same device. You get an impression about the visuals though.

[Jaguar Homebrew VS Megadrive / Genesis Homebrew]

3 hours ago, mdkdue said:

I must say this does look awesome, and I totally get the time involved in creating assets. 

 

Is this getting close to a release soon? 
 

A lot more gorgeous looking assets has been made for this game (including bosses). Still quite some work remaining on the programming side, so a release in not imminent.

[Jaguar Homebrew VS Megadrive / Genesis Homebrew]

On 1/6/2023 at 11:17 AM, mdkdue said:

In MY opinion I have not yet seen anything on the Jaguar homebrew wise that looks as good as say, Final Fight, Robocop, Metal Slug or Strider in that video, and as I previously said The Simpson’s looks seriously impressive

It's all in the eye of the beholder, some say that they like what they see in Hammer of the Gods (WIP):

We will get the coolest looking games for the Jaguar, just wait...

 

Again, they use copyrighted assets to make their games look good (you cannot neglect the number of man-years it takes to make graphics like that by artists) This is unfair competition, and remember what happened to AM2R (Another Metroid 2 Remake), it was banned by Nintendo even if it was a free game. Because it used so much copyrighted graphics, and it was a no brainer to get it banned.

[Jaguar Homebrew VS Megadrive / Genesis Homebrew]

I am surprised to hear that so many people does not understand graphics!

It's all about the artists. For example if my 3 year old child draws a simple character using MS. Paint, it will not look better because I display the image on more powerful PC.

I also don't understand the statement that the art should not look as good just because the Jaguar has some reputation of being hard to program. I would actually claim that the Genesis/Megadrive is harder to program for today, because of less colors, having to manage pseudo color visuals using color lookup tables etc. The Jaguar on the other hand has plenty of libraries, so newbies do not need to bother with the hardware specific stuff at all.

 

The real reason is that Genesis/Megadrive is a much larger market, thus it's easier to attract better artists. If you anticipate to sell a certain number copies of your game, you may even pay professional artists to help your game look better. Unfortunately the Jaguar's market is not big enough for this yet. (I am not impressed at all by projects that use copyrighted graphics without proper permission)

 

So if you want to see more professional artwork on the Jaguar, start buying more homebrew games! This will help the handful of programmers (that many times use their own programmer's art) to be able to recruite professional artists.

 

What has helped the Jaguar homebrew scene to get a little bit out of the 8-bit looking art is some emerging artists like: @Eternal-Krauser, @agradeneu and @SlidellMan who are willing to support the Jaguar homebrew scene just out of pure dedication.

[Wyvern Tales 2]

9 hours ago, CyranoJ said:

 

RAPTOR doesn't work at all like that, and yet, oddly, Jumping at Shadows looks just fine at 60fps with multiple layers

 

There's more than one way to skin code a cat.

Yes, of course there can be a number of different ways to make it nice.

Keep up the good work, we all improve

😀

[Wyvern Tales 2]

2 hours ago, agradeneu said:

Using the 68K for gfx actually means you have some room for improvement, possibly

That's exactly what I said was not good, you have to load the tilemap into the internal SRAM on the gpu to avoid buss stalls.

It doesn't have to do with the slowness of the 68k (it'sactually quite fast), it has to do with the 68k's role as the manager which blocks the buss (and sometimes it has to wait for the buss). This will not happen with the gpu if it uses the internal SRAM as it is not located on the shared buss.

 

So it's not only about moving from 68000 assembly to RISC assembly, you have to understand how to arrange thigs efficiently.

(It's all described in the developer documentation)

[Wyvern Tales 2]

55 minutes ago, agradeneu said:

You can kindly ask the OP to draw and scroll tilemaps pretty nicely. 

The OP does the actual drawing,  but you need something else to read the tilemap data and to determine which tiles to draw in the viewport window. This is a memory access intense operation, so having the 68000 locking up, and waiting for the bus is not a good idea (it works, but you will not have many cycles left for the game logic)

 

Smaller tilesizes will make this more obvious. For 32x32 tiles need 70 memory lookups, for 16x16 tiles you need 260 memory lookups (per frame). Provided that the viewport is 320x208 pixels.

 

PS. This is also why I am a little bit sceptical against those who push the boundaries of the Jaguar with a visual demo. Once you add collision detection, and some convincing game logic you may not be able to have a game that looks like the visual demo did.

[Graham Gooch Cricket]

What about Australia, it's 3rd from the top on the cricket list?