raiding a bike to my atelier today i thought that there could be most crazy setups evolving along even more absurd storyline. imagine the player controlling a paper plane or another toy sliding above surface of urban sidewalk and attacked by bees and flies just to find himself some levels later on crater infested surface of another planet in sorta moon rover or the like.

well. setup and the graphics or even music and the storyline are not that of a problem, craziest things would do. but the first thing would be to set up the game engine. after that one would only have to know: sprites this and that size, this and that movement phases, background or layer tiles this or that size. how many layers allowed. and so on. everybody could help. what i actually wonder is if the dedicated natami team developers have spare time and motivation to pull on such a project even when there is still no actual hardware available it could be tested on. i would expect there have to be some priorities set.

edit: ok. i looked at the sprites and level1 bmps. i understand you basically want to have something about two times that resolution. in this case the scrolling background would be something like ~640x4096. i must admit im not in the mood to do a ww2 theme atm, but eventually i might come up with an alternative. i will report back in that case.

Don't worry that much about the coding. :-)

I took me just 14 days to write the whole first version of the 194X game.

If we have the GFX done in time then it should be no problem to create a very good Arcade game in time to be released together with the first Natami consumer boards.

Cheers

Yes, this is a good idea.

George Mystiloglou wrote:

By the way, what type of airplane is that? I have to design it in 3D to render it...

The original Capcom "1942" and follow saga played the pazific battles between the US and the Japanese Kingdom.

This means the player plays US airplanes and the enemies where japanese planes and japanese airplane carriers and battleships.

You might call me a wimp, but personnally I never liked the feeling of playing one nation, having to shoot down another nation much. I always liked games with a Humans vs aliens plot more.

Anyway if we want to re-create one of the best classic shoot-em-ups then the plot is as it is.

For the players we should pick three sensible looking 2nd-Worldwar planes.
Having slightly different looking models like the "regular" airplane for the 1st player and the twin-body plane for the 2nd is quite nice. Maybe we can just do this again.

Which planes to use makes most accurate sense?
To answer this I lack the know-how about 2nd World-War Airplanes.
Maybe someone else can answer this?

Cheers

Yes this is right.

wawa tk wrote:

in this case the scrolling background would be something like ~640x4096.

About 800x4094 pixel per level.
The background should be a bit wider than the screen so that we can slightly move to the left and right during game play.

wawa tk wrote:

i must admit im not in the mood to do a ww2 theme atm, but eventually i might come up with an alternative.

The game engine can without any change be used for alternative scenarious.

You could easily create a Space game like Hybris or Xenon with it.

Also a Dragon versus sea-dragons and firebirds - Fantasy scenario would be no change at all.

If artists are interested in another scenario we can do this easily later or even in parallel.

Cheers

Oh excellent. This is wonderful!
Looks like we will have the game done very fast!

How about a little more physics simulation. For example acceleration and decceleration matching the airplanes flight attitude. I mean not a exact simulation, just something that feels more like a plane than a robot.

About the plot I would prefere some unexpected twist. For example after war is over the player discovers that he fights for an american mad scientist. Now he has to switch sides and fight side by side with Japanese against the mad scientist. The mad scientist could have secret wappons like tesla towers or strong magnetik fields deflecting bullets and so on ...

That is exactly what I think would be worth to do. To make plane behavior match real plane in action and not only that, but add physics in general. What do you think?

Regards.

The key US fighters in World War 2 were the P-38 Lightning, The P-47 Thunderbolt, and the P-51 Mustang. I think the P-38 is the most visually interesting. Goto
EXTERNAL LINK for paintings and prints of all theses aircraft.

Later

So i decided to play the original game.

1944 the loop master cps2 game, using winkawaks emulator.

Its a fast paced game, action packed, but reviewers dont like the games repetitiveness.

The game I think that beats 194x style game is the Japanese game Ikaruga.

Youtube vid:
EXTERNAL LINK

We are going to pre-render the sprites.
Pre-rendering in high resolution and high quality will result in a better result than 4xAA to start with.

AA is normal texture mapping to improve the placement of pixels of a real time rendered objects. If you prerender in high quality this is done automatically.

The only difference would be the outer-edges of the sprites - but here is might even be better to not AA as to have a clearer definition of the corners like in a Comic movie where the outer edges is extra emphasis to make the pictures look clearer.

Regarding the drawing.
I would like to use the 3Dcore on the Natami to blit the bobs.
The 3DCore can do alpha blending which is nice for explosion, smoke and similar things.

Cheers

Ikaruga is nice but its a complete different type of game.

What I would like to do today is re-create a beautiful Arcade classic.

I would also like to "force" 194X Deluxe into 12bit colors to make it look even more like a deluxe version of an old AMIGA OCS game.

Also we should not over enginer the game.
We don't want to invest 12 month development time into this.
 
The game should be ready in a short time to be bundled with the first Natamis.

We want to bundle the sources of the game with the Natami also..
So that interested developer have re-useable examples which they could re-use to create games quickly.

Cheers

Thanks for the info.
Perfect, so we now have 3 types of airplanes for the players.

The P-38 Lightning with its twin-body - looks real nice.
This plane was used in all original Capcom 1942/1942/1944 games.
Would be nice if we would feature is also.

The two others P-47 Thunderbolt and P-51 Mustang will make nice planes for the two other player - But they are very similar in size and shape aren't they?

Cheers

Most important to me is the game play.
The game should be easy to play and fun to play.

I have no objections to make the game more realistic but to much "realism" could easily destroy the fun of playing.

The point of such a 2D arcade game is that enemie shoot fly slowly and the player can move quickly around the bullets and avoid them.
While this is not realistic at all its fun to play.

Great I'm looking forward to this.

George, what do you think shall we make the development process open to be able to be followed by the public?

What I mean is if we exchange our files/images via uploading them to some fileserver then development /progress of the game would be more public than when we only email them?

Do you like this idea?

Cheers