Experimental game design
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Gamasutra just posted an article on the recent Indie Game Jam. The organizers asked,"what can you do with sprites on modern hardware?", and found out that you can render 100,000 of them. 14 developers created 12 games with a lot of sprites in 4 days. The results are pretty interesting.
A lot of people seem to want to make games with older technology (2D, text games, etc.) either because they don't have the time or skills to use more complex technology (which is completely valid) or because they are nostalgic. The nostalgic people tend to make the same style of games that they played as kids (Final Fantasy clones, Mario clones, Street fighter clones, etc.), but it seems like very few people use the full potential of today's hardware with older techniques.
What can of games can be made today with older techniques (very low poly, sprites, 2.5d, tiles, oldschool vector graphics, etc.) that could not be made when the techniques were new?
[edited by - impossible on June 1, 2002 3:04:28 PM]
I''m not sure I understood what the first thread was all about, but I coulda sworn I felt some gool old nostalgia wash over me. 
Just slightly off-tangent here, I really looooove the new console games that look new but play like the classics. Nintendo seems to be good at this with a lot of the GC titles.. I really loved Einhander on the PS. It had all the flashy 3D enhancements, but they never got in the way of the old school 2D shooter feel. Down with FPS, I wanna see some old-style side-scrollers with wall jumps, double jumps, secret areas, Etc.!
Just slightly off-tangent here, I really looooove the new console games that look new but play like the classics. Nintendo seems to be good at this with a lot of the GC titles.. I really loved Einhander on the PS. It had all the flashy 3D enhancements, but they never got in the way of the old school 2D shooter feel. Down with FPS, I wanna see some old-style side-scrollers with wall jumps, double jumps, secret areas, Etc.!
I''m not sure I understood what the first thread was all about, but I coulda sworn I felt some gool old nostalgia wash over me. Just slightly off-tangent here, I really looooove the new console games that look new but play like the classics. Nintendo seems to be good at this with a lot of the GC titles.. I really loved Einhander on the PS. It had all the flashy 3D enhancements, but they never got in the way of the old school 2D shooter feel. Down with FPS, I wanna see some old-style side-scrollers with wall jumps, double jumps, secret areas, Etc.!
Just slightly off-tangent here, I really looooove the new console games that look new but play like the classics. Nintendo seems to be good at this with a lot of the GC titles.. I really loved Einhander on the PS. It had all the flashy 3D enhancements, but they never got in the way of the old school 2D shooter feel. Down with FPS, I wanna see some old-style side-scrollers with wall jumps, double jumps, secret areas, Etc.!
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quote:Original post by Anonymous Poster
I''m not sure I understood what the first thread was all about, but I coulda sworn I felt some gool old nostalgia wash over me.
Read the article and you''ll understand. My post definitely wasn''t about nostalgia though. The whole game jam is more about creating new styles of games with older techniques and modern hardware, rather than recreating older games with better graphics.
Well if you take the polygon drawing power of the new graphics cards and discard the 3rd dimesion that means you have an awfull lot of polygons to spend on creating extremely detailed and elaborate 2D graphics. I''m not talking just sprites. Take an old-style 2D side-scroller. The landscape in most cases was probably done with bitmapped images. Now imagine creating one with polygons; you could have full-screen dynamic video with cartoon rendering (in 2D or of course 3D), deformable landscapes, etc. In fact you can use polygons to do ANYTHING you could imagine in 2D, and faster with more detail. So it''s up to your imagination.
Video hardware in the realm of 3d accelerated card just means that they can draw textured triangles really fast. It''s mainly the responsibility of the software to make those triangles represent anything. A hundred thousand sprites for example, is just one way to make use of those triangles. Whats missing from today''s games is that artistic vision that directs the game. Many developers seek to just reproduce whats already been done so as to get some of the fame and profits that belongs to the game that revolutionized whatever it was that needed revolutionizing. I don''t know what it''s worth, but rpgamer.com has a bunch of screenshots from a korean RPG called Project Arcturus that makes use of 3d polygonal areas, and 2d colorful sprites. It strikes me has having a bit of that artistic design that begs to be different, though its doing what was done a few years ago by Xenogears...
-> Will Bubel
-> Machine wash cold, tumble dry.
-> Will Bubel
-> Machine wash cold, tumble dry.
100,000 cool, I have a game in mind that needs that many, although you''d probably need like a T1 line or something if you wanna play over a network
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