@imaginaryhuman_1 you and I seem to be operating on the same wavelength. Which you may find to be a good or scary thing. Not sure. Anyway, I agree with you and am doing the same thing for the same reasons. Sure we gained some stuff over the decades following all 2D games but we also lost something. And most people making 2D games these days seem to not be true retro gamers. Sometimes they do well and other times they just miss the mark.
Some comments and messages I’ve got on GameJolt for my Atlantic Crisis game are focused on it being too easy for a real retro gamer. They like it a lot and feel that it is more authentic than the majority of so called retro games but want the first round to start out about as hard as round 4 does so they actually have some challenge out of the gate.
So yeah make them challenging. I intentionally tried to make it start out easier so more folks could enjoy the game. But that was because my mind was still messed up from hanging around here (lol) and past experience of every game prototype receiving comments about being too hard. I’ve got to unlearn some bad stuff I picked up from presenting retro-inspired games to a non retrogaming audience. As you said anyone playing retro games is used to a challenge from the start. It is what they enjoy and expect.
Anyway if you read the description on my Atlantic Crisis game at GameJolt it is incredibly close to what you just wrote above.
Space Duel was great game and I think they did a great job on that game. My friends really loved that game. Red Barron and the infamous “enemy behind you” … and there was no escape. I loved that. One of my friend’s like playing Star Castle but I never played it just watched it. Gravitar was good game and very hard but I think it was well done. I do not recall seeing Omega Race at all. I had one friend who loved Tempest he would go for an hour so on one quarter. There was “bug/feature” that would give you 40 free credits in Tempest that everyone seemed to know about.
Space Wars (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Wars) was another very popular arcade game but it only seemed to be available at amusement parks. But it was really nice two player vector game.
I am still interested in how you got space duel up two flights of stairs. :):)
Really amazing engineering went into those machines back then. Super Missile Attack (which was modified Atari missile command) was another game that just thrashed the player.
super missile attack background history as well as Asteroids speed up kit
Well if you went to arcades where I lived you’d see plenty of girls too. Guess what? girls get excited and have adrenaline too. I know, it’s surprising.
Back in the 80s I knew a girl called Gina, she was ahead of me and a better gamer to boot. Don’t get caught up in any kind of feminist craze. Girls and women know what they like, and it’s not what men tell them they like or attempt to market to them. It’s what they choose to like.
Plenty I knew back then liked games of all difficulties so I guess we have different experiences.
That’s true. There were a few gaming girls in my little social circle back in school days and one was very skilled. Pac-Man probably pulled more of them in although this girl enjoyed blowing stuff up.
Yeah fast forward to 2016 where people are (regardless of internet politics and gender) are enjoying things like bayonetta, world of warcraft, overwatch and dark souls.
It’s short sighted to say: “oh! you appear to lack a dangly one, therefore you can only play politically correct woman’s games.”
I didn’t realize Space Wars was ever an arcade game. I only saw it on Unix machines back in the 80s (the earliest boxes I got my hands on that had graphics of any kind). Since the code was available for free there used to be implementations on just about every platform. Somebody wanna port this to Unity?
An arcade cabinet like that weighed in around 350 lbs, mostly due to the CRT and 3/4" MDF construction. A hand-truck, a friend, and a case of beer did the trick. The hard parts were the turns in the staircase…
Ha, not that masochistic! Though I guess if I’m doing a vector game anyway, it doesn’t get any simpler than Space War as a starting point. However, looking through the comments in that PDP assembly it seems there were more modes and opponents and features than I remember.
I haven’t done anything towards actually starting a project except run my mouth, so far. I have to finish my current giant complex monster of a project first, lol. Too far along in that to just drop it (finally).
I own Fast Line Renderer and MK Glow, which I thought about using, but there’s a pretty good chance I’ll write my own shader. I’m pretty new to shaders but have done some elaborate stuff on the fragment side, so this might be a fun way to do something novel with a 3D shader (to “simulate” flat vector graphics rendering of 3D objects as Space Duel does).
I just remembered the other weird part in Space Duel… the linked ships. That mode always got chaotic fast:
Thanks for the info. I will have to check out those two unity assets.
Linked ship mode. Nothing brings out team spirit better than linked ship mode. The thrill of spinning out of control. In many ways Space Duel seems like it would be a much better sequel to Asteroids than Asteroids Deluxe.
They really had some good multiple player games back then and Atari always had some of the more interesting ones. Atari Indy 800 was a great 8 player car racing game. Some of the Atari four player games that were always fun … Atari Warlords, Gauntlet I and II, and the rare Atari Football. The Atari Football was really great introduction to the large Atari trackball. You really had to work to play football and the trackball was the perfect controller for it.
We played Warlords after school almost every day for awhile there.
The other line/vector asset which is probably more popular is Vectrosity. I don’t remember why I chose Fast Line Renderer over that one but both seem to be very well supported. I’ll probably end up buying Vectrosity as well.
My thinking is it might be easier to simulate Space Duel’s look (and certainly more interesting to me) to write a vertex shader to do edge highlighting and use real (basic) unlit 3D objects moving in a flat plane but rotating around their centerpoints, rather than doing all the calcs needed to draw, clip, and hide the edge lines using 2D line drawing. (Obviously the Space Duel elements which aren’t spinning in a 3D fashion can just be simple textured quads.)
Actually, though, since the shapes are so basic and have few faces, it probably makes the most sense to just texture each face in black with colored edges and let a regular shader (or maybe the glow shader) do the rest. But that’s no fun!
That would be interesting to write a vertex shader. Texture each face sounds like an easier option and probably less changes with each Unity upgrade cycle.
I did notice there is an asteroids clone in Unity. It has a classic mode and and “slightly enhanced mode” which gives it options for a star field, asteroids can collide and and an optional field. I built with Unity 5.3.x without issue.
The final 1.0.0 code can be downloaded from here.
Since you like space duel you might find this interesting from the one of the original developers.
Interesting that Twiik found Vectrosity difficult to work with. Fast Line Renderer is kind of fiddly (though doesn’t seem especially buggy) so that was one reason I was thinking about trying Vectrosity. Of course, it has been almost two years, too.
And as a bonus that Space Duel page links to a font, completely absolving me of any need for artistic talent! Right up my alley.
Since you were talking earlier about your Space Duel vector graphics CRT going out … I thought this part of the article on hardware issues (in The Close of the Vector Era section) was especially interesting …
We discovered a problem a bit too late which caused the displays to blow out. It seemed, to correctly draw vectors with proper clipping, you needed to be able to draw a distance off the actual screen. This allowed scrolling and lines to disappear gracefully without the need for expensive clipping hardware. Unfortunately, if you drew too far off the screen, you could blow out the deflection amps in the monitor. Effectively, you were trying to draw on the back of the cabinet, and the hardware would let you try! We thought we had some hardware checks to prevent this, but they didn’t always work.
<<<<<<