[thunderstruck]

Thanks allot for all the comments. I highly recommend everyone to play it on hardware. The music has less static on the emulator but the stero backgrounds look much better in 3D. The pixel distortion looks somehow wrong when you only see the left eye image.

KR155E wrote:
I was a bit surprised though that Jordan didn’t have anything on file when I entered “Thunderstruck”. 😉

There is actually one easteregg in the Jordan computer because I forgot to take it out.

KR155E wrote:
That’s some amazing sound quality! And some of the best stereo backgrounds since Virtual Bowling, did you 3D-fy them by hand?

Writing the sound engine was surprisingly easy. Looking at DogPs and Horvats code helped allot though. There is still some static sometimes which bothers me a bit.

The image conversion is a half automated process. The conversion to redscale vb images happens automatically, but I need to draw a depth map for the stereoscopic images. I got quite fast at drawing those with photoshop. My converter uses the depthmap to generate a stereo SBS image.

• This reply was modified 11 years, 4 months ago by thunderstruck.

Good news, I have my demo done. I just gave it another complete playthrough and everything seems to be fine. There isn’t really a point in waiting another 3 days so the release will happen soonish in another thread.

A guy from spain said he was working on it: http://www.planetvb.com/modules/newbb/viewtopic.php?topic_id=5908&post_id=30678#forumpost30678

There hasn’t been a change in a while but maybe you can start from there.

Looks pretty cool.

How comfortable is it to use?

Heh, it might look like allot of time, but I would guess I work an average of 2 hours per day. That means I spent around 200 hours on if so far. Therefore, the demo is surprisingly short. I have to stop rewriting everything all of the time I guess.

I managed to put quite some time into this project. I had to stop for a bit recently but am now on track again.

As expected I did run out of space. I managed to compress the music by 10-40%. That allowed me to add some more content and produce a first release candidate.

After that I also changed my image code to be less wasteful. Now there is plenty of space again. So right now I’m in the middle of adding a bit more content while polishing what is there.

Some people were asking for a hint. The only thing I feel comfortable saying right now is that it’s my take on a game that had been in development for the VirtualBoy but was never released.

18 more days.

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Cosmoliner wrote:
Thank you Thunderstruck for release it! :thumpup:

hawk1010 wrote:
Thanks for the release!

manic23 wrote:
… and thanks to Thunderstruck for making this cart available for all 🙂

melloman wrote:
Thank you Thunderstruck….This is awesome!!

Protoman85 wrote:
Thank you, man

speedyink wrote:
Thanks for sharing!

You’re welcome. I actually wanted to put this out right after everyone got their card but forgot to do so.

I don’t really see the point in selling it though. Most of the games are fairly short and you can easily play them on the Flashboy.

Good video indeed. It’s somehow missing the humor from the previous videos though.

It depends on who the developers are and what skills they have. I think it takes more then just programming skills to pull something like this off. The exclusion of the physical release is a good idea.

I think I would be willing to pay something between $100 and $500. As I said, it depends allot on the team, the actual development plan, the game and many other things.

$50,000 sounds like 3 people 3 month?

Johnny365 wrote:
Just got a VB (posted in other thread) and am looking for cheap games right now so I can test the unit. Prefer labels to be in good shape, but for the right price, I’ll accept torn/less than ideal ones!

If you want to play games for cheap I suggest you get a Flashboy+.

There are actually already multiple game idea and mockup threads:

http://www.planetvb.com/modules/newbb/viewtopic.php?topic_id=5962&viewmode=flat&order=ASC&type=&mode=0&start=0

http://www.planetvb.com/modules/newbb/viewtopic.php?topic_id=5623&post_id=28203#forumpost28203

http://www.planetvb.com/modules/newbb/viewtopic.php?topic_id=3992&viewmode=flat&order=ASC&type=&mode=0&start=0

Dreammary wrote:
Omg, VB Wario could be converted into a Mario game instead! Change sprites, and create custom levels!!

hah. I had that exact same idea when I was hacking around in the faceball rom.

Benjamin Stevens wrote:

speedyink wrote:
Hahaha, I remember that one, it was the one that just happened to be silver right? It’s probably still on ebay.

Actually, if there was one where the seller said that it just happened to be silver, then that might be yet another one, because I don’t remember the seller of the white Virtual Boy calling it a silver color. It was definitely a very white color, and it had a lot of spots on it where the paint drips were simply left there and had hardened. I think the white one actually sold rather quickly, though.

I remember the silver one as well. He didn’t specifically say that he painted it silver. He just said he is selling his very rare silver Virtual Boy.

VirtualChris wrote:
I would like some feedback on the game. What do I need to do next? Is it anywhere close to being finished? I want to finish this by August, so any feedback would be greatly appreciated. Man I wish there were signatures here so I don’t have to keep putting the link to the latest builds.
http://www.atari2600land.com/insecticide/

I just gave it a good shot. First of all: I’m impressed how far you’ve got already. It’s been a while since I played it the last time and I think you are actually very close to completing the game.

I love the music per fighter and the individual stage designs. Even though the music loops are relatively short they fit well to the fighters and the stages.

There are some minor things I noticed throughout the game. Some of the screens (for example the fighter select screen and on the kitchen stage) hurt my brain. That’s because the depth is arranged in the wrong order. Basically, something that is in the foreground is displayed further away then the background.

Another minor problem is that there is no option to go back after you picked a fighter. At least I didn’t find any. I also couldn’t continue after I won/lost. But I guess those things are just not implemented yet.

I think the part that needs most improvement is the enemy AI though. Basically, I would hunt after the opponent all of the time and attack him when he passed by. That got a bit frustrating after a while. Sometimes he sneaked up on me from the back. That was cool.

A nice thing to have would be a bit more depth in the single stages. I noticed the kitchen had quite some depth but the other stages I played looked quite flat.

After all it is already a quite fun game. Good job.

The release is just not happening because of the legal consequences.

Maybe if you contact the programmers and offer them to sell their game for them while taking all of the risk you can make a release happen.

You will most likely get sued though.

RunnerPack wrote:
The “why” is irrelevant. Your job as a programmer, upon finding out that your assumption about the behavior of the system was false, is to change your program so that it produces your desired output without relying on said non-existent behavior.

tl;dr: Write a startup routine that clears everything.

Actually, a good software developer will always investigate the “why”. Fixing problems by curing the symptoms is a very sloppy way of doing things and will eventually backfire. You can only develop robust software if you know what you are doing.

SuperRetroBrosBlog wrote:
Definitely looking forward to this. Thank you for all the contributions you have made to the Virtual Boy community!

Thanks for the interest. Hoping you will like the final result.

VBmills wrote:
You have been busy, but don’t burn yourself out thunder, 2015 is still young.

I was actually planning on taking a break from my current game after the demo and approach a couple of smaller projects so that they can become part of the anniversary celebration as well.

Benjamin Stevens wrote:

thunderstruck wrote:
I’m not sure if money is the right way to keep a project going. I actually do appreciate it allot when people show interest in what I’m doing and of course when they like the final result. When I spent too much time on making a game I tend to burn out quite fast. Seeing that others actually care about what I’m doing makes a big difference.

Don’t get me wrong. I am definitely very grateful for the dedicated Virtual Boy game developers that we have here on Planet Virtual Boy, who do it in their spare time for fun and not at all for money. It’s just that it makes a lot of sense that if a person can do what he or she enjoys doing AND can also get rewarded for it, obviously it would be wise for the person to pursue an avenue where such can happen. I think of all the indie developers on STEAM who are doing what they love to do AND getting nice reimbursement for it. There are probably quite a few indie developers out there who could develop very great games for the Virtual Boy, but they currently have no interest in the Virtual Boy and also need money to keep paying the bills. Thus… maybe… just maybe… if they know that they can work a few months on a Virtual Boy game and can get money to pay the bills as a result of it, there might be some of them who will jump on the Virtual Boy scene and help make more of our wildest dreams come true!

I see your point now. I’m all in for a community funded virtual boy game. We would need trustworthy developers and quite some funding though.

Benjamin Stevens wrote:

Well, I am all about getting new games to play for the Virtual Boy, so yeah… I would much rather people try to get something together to raise money for a future game, rather than donate anything to me for this already completed game. It is very likely that I won’t be able to fund another big project by myself in the future, at least not for a long while, so if we can come up with a way for the community to fund a project rather than a single individual, that would be most excellent, I think.

bigmak wrote:
I think having the coders get a certain % or dollar amount from the games sold would be an easier way to fund projects…just a way to say think you to the coders for their time….

-Eric

I’m not sure if money is the right way to keep a project going. I actually do appreciate it allot when people show interest in what I’m doing and of course when they like the final result. When I spent too much time on making a game I tend to burn out quite fast. Seeing that others actually care about what I’m doing makes a big difference.

OK… so the timer is running without a break and I tried to keep up. I have all of the basics (controls, graphics, game-engine, music) in place since mid January. Only a save feature is missing but I might not add that for the demo. I had to make compromises here an there but I think the result is still enjoyable.

Since then I have been working on adding content. So far that is going quite well even though it is tiresome. As usual I wrote plenty of tools to support the task.

However, over the last few days I have build multiple possible demo builds. So basically I build a demo, then start adding stuff until I have another demo ready. Whatever is in the latest demo build when the timer runs out will be released.

The only problem I have is that I’m slowly running out of space. The rom is 2mb already and constantly filling up. This is not because there is so much content but because I’m rather wasteful when it comes to graphics and music. So as soon as I break the 2mb barrier I will start optimizing that before I add more content.

I know that I’m teasing quite a bit here. I promise all of this will make sense when the release happened. Only 10 more weeks.

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