Dezaemon Discussion

alpha5099 · Post by **alpha5099** » Thu Mar 24, 2005 2:17 am

Just thought I might as well start a topic about one of the best known shmup-making utilities. What kind of variety is available through the different versions? Who has tried their hand at shmup design? Anything worthwhile, or just dicking around? If anyone has screenshots of their magnum opus, share away.

SheSaidDutch · Post by **SheSaidDutch** » Thu Mar 24, 2005 2:41 am

I was thinking of making this thread myself

I would love to see /play someones creations with this engine

raiden · Post by **raiden** » Thu Mar 24, 2005 5:03 am

I worked about 60 hours with it, and the best discovery/idea I wanted to share was that you can actually use it to create a tate game by selecting horizontal and turning the joystick when playing.

To reduce savefile size, you should make sure to delete all stage data still in memory when you start a new project. This brings it down from about 2500 to 1500 blocks, enabling you to save more on a cartridge.

One nice touch is that you can make enemies shoot other enemies. This helps in several ways, for one the game only allows 3 bullet types regularly, but enemies don´t count, so you can increase the number of bullet types that way. However, enemies can only be shot as a single bullet, not as a pattern, so you should think about which bullets are not to occur in a pattern and use an enemy for that.
Another nice thing about using enemies as bullets is that you can use it to create bullets that change into other bullets, like Shikigami no Shiro has, for example, where an enemy shoots flames, but if the player shoots at the flames, they part into several bullets, making it harder to dodge them.

Dezaemon 2´s engine is surprisingly strong, you can actually make a manic shmup with bullet counts in the region of Dodonpachi, without too much slowdown occuring. All of this with realtime rotation, sprite zooming, parallax effects and the like, which can even cause performance issues on a midrange PC.

The main drawback is the cartridge. As game files are much bigger than the Saturn´s internal memory, a game you make is confined to this cartridge forever, and as the Saturn cartridge slot is a little unreliable, you are always running the risk of losing the game to data loss. Dezaemon Kids on Playstation allows you to copy your game to another memory card, enabling you to distribute it to other people and archiving for safety, too. If you want to work with Deza2, you should try to hunt down the disk drive for the Saturn which is pretty hard to get, though. A mouse also helps a lot for drawing graphics and handling the editor.

captain ahar · Post by **captain ahar** » Thu Mar 24, 2005 8:23 pm

another limitation with Dezaemon 2 is the graphic tables. you can create up to 4 pages, but as all the graphics get stored here it can get eaten up quickly if things are not arranged well.

i have tried some basic things myself (mostly modifying the demo games). as i can't read the documentation, all i have learned is what i can glean off the menus, and experimenting with cause-and-effect of course.

question too: raiden, how much more accesible is Dezaemon Kids? I have heard that it's interface is less cryptic than 2's.

fog · Post by **fog** » Fri Mar 25, 2005 1:07 am

Never used Dezaemon myself but I'll have to investigate.

Does anyone know of some good SEUCK's for the PC? I'm kinda writing one myself and wouldn't mind seeing what the others have to offer

Thunder Force · Post by **Thunder Force** » Fri Mar 25, 2005 2:15 am

fog wrote:Does anyone know of some good SEUCK's for the PC? I'm kinda writing one myself and wouldn't mind seeing what the others have to offer

Last year someone posted about a new tool they wrote called Prelude, although I haven't seen a project released using it yet.

fog · Post by **fog** » Fri Mar 25, 2005 10:08 pm

Yeah I've been watching that one for a while but it doesn't appear to have been updated for ages.

I know loads of people ho still talk about SEUCK on the C64 and Amiga.....you'd think there would be a modern equivalent on PC.

tikkaman · Post by **tikkaman** » Sun Mar 27, 2005 8:32 pm

Hello - just joined!

I think a modern day version of the Seuck is an excellent idea (can't think how many hours I've lost to that program in the good old C64 days (the Amiga version was nowhere near as good!)).

I was thinking about doing a version myself, just wondering if anyone out there had any ideas what a new shmup maker should be able to do - would a clone of the old seuck be good enough nowadays - or would it have to have all sorts of features/options?

Bye for now

fog · Post by **fog** » Sun Mar 27, 2005 10:27 pm

Hi tikkaman,
I guess a lot of older people who played the original would be happy with a PC version of SEUCK with nothing added.

Can't see that appealing to the younger generation though

There are a number of approaches you could take but I'm concentrating on making mine as flexible as possible. So it should be able to handle most shmup types (single screen, horizontal & vertical scrollers, multi-direction scrollers etc) and also allow for plenty of variety in gameplay so it doesn't just produce a load of clones with different gfx.

It would be useful to hear what features people would like to see in a Shmup maker.

tikkaman · Post by **tikkaman** » Wed Mar 30, 2005 11:39 pm

I was thinking of doing an exact clone of the original - then maybe adding new features.

Any thoughts?

fog · Post by **fog** » Thu Mar 31, 2005 8:34 pm

tikkaman wrote:I was thinking of doing an exact clone of the original - then maybe adding new features.

Any thoughts?

Yeah as I said there are several ways you could write a modern day SEUCK. Doing a copy of the original but with obviously improved graphics would certainly work.

There's a lot to be said for keeping it simple like the original as so much of todays game creation software still requires a lot of effort and time invested.

IMO one of the appeals of SEUCK was the low level of skill required and the speed at which you could get results.

ryosnk · Post by **ryosnk** » Tue Apr 19, 2005 9:25 pm

I'm looking into purchasing Dezaemon (for any system) but I don't know the prices for them. Can someone tell me what is the current rate they go for and some links would be thanksful? Thanks.

captain ahar · Post by **captain ahar** » Wed Apr 20, 2005 7:25 pm

there are quite a few on Ebay right now for various systems (PS, SS, NES, SNES, N64). out of those posted i have only played the saturn release, Dezaemon 2 and it is amazing (would be better if i had a running knowledge of japanese, beacuse the game is quite text intensive). also, of note at a Buy it Now of $18, it is less than i payed for mine!

i should point out that with Dezaemon 2, it REQUIRES a 4m cart for saving (Pro Action Replay will NOT work). so best bet for using it is with a jp system.

ryosnk · Post by **ryosnk** » Wed Apr 20, 2005 9:04 pm

I see it on ebay for $18 and $6 shipping so its not bad but I guess I need to get a japanese saturn because I have a US saturn and a action replay and it was noted that, that doesn't work.
I also noticed a Dezaemon 3D for the N64; is that better graphic wise and for storage?

captain ahar · Post by **captain ahar** » Thu Apr 21, 2005 6:45 pm

i've heard Dezaemon 3d is pretty ass, but have not played it myself, so you might want to seek a "real" opinion.

here's a review from Gamefaqs: here