Dylan1CC wrote:Looks nice so far! Like a bit of Blazing Lazers and Nexr perhaps? Any PCE shooters you guys are using in particular for inspiration?
I really like the sun in the background. BTW, have you thought about having some kind of static "cinema"/character story screens in between levels?
As far as the graphical style, I, personally, am drawing inspiration from arcade games like DonPachi as well as the great PCE shmups like Soldier Blade, Blazing Lazers, and Spriggan. As for gameplay, Xymati may feature some things that were virtually absent in PCE shumps, like chaining bonuses and maybe even some mild form of rank.
That sun background is just tentative. It will probably end up in a cinema for PC-Gunjin, to be honest. Xymati will, however, feature some great space backgrounds and, yes, it will also have some cinemas. I don't know about cinemas after every level, as that might break up the gameplay a bit... we'll have to see how things develop.
Ganelon wrote:Although that screen looks to very a mockup of sprites, I'm guessing there won't be any bombs?
No, that's not just a mockup. Yes, Xymati will have bombs
ST Dragon wrote:It looks cool, but one problem that plagued most PCE / DUO vertical shooters, is that the player's crafts, usually weren't agile / aerodynamic looking, but rather a bit blocky, with weird looking angles & curves.
You should make one that looks more like the Axelay, Raiden, RayStorm spaceships.
A vertical shooter without a cool looking craft is… hmm... well, a novel.
Only Vertical PCE shooter I can think of with a cool looking craft is Soldier Blade.
The rest look plain dull imo.
There will be at least two other ships to pick from. I'm sure at least one will strike your fancy.
ST Dragon wrote:Not to mention the lack of animation frames in the Bosses of most PCE / DUO shooters (Excluding Arcade CD games of course)
If one could make a fully articulated Boss similar to the Axelay 2nd Level Mech Boss on the PCE or DUO that would be a technical marvel.
By the way, how many on-screen simultaneous colours, is this new Xymati PCE shooter going to feature?
Is there any chance that we'll finally see the theoretical peak of 256 simultaneous on-screen colours, achieved in this PCE shooter?
That would rock!
Correct me if I’m wrong, but weren’t the only PCE games that actually utilized all 256 colours on screen:
Detana Twin Bee
Magical Chase
Parodius
Street Fighter II
Strip Fighter II
Most other PCE didn’t use any more than 64-72 colours. Even Aldynes (SGX) for the SuperGrafX didn’t use more than 64 colours on screen.
So was the PCE’s low 8K main Ram bottlenecking the system from utilizing all it’s 256 colours, unlike the SNES which used all it’s 256 colour palette in most cases. (Donkey Kong Country, Axelay, R-Type 3, Super R-Type, Rendering Ranger R2, Terranigma, etc…)
Chris Covell already put this into words better than i could. Here's the scoop... take the most colorful PC-Engine game that you know of, take a screen shot in an emulator and then open it up in Photopshop. Reduce it to indexed color, and you'll find that it has no more than 70 or 80 colors. You see, on the PCE you run out of good colors to pick from, before you run into any kind of hard limit. Using 256 (or even 481) simultaneous colors in a PCE game is completely feasable, but your game would look rather silly using that many colors, unless you're drawing something like a rainbow. The most colors i have heard of a PC-Engine game using was maybe Ys IV using 80+ in some places. Both PC-Gunjin and Xymati will far and away be the most colorful games ever produced on the PC-Engine. PC-Gunjin will push 100+ colors in some places, and Xymati even more. The PC-Engine is very, very good at managing color palettes. The PC-Engine could handle up to 32 color palettes simultaneously (16 palettes for the background, another 16 available for sprites). This is
twice as many as the SNES (maximum of 16 palettes), and
eight times as many as the Genesis (maximum of 4 palettes). This means you can pretty much just throw wanton disregard to the number of palettes you are using on the PC-Engine, whereas on the SNES and Genesis (especially the Genesis) you had to be more mindful of not surpassing the system's palette limitations. The games you mentioned (Detana Twin Bee, Magical Chase, Parodius, Street Fighter II, and Strip Fighter II) in all actuality use no more than 60-70 colors at any given time.
To illustrate my point, I'll give you the following comparison. The picture on the left is a screenshot of the original Donkey Kong Country for the SNES. It uses 243 colors out of a global 15-bit palette. The picture on the right is the same image converted to the nearest 9-bit color (what the PC-Engine uses). The PC-Engine image uses only 88 colors. If you tried to add more colors to the PC-Engine image, it just wouldn't look right.
The 8KB of work RAM in the PCE is not really a bottleneck issue at all. Many games never even use it. It's basically there just to store variables and run small programs that need use of some banked RAM. The game code itself is executed straight from the HuCard, instead of being transferred to RAM first, so it is like the HuCard is also the RAM in a roundabout way. This means as far as executing game code, you are only limited by the size of the HuCard (or System Card for CD games).
Big, scary, complex bosses are a personal graphics priority for both PC-Gunjin and Xymati, in my book. I once asked BT if he wanted big, scary bosses, and his response was "I want bosses that make people want to buy stock in Fruit of the Loom."
Here's an example from PC-Gunjin:
If you liked Axelay's level 2 boss, you'll want to check out Gate of Thunder's level 6 boss... very similar. Some other PCE games with great bosses that come to mind are Lords of Thunder and Soldier Blade.
That's looking amazing, I sooo want this game.
(3x normal size for easier viewing)
