This is some concept art I am working on. The game project this is for is a retro-pixel top down affair. The character won’t look like this in-game. It will look more like this. I made this stand in so that I could test the perspective, the shaders, and the animation pipeline, but I always knew that the character would end up looking different. At the time, I hadn’t determined what that different would be.
I wanted a character and a style that fit the retro era of the game. So, sometime late 80’s to early 90’s. I wanted a touch of North American, a touch of European, and a touch of Japanese in the style. A game that could have spawned from that arcade, console, and micro-computer soup. This is the best I have come up with so far.
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Best Games - Dead Connection
The attract mode for Dead Connection opens with a screen that says Taito Film Presents. So far as I can tell there was never an official division of Taito called Taito Film. That fictional declaration helps to set the tone. This won’t be the usual arcade action fare. Aliens, zombies, monsters, you aren’t going to find any of those here. Dead Connection borrows from a lot of sources, not the least of which are the historical crime dramas Untouchables and the Godfather. Gesturing toward film makes sense. This is a game that oozes cinematic style. That is far from being the most interesting thing about Dead Connection. Dead Connection is set in 1953 in a big city somewhere. It says so in the opening titles. The game drapes itself in a film noir, gangster pastiche. Nothing about it is realistic or properly historical. It is, at times, anachronistic and overly cliche. But that’s okay. This is a fanciful take on the crime and revenge genres. More than that though, more than any of the trappings, Dead Connection is a game. The way it plays matters more than the way it presents itself. And it plays like no other game I know. There are plenty of games where you direct a character to walk toward enemies and punch them. There are even more where you use some sort of weapon to shoot at enemies. There are games where you can interact with the background, and there are games where you can dodge and dive for cover. Dead Connection combines all of these, and it did so at a time when that didn’t happen. Games did one or two things very well. Or at least they tried to. Games didn’t try to incorporate multiple overlapping systems. Dead Connection is a piece of gaming history that is both obvious, and well ahead of its time. I’ll attempt to explain why. There were a few run and gun character shooting games made previous to Dead Connection’s release in 1992. Okay, more than a few. Literally hundreds of games had you controlling a character who runs around the screen and shoots at enemies. There were even a couple of games like Cabal, and Blood Bros. where you can dive and dodge enemy fire. It’s possible that Dead Connection took some inspiration from those games. There are a handful of games where they will give the player a certain amount to auto aim, inferring your intentions from simple directional and button inputs. Maybe Dead Connection is aping those games. There are even games that offer a variety of interactions with background elements in the levels using the same simple, context-sensitive, controls. It could be that Dead Connection is trying to be like one of those games. Maybe. But Dead Connection is all of those things. All at once. The wild amount of potential interactions is staggering. You can set parts of each stage on fire. You can destroy almost everything in various ways, and they will display different levels of destruction depending on what happens to them. Cover comes and goes dynamically. You can hit the deck and enter buildings to hide behind walls. You can climb stairs and ladders to take the high ground, and you can lay prone behind a vehicle until it blows up. There are switches and doors. Glass that shatters. Chandeliers that can come crashing to the ground. In 1992, arcade games simply did not have this level of interactivity. They just didn’t. And, as it turns out, they never would. Games like Dead Connection would never be the norm until they were developed specifically for powerful consoles and home computers. There is a fairly minor tradeoff for all of that interactivity. Every level in Dead Connection takes place on only one screen. I said it was a tradeoff, but it may be a strength. Keeping the action on one screen means the player has some time with each level. They have time to investigate each of the interactive elements. They can try to use the level in different ways. If the levels were long, scrolling affairs, it would be likely that you would miss a stairway or switch in all the gunfire, and just walk right on by. Dead Connection is an anomaly. A unicorn. The action arcade game that tried to do a lot with a little and succeeded. At the end of the day, it’s still an arcade game. Relatively short, borderline impossible without spending a mountain in quarters. But that shouldn’t be too surprising. What is surprising is that this game wasn’t copied a million times. There are no home console ports. There isn’t a genre based around the Dead Connection framework. It is really one of a kind. When you look into the resume of the team who worked on Dead Connection, it all starts to come into focus. They worked on several games that I have either covered in a Best Games or have on my list. Dead Connection was made by people who know how to push the envelope. Try new innovative game design solutions. They made sure that Dead Connection is one of the Best Games. I have been sort of off and on with the game project recently. Between finishing up some polish work on Neon Noodles and getting a couple more stories ready to submit, I haven’t done much work on the coding and mechanics side of my 2D game.
That isn’t to say that nothing has moved forward. It most certainly has, but that movement is mostly in the process and visuals department. I slightly revised my rendering process so that it is both faster and more customizable. I developed the technique of rendering crisp, low resolution, sprites based on 3D models in blender. It works well, but I built it to work on one particular set of animations at a particular scale. Part of my revising has been to make it a more general process. Something that can work for a bunch of different sprites at different scales. As far as the style goes, the sprites don’t exactly look like 3D models rendered in Blender. They don’t look quite hand drawn, either. So some more work had to be done. The process works, but to get the visuals where I want them, I’m going to have to work on my animation. For me, this is great news. I’m an animator that rarely gets to do much animation. I spent a bunch of time training my eyes, brain, and hands to detect and recreate motion with life and feeling. I have done a lot of design, modelling, and illustration work over the last few decades, but only a tiny amount of animation. And even less character animation. Now, finding that animation is probably what I need to punch up my visuals is both exciting and terrifying. What if I don’t remember how. What if I can’t animate something that matches my ambition. I guess I’m gonna find out. Best Games - Silpheed
Silpheed wants to set a mood. The game opens with a few lines from the end of Julius Caesar over a simulated star field. “How many ages hence / Shall this our lofty scene be acted over / In states unborn and accents yet unknown” When Cassius speaks these words, he and his co-conspirators have just murdered Caesar and are in the process of smearing their arms with his blood. They want everyone to know what they have done. They are seeking infamy. They are seeking immortality. The game itself is a fairly standard space shooter. The absolute earliest video games were stocked to the rafters with space shooters. They had the sci-fi obsessions of the day to thank for that. Star Trek and Star Wars stand as the inspiration for far too many video games. Early and recent. But, unlike their inspirations, very few of those games can claim to be space operas. Silpheed wants to be a space opera. Of course, the very limited scale provided by the japanese PC-88 computer would never allow for a soaring adventure. Not really. So the developers picked their battles. They would wrap a twenty level space shooter in the trappings of anime space operas. They would do anything to make the game feel grander. More important. It worked. After the Shakespeare quote fades, you are immediately treated to a flythrough of a wireframe 3D spacecraft. So again, this game is punching well above its weight. The PC-88 has more in common with a ZX Spectrum than any modern computer. This is not the sort of machine that should be able to do 3D anything. Yet here we are. The effect still resonates today. This is a space shooter game with cinematic trappings. Operatic ambitions. The FM synthesized music is on point throughout. While it’s not quite a John Williams score, the sense of grandeur is there. While you start out in Silpheed destroying simple waves of enemy ships, the game quickly escalates to battles over planets, Star Wars style trench runs through massive space stations, and battles against devious boss craft. All of these are intermixed with cinematic interstitials. Silpheed wants so badly to be a grand anime, and for the most part, it hits. When ( if ) you finally reach the climactic battle against the massive battleship, Gloire, you will have to contend with terrifying laser blasts, impenetrable shield walls, and every variety of bullets you have dealt with so far. It’s a fitting end to a spectacular game. Silpheed is the sort of game that doesn’t seem to fit in the era when it was made. A game too ambitious for the hardware. Too far ahead of its contemporaries. It's the sort of game that spawns a series, which it did, for better and worse. Most of the games that came after were space shooters, but they lacked the space opera wrapping that made the original so memorable. Silpheed is one of the best games. I’m in the cooldown period.
Whenever I finish a draft of a story (this is the second of this particular story) I set it aside for a little while before looking it over again. The cooldown period could last anywhere from a few days to a week or so. Just enough time for me to not feel so close to it, but short enough that I haven’t forgotten how I want it to feel. It’s a luxury, I know. This idea of a cooldown period. Some people are writing at a breakneck pace, or writing to hit deadlines. I can afford a cooldown, and I hope that most other writers are able to find a way to fit such a thing into their schedule. That doesn’t mean that I won’t be writing for a week. I will just move on to one of the other stories that I’ve been working on. I’ll just push that one to one side for a short while before I look it over again. The hope is that when I read it over I don’t find too many glaring errors or deficiencies. There will likely be a few lines that get tweaked. Maybe some slight rewording here and there. After that, I will send it out into the world where it can gather a few rejections. Currently, I think it’s a fairly good story. Something with some sci-fi ideas, but a core of humanity. A story that will speak to at least some audiences out there. A story that says something to me, at the very least. It’s something I hope to ultimately sell to one of the major sci-fi outlets. We’ll see what I think of it in a week. |
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