When Sega was touting their “blast processing”, they really meant the hard work and dedication of the Genesis developers who used every trick they could to get the graphics run on hardware that was not designed to run them.
I do miss this sort of programming skill that was required (not to undervalue current game programmer's skills, its just a very different skillset these days), working within hardware limitations to trick the hardware, viewer or both into doing/seeing things which shouldn't of been possible. You are a really talented individual and love your simple explanations of what probably took weeks/months and a lot of hardwork to perfect. I only wish there were more people sharing this sort of content, but still look forward to more of your excellent content.
I completely agree, what I loved the most about older game design were that the limitations of the hardware forced developers to think outside the box and come up with creative ways to design games and try to capture the perspective and intent they were going for. A lot of the games that I love, such as turn based RPGs, tank control style adventure/horror games, and even many side-scrollers that attempted to artificially imitate 3D depth, and even movement with pre-rendered sprites and animation effects were achieved with unique techniques such as use of pre-rendered sprites, techniques like parallax scrolling, software based sprite scaling and use of hardware to pull off stuff like Mode 7 and Super FX, because the limitations of the hardware necessitated such thinking. Now that game hardware theses days can pretty much do anything, and game design such as these fall by the wayside for more modern techniques, many games these days feel kinda samey, and I feel that something is lost. Kind of like with movies and comparing the old time consuming use of practical effects , skilled photography and advanced editing, and limited use of CGI to compose certain shots, that was required to capture what they wanted, with great results, compared to many modern films, where they just toss everything into a computer and modern CGI and Photoshop just does everything for them, and it comes off as too clean and shiny and sort of cheapens the product as a result. But yeah, my bottom line is that limitations aren't always a bad thing! ;3
This might not be your thing, but i highly recommend you check out whats happening in the 3d rendering community. A lot of problem solving trying to simulate lighting and physics animations that are just too complicated to compute. If your not familiar with Corridor (vfx artist react guys) they do a great breakdown of solving problems in movie magic and rendering situations.
There's bound to be a time in the foreseeable future where hardware plateaus for a number of years and we have to start using software trickery to get more and more impressive programs and games.
@@skyricq I really hope this is what ends up happening but I also do not think it will be the case. Enter: Capitalism. Performance isn't a necessity, it's a luxury (unless it's part of a workflow like 3d, IDE, image manipulation, design, Maya/Blender/Photoshop/After Effects, etc) where quicker work = more work = more money. Performance takes time to design and test, you're gonna have a hard time explaining to the suits that faster software is better than some other more marketable feature you can take pretty screenshots of and plant on your 'purchase page'. For example, Spotify doesn't give a shit about your ram or any other resource usage metric, it's built on a tech stack of petrified feces (Spotify's engineers call it the 'most intricate use of JavaScript ever', go figure). The desktop app hasn't received a new feature in (it's removed a bunch though) in like half a decade. It won't matter if it's slow and unstable, it opens (most of the time) and it's bringing in money. That's all it cares about.
I remember being impressed with this effect back when this game first came out. I couldn’t figure out how you did it until now. Thank you for an awesome game experience in my youth, and an education in my mid-life.
I'd be curious to see you talk about Duke Nukem 3D for Genesis to see if they came to the same solution you did. One thing I noticed with that game is that they have skipped every other line vertically giving a stripe effect, but when played on a composite signal it blends it so you do not notice it. I'm also curious if you ever developed games with the intention of it being played in either RF or composite since the mega drive sometimes needed those tricks to simulate more colors.
I LOVED this game as a kid.. man the RC Car parts were hard. But learning all these bits of how it was coded and came to be... I mean, you sir.... are a genius.
fascinating video. I always wondered why I didn't like these psudo-3d platformers but I think I know now: the technical tricks required placed serious constrains on the level design.
I had this projet 2 years ago. I wanted to create it on cocos creator and needed to fake 3d (back then cocos creator didn't support 3d yet), I did implement something very similar to this. Then after more and more thoughts, I realized it was just too difficult for what's it worth so I just switched the whole project to unity and used proper 3d model instead. What you did here is very amazing considering that you did this years ago without all the modern tools.
i only ever had the demo for clockwork knights but i played the mf shit outta toy story as a kid. And here i am now, finally graduated as a game programmer watching this just as entertained as i was playing it XD.
People forget that software development and the raw complexity of the hardware they're programming on and the tools they use is exponentially higher than it used to be. To truly make such small optimizations for very minor things would require so many unique modules to be handwritten, at least tens of thousands of lines of code, which would take god knows how many man hours to become stable and fully functioning. Games nowadays must be at least hundreds of times larger in terms of lines of code and art assets that need to be made, and it's just impossible even with an incredibly large staff and years worth of time to accomplish.
If only the Game Boy version was this good. 3d does not work on the Game Boy due to only having 4 colors, but games like Donkey Kong Land and this one is still impressive.
You mention Clockwork Knight as inspiration for doing a 2.5d game. But it was released after Donkey Kong Country. Did DKC give you inspiration as well?
DKC used pregen 3d models but the worlds were 2d, just beautifully drawn. Terrain didn't skew or anything like that to make it appear 3d. They did have some foreground and background objects to give it an effect in some places but not quite the same.
You should,ve also explained how that vertical 3D depth was done, eventrough it’s the same trick, but it would,ve been interesting if you,ve just talked about it as well.
Really insightful, loved it! It's an ingenuous technique and looks very convincing. I did have one question though: how did you manage to achieve the 3d effect on the plane that's is constantly circling. As it's moving independent of the player position I'm assuming the same technique could not be applied...
Did anyone actually like the game Spot (7up ad) on Snes? I loved it and have played it many times through the years. Just curious. This game made me think of it.
That was always the way though. The longer devs programmed the system, the more they found the tricks they could use and get the most out of it. Most of a console's technically brilliant games would be its later ones.
It does still happen but on a larger scale while being pushed by hardware advancements over the decades. Not all machines were built the same, especially PC's but effects and techniques such as the following were also made available on console grade hardware from ps2/xbox up to the latest : Fur effects, displacement/normal mapping, vertex instanciation, "realistic" physics simulation and ragdols, facial animation, pixel/vertex shaders, materials, AI and pathfinding, raytracing ... the list goes on and, and these were all inventions and innovations in their own rights and you can retrace their history by reading articles from back then up to today about most game engines on the market including ID tech, Lith tech, Unreal, Cry engine, etc .... It did stagnate a bit during the mid 360/ps3 era when multicore processors started to be mastered after which it all just skyrocketed and just kept going with the latest ps4/Xone but more specifically the Switch and it's ARM/Tegra combo that nobody though could deliver such good looking ports (althouth still limited). Seing Doom, Wolfenstein or The Witcher run on the switch is interesting. So yes, we have plenty of hardware to do basic stuff but you'll have to work as much harder as before to push the limits. I mean, how could you even compare the quality of an innovation on 16 bit hardware to our modern beasts ? I guess some answers could be found in the demoscene but still..
@@TheSliderW Even the demoscene isn't what it was back in the 90s, a lot of modern demos are made using construction kits, they are built by artists. Still there a mind blowing things to be found.
If only the game had some more variated color palette like donkey kong.. I guess that would limit the possibilities for the 3D effects. Yet then the game would be much more attractive in my opinion. It looks a bit sad now...
artists in your team must have been pretty smart to make their art work in thease games ! with unreal 5 being a thing now i imagine artists will need even less optimization skills to make games. and its kind of sad.
"Back in my days, we drew 3D manually !"
@Stanley Sean what does that have to do with this video?
@Fluffy's Dumping Grounds he's @ing an account that isn't here. he's probably replying to a deleted reply
When Sega was touting their “blast processing”, they really meant the hard work and dedication of the Genesis developers who used every trick they could to get the graphics run on hardware that was not designed to run them.
this game was hard as hell but looked incredible
I do miss this sort of programming skill that was required (not to undervalue current game programmer's skills, its just a very different skillset these days), working within hardware limitations to trick the hardware, viewer or both into doing/seeing things which shouldn't of been possible.
You are a really talented individual and love your simple explanations of what probably took weeks/months and a lot of hardwork to perfect.
I only wish there were more people sharing this sort of content, but still look forward to more of your excellent content.
Yeah, meanwhile Electron apps: Sits at 2 gb of ram to display a text box while also taking up 400 mb on disk.
I completely agree, what I loved the most about older game design were that the limitations of the hardware forced developers to think outside the box and come up with creative ways to design games and try to capture the perspective and intent they were going for. A lot of the games that I love, such as turn based RPGs, tank control style adventure/horror games, and even many side-scrollers that attempted to artificially imitate 3D depth, and even movement with pre-rendered sprites and animation effects were achieved with unique techniques such as use of pre-rendered sprites, techniques like parallax scrolling, software based sprite scaling and use of hardware to pull off stuff like Mode 7 and Super FX, because the limitations of the hardware necessitated such thinking. Now that game hardware theses days can pretty much do anything, and game design such as these fall by the wayside for more modern techniques, many games these days feel kinda samey, and I feel that something is lost. Kind of like with movies and comparing the old time consuming use of practical effects , skilled photography and advanced editing, and limited use of CGI to compose certain shots, that was required to capture what they wanted, with great results, compared to many modern films, where they just toss everything into a computer and modern CGI and Photoshop just does everything for them, and it comes off as too clean and shiny and sort of cheapens the product as a result. But yeah, my bottom line is that limitations aren't always a bad thing! ;3
This might not be your thing, but i highly recommend you check out whats happening in the 3d rendering community. A lot of problem solving trying to simulate lighting and physics animations that are just too complicated to compute. If your not familiar with Corridor (vfx artist react guys) they do a great breakdown of solving problems in movie magic and rendering situations.
There's bound to be a time in the foreseeable future where hardware plateaus for a number of years and we have to start using software trickery to get more and more impressive programs and games.
@@skyricq I really hope this is what ends up happening but I also do not think it will be the case.
Enter: Capitalism. Performance isn't a necessity, it's a luxury (unless it's part of a workflow like 3d, IDE, image manipulation, design, Maya/Blender/Photoshop/After Effects, etc) where quicker work = more work = more money. Performance takes time to design and test, you're gonna have a hard time explaining to the suits that faster software is better than some other more marketable feature you can take pretty screenshots of and plant on your 'purchase page'.
For example, Spotify doesn't give a shit about your ram or any other resource usage metric, it's built on a tech stack of petrified feces (Spotify's engineers call it the 'most intricate use of JavaScript ever', go figure). The desktop app hasn't received a new feature in (it's removed a bunch though) in like half a decade. It won't matter if it's slow and unstable, it opens (most of the time) and it's bringing in money. That's all it cares about.
I remember being impressed with this effect back when this game first came out. I couldn’t figure out how you did it until now. Thank you for an awesome game experience in my youth, and an education in my mid-life.
Limitations produce the most aweing and amazing solutions that are just crazy to learn about.
This game had a lot of memories for me. Both SNES and Genesis, I rented both versions. The Claw fight though was so stressful.
The Genesis Version Was Annoying.
The SNES Version Was *H E L L*
Man, this channel is mandatory to anyone into game development. Liked, Shared, Subscribed and Recommended.
Clockwork Knight was one of my favorite saturn games!!
This looks like the Alladin game for master system, they have a nice 3d effect that made the game look gorgeous
Yeah
Very cool. The effect looks fantastic today, even!
I found my new favorite channel
I can't get enough of this.
I'd be curious to see you talk about Duke Nukem 3D for Genesis to see if they came to the same solution you did. One thing I noticed with that game is that they have skipped every other line vertically giving a stripe effect, but when played on a composite signal it blends it so you do not notice it.
I'm also curious if you ever developed games with the intention of it being played in either RF or composite since the mega drive sometimes needed those tricks to simulate more colors.
That looks pretty sweet. I imagine that Donkey Kong Country used similar classes of tricks. It was known then that it used pre-rendered 3d.
I LOVED this game as a kid.. man the RC Car parts were hard. But learning all these bits of how it was coded and came to be... I mean, you sir.... are a genius.
That is an interesting programming effect. Mickey Mania also had some of this effect in places, IIRC.
Same coder. :)
I absolutely loved this game as a kid. Great work
Very interesting stuff, thank you for putting together that video! It's a shame this doesn't have more views.
This is such a great game, mind blowing at the time and still amazing in hindsight. Great video!
That's so incredibly clever. I love it
fascinating video. I always wondered why I didn't like these psudo-3d platformers but I think I know now: the technical tricks required placed serious constrains on the level design.
You are absolutely awesome. Please keep this kinda content coming. Except next time, get that invincibility cheat on the dresser drawer!
Awesome, I loved Toy Story on the Genesis back in the day!
I had this projet 2 years ago. I wanted to create it on cocos creator and needed to fake 3d (back then cocos creator didn't support 3d yet), I did implement something very similar to this. Then after more and more thoughts, I realized it was just too difficult for what's it worth so I just switched the whole project to unity and used proper 3d model instead. What you did here is very amazing considering that you did this years ago without all the modern tools.
These videos are both very impressive and educational.
i just binge watched your channel!
Great video thx.
I used to LOVE this game... I think I still have it actually.
That was incredible! How are you modifying this to show us today? Are you video editing the game in an emulator or do you have source code?
Probably the latter.
this blew my mind!
i only ever had the demo for clockwork knights but i played the mf shit outta toy story as a kid. And here i am now, finally graduated as a game programmer watching this just as entertained as i was playing it XD.
Love your channel!
Ingenious! Skew & Stitch
This is so cool and clever
Whatever happened to the Directors Cut of this game? I LOVED Toy Story as a kid and the changes you discussed making sounded great.
Astounding.
always back for more
If only this creativity could be used a lot with the new hardware of today.
It can be used. But lazy developers don't give a shit
@@nneeerrrd it's not the developers fault.
It's more likely the Management's fault, as all that matters is a too short deadline and money
It can. The problem is developers who lack the creativity to even bother trying to do these things.
I meant i wish people could've decided to use this creativity and other tricks.
People forget that software development and the raw complexity of the hardware they're programming on and the tools they use is exponentially higher than it used to be. To truly make such small optimizations for very minor things would require so many unique modules to be handwritten, at least tens of thousands of lines of code, which would take god knows how many man hours to become stable and fully functioning. Games nowadays must be at least hundreds of times larger in terms of lines of code and art assets that need to be made, and it's just impossible even with an incredibly large staff and years worth of time to accomplish.
The 3D side of the house in the first stage of Mickey Mania's "Lonesome Ghosts" level looks similar to the technique you've demonstrated here, is it?
If only the Game Boy version was this good. 3d does not work on the Game Boy due to only having 4 colors, but games like Donkey Kong Land and this one is still impressive.
You mention Clockwork Knight as inspiration for doing a 2.5d game. But it was released after Donkey Kong Country. Did DKC give you inspiration as well?
DKC used pregen 3d models but the worlds were 2d, just beautifully drawn. Terrain didn't skew or anything like that to make it appear 3d. They did have some foreground and background objects to give it an effect in some places but not quite the same.
It was actually released around the same time as DKC (in Japan, at least). November 1994.
I loved this game, I actually had to got back and watch the movie to complete the alien 3d level.
You should,ve also explained how that vertical 3D depth was done, eventrough it’s the same trick, but it would,ve been interesting if you,ve just talked about it as well.
you! you worked on this? this game was so hard for me when I was a kid!
This is so goddamned interesting.
the way woodyy runs is so creepy
Really insightful, loved it! It's an ingenuous technique and looks very convincing.
I did have one question though:
how did you manage to achieve the 3d effect on the plane that's is constantly circling. As it's moving independent of the player position I'm assuming the same technique could not be applied...
I think the plane is just a sprite animation.
Spent a lot of time on this game on my Genesis!
I remember playing the Toy Story game back in the day
It was a little bit too child like for me lol
This guy is a god
I wish there were more channels like this one (but for SNES games)
Toy Story looks much better than Clockwork Knight. "Simplicity" is the key to many many things.
did sega get annoyed at this type of thing as it might have made the Saturn look less capable?
Gasek86 made a Wolfenstein 3d game on genesis that roasts any supernes or 32x versions !
Did anyone actually like the game Spot (7up ad) on Snes? I loved it and have played it many times through the years. Just curious. This game made me think of it.
Haven't I seen this before?
Is this a reupload? Cause I swear I already saw this vid months ago.
Jon really is a wizard of programing... Too bad he used his "magic" on Sega Genesis latter in its lifetime...
That was always the way though. The longer devs programmed the system, the more they found the tricks they could use and get the most out of it. Most of a console's technically brilliant games would be its later ones.
Yet more voodoo :)
Neato.
𝚂𝙸𝙻𝙸𝙲𝙾𝙽 𝙶𝚁𝙰𝙿𝙷𝙸𝙲𝚂 𝙲𝙾𝙼𝙿𝚄𝚃𝙴𝚁𝚂
You should do that with other Mega Drive and SNES games, lel.
Damn, i really wish that donkeykong country did used such cool effects as well, but sadly, nope😟
I want Tom Hanks to watch this
Could this same style be used in top down gta style game?
Sure why not? You could have the buildings use this technique as you drive by them
Limits made games more impressive. Now you have as much RAM as innovation like this doesn't happen
It does still happen but on a larger scale while being pushed by hardware advancements over the decades. Not all machines were built the same, especially PC's but effects and techniques such as the following were also made available on console grade hardware from ps2/xbox up to the latest : Fur effects, displacement/normal mapping, vertex instanciation, "realistic" physics simulation and ragdols, facial animation, pixel/vertex shaders, materials, AI and pathfinding, raytracing ... the list goes on and, and these were all inventions and innovations in their own rights and you can retrace their history by reading articles from back then up to today about most game engines on the market including ID tech, Lith tech, Unreal, Cry engine, etc ....
It did stagnate a bit during the mid 360/ps3 era when multicore processors started to be mastered after which it all just skyrocketed and just kept going with the latest ps4/Xone but more specifically the Switch and it's ARM/Tegra combo that nobody though could deliver such good looking ports (althouth still limited). Seing Doom, Wolfenstein or The Witcher run on the switch is interesting.
So yes, we have plenty of hardware to do basic stuff but you'll have to work as much harder as before to push the limits. I mean, how could you even compare the quality of an innovation on 16 bit hardware to our modern beasts ? I guess some answers could be found in the demoscene but still..
Yeah... Also... Games sometimes run.. slower.
Nobody spends much time optimizing stuff anymore...
@@TheSliderW Even the demoscene isn't what it was back in the 90s, a lot of modern demos are made using construction kits, they are built by artists. Still there a mind blowing things to be found.
@@SerBallister Agreed. Nowadays you also need a deep understanding of a shader language to do original and impressive stuff
this is called "2.5D"
3 brown 1 blue
If only the game had some more variated color palette like donkey kong.. I guess that would limit the possibilities for the 3D effects. Yet then the game would be much more attractive in my opinion. It looks a bit sad now...
"Ow." ... "Ow." ... "Ow."
I'ma fan of the sega md an this looks better than clay fighter could you rework clayfighter then I'll subscribe 😅
This a duplicate from the one from 6 years ago labeled with coding secrets
Coding Secrets started as a sub-series of GameHut, which was later spun-off into it's own channel.
@@gwishart but it was uploaded twice to this very channel. Not 2 different channels.
Better than Sega Saturn
artists in your team must have been pretty smart to make their art work in thease games ! with unreal 5 being a thing now i imagine artists will need even less optimization skills to make games. and its kind of sad.
Stop Reuploading these videos with a different title sequence
2nd
loser
@@nneeerrrd :(
Incessant, annoying music.