This stuff blows my mind. Programmers like you had such a perfect knowledge of the hardware and exploited every little bit. The new games are impressive visually and story wise, but the fact that in these older games you needed to design the editor for everything while limited on storage is insane to me.
Toy Story is one of my favorite games on the Genesis. I could have never imagined, as a teen, that I would be - one day - watching the game's creator showing and explaining the tools used to design the game. I loved the games TT produced on the 16 bit days, and I have to thank you for dedicating so much time of Coding Secrets to those amazing pieces of software. Any chance of a Director's Cut of Toy Story?
Strangely, I only had Sonic 3D Blast as my sole Sonic game on my Genesis. I loved that game and never really understood its flaws until the director cut came out. Now it's one of my kids favorite games. I love hearing these stories and learning how they were able to take advantage of a limited system.
@@JosiahGould When I bought my Genny, I got two games with it, and one of them was Dracula. And I played the hell out of it and loved every second. I was always amazed by the scaling effect on the book on Dracula. Later I bought Toy Story and got hold of Mickey Mania and Sonic 3D, and also loved them. Usually, games developed on the west were no competition to Japanese stuff, but TT were always an exception (in general, games by UK developers were, usually, very good).
@@GimblyGFR Be sure to check out Puggsy as well if you haven't already, definitely one of Traveler's Tale's lesser known titles and a true hidden gem that could have been the next evolution in the puzzle platformer genre had it gotten the attention and recognition it deserved when it came out.
people are making things like this possible with games and speedrun practice tools, but it's cool to see people were doing it for their own games already in some cases. I don't think this was very common
@@Valientlink plenty of games back then had debug modes for placing objects, but I''ve never seen one quite so advanced running on the system itself. Cool stuff!
@@Shaflugi What's so surprising, really? I mean there were already fully fledged PCs with GUI based OS and multi-tasking on much inferior hardware than the mega drive.
That editor is utterly amazing. I'm especially intrigued by the memory mapper tool, and how it's visually represented. I almost feel a bit sad that games and the tech powering them is complex enough nowadays that this kind of precision is probably a bad idea to have, because I would feel really happy having that kind of control to fine tune things and make them efficient.
As a mere web developer your programming skills are mind-blowing to me. It would be awesome if you made a programming course, it feels like you have this cool old school programming wizard level of knowledge. The idea anyone managed to learn this much about programming pre-internet is unfathomable to me.
I can't begin to describe how much my childhood is thanking you for making these videos. I feel closer to these classics than ever before and it brings me a tonne of joy. Thank you, man.
If not dumping the RAM via something like a ZAX ICE for the 68000 for directly porting through a custom tool, then likely just printing to the screen the active object ID list and attributes. Key them in on the PC per what the screen reads out. Individual creatures attributes are likely stored in a level as no more than a handful of bytes each making it very easy to type their hex values in to your assembly for the level's objects.
@@sails9311 I was thinking something like that. Either there's some debug connection to the PC, or you just go through the menus and write down the changes on paper for later.
I love everything you show in this video, but I particularly love the vram editor. It's so clean and simple, and it gives you an easy, visual way to arrange data in memory. Great work on this, and great video!
The one thing I didn't see was how you saved the data from that menu. Was there some sort of key-combo that let you store the level in it's current state? It is amazing to think that your team had an ingame level editor of that quality back then, because I still remember being blown away by the unreal editor when I was younger.
@@CodingSecrets I didn't know if it was some menu option or some sort of command on the PC that caused the data to be xferred back to you.That was the only thing I didn't know about was if the editor had that built in to it as I didn't see that bit. I know that obviously the perpiheral that you used wouldn't work anymore unless you rebuilt a DOS computer with a parellel(or serial) port. Just found it amazing that you had that level of a level editor way back when. I always love to see how developers make their games. Even if I never will venture down that road it's still fascinating learning the ins and outs of how they accomplished what they did. I wish more developers of old would do what you've done hear. The only insights I tend to get is from "making-of" bonuses in games or a GDC/other insdustry talk. Thanks for the amazing content on your channel, I'll be sure to continue sharing the videos with my circle of contacts.
This fills a hole I've been thinking about for a good few years now. There are quite a few games out there that have left their editors in the code for fans, data miners and romhackers to find. And while they're always neat to look around in, it's usually only up to your imagination how they were used. Sure, some might be self-explanatory, but it's still a treat to see something like this be demonstrated in its use by a developer of one of these tools.
I'm a huuuuuuuge fan of 8- and 16-bit computers and consoles, in no small part because of the cool techniques programmers used to squeeze out every bit of magic from these systems. Thanks for not only making these games, but taking the time decades later to talk about how you did it!
Theoretically, if the tool is his (which it likely is if he designed it) then by scrapping the Disney materials like the Toy Story ROM and Mickey name, as well as any SEGA IPs, that could potentially be legal, provided he find open-source or PD stand ins for the removed content.
@@dgamer5075 There’s so many bad assumptions here, I’m not quite sure where to begin. Let’s just go with the idea that messing with copyright with Disney is about as wise as doing so with Nintendo, and that odds are he developed this on company time and thus not at all his property to release or repackage.
I had no idea you could make tools like these back then. I thought all of them were really unintuitive because of the hardware limitations. This channel just keeps on giving :D BTW, do you have anything from Toy Story 2 to show? that game was a HUGE part of my childhood and I'd love to see ANYTHING from behind the scenes!
i failed to launch a doom mod in 7 years. sure, it grew 100 fold in scope over time, but i couldn't finish it. got really close and burned out and started something else that i probably won't finish either (trying hard not to stop though)
The key thng to keep in mind is that our narrator had to think about all of this to implement it. It wasen't just there when he arrived on the scene. The cornerstone of computer science is developing a mind capable of creative problem solving when given a set amount of tools.
I've been watching these since they used to be uploaded on gamehut. I'm so happy they are still coming out. one of of not my all time favorite series on RUclips.
With the game being released on the same day as the movie, did you receive renders from Pixar for things like Woody's sprites, or did you have to render the models yourself/find some other way of acquiring said sprites?
This game was great in the day. I then went on to play clockwork knight 1+2 on sega Saturn which I also enjoyed. Keep releasing videos and I will watch coding secrets I do enjoy them and learn alot
Easily one of my favorite videos you've done. Amazing stuff. Your intuition and ability to streamline functionality to work within a set of limitations is admirable. I wish we had more people like you running for political office.
This is amazing. Surely you've won every video game award imaginable! You were ahead of your time. Thank you for not only sharing this, but for everything you did for us in these games that brought us joy. God bless you kind sir.
It's actually pretty common for games to have their editing tools built in, as it saves work; you don't have to write a separate program that can render the game assets, test performance, etc. What's especially nice is when they're left in! It's interesting to learn about how this game was implemented too. I don't think I've seen some of these techniques before. Having the "path" be a box, having a region explicitly control when they're visible, manually assigning VRAM with an intuitive UI... all very clever.
It’s cool to see with how far we’ve come, how much we still do in similar ways! So much about this editor made me think of map editors, Construct, and Unity, with some of its features, even basic. Good job! This is cool to see how things were done back then!
I remember playing this game as Snotty nose, now I’m watching the guy who made the darn thing explain the coding process for it, you are the GOAT SIR. I remember your games for how incredible they looked when I played it on the Sega Genesis
Every time you post a video like this I'm amazed by your forward thinking. Seems like you did these tools (and hacks) not only because it would make a better game, but because it was the right way to do things. I'm willing to bet this "engine" was ultimately un-needed and an overkill for a single game, but you did it anyway... Because you could.
As a working programmer, I appreciate good tooling. I imagine this saved a lot of time when designing levels compared to having to re-burn an EPROM whenever you want to change something. Brian Provinciano gave a good talk on a similar topic: how he made Retro City Rampage deterministic. This made development, testing, and debugging a lot easier.
Another level editor for another awesome game, I've noticed that during Mickey Mania's development you really. started trying to figure out as many ways as possible to really make things even easier with development and I'd say you were very successful considering the fact you were able to not only get your games finished and out within strict project deadlines but still managed to provide such enjoyable and memorable experiences as well. When you really stop and think about it, the legacy Travellers Tales and TT Games has behind it is truly astounding and it was forward thinking such as using things like your level editing technique that helped make something like that possible. Also this episode is missing from the GameHut channel.
That’s an incredibly impressive editor Jon. I’ve always found game development tooling really interesting, not every team had such an aptitude for making things easier.
@@thefunkdroid2777 I took it as that being exactly what OP intended. In that even though the editor did not have to be intuitive, it still ended up being far more so than it had to be.
Never seen so smooth level editor! Specially at this the time. Played with some game's editor on PC and they was slow and clucky. I'm also curious how did you store all changes?
I can't believe one of my favorite Mega Drive game that I spent hours playing back in the day is actually being shown by its creator in editor mode. Its weird and fascinating at the same time.
I still have this game on a disc lying somewhere. This game made part of my childhood, and it's good to know that skill with editing is what made this game so great with such simplicity. Thank you.
I'd be interested in such behind the scenes as well. I'm not the best source for this, but I think the prerendered sprites are just that - 3D models that are rendered into 2D space from modelling software and converted into sprites. As for the exact process, I assume it would involve converting the image into a bitmap of the proper amount of colors for the Mega Drive, and dividing it into a sprite set and animation with, likely proprietary, Tile Editor software. Keep in mind, this is based off a rough experience with deprecated free tools and Sonic 1 ROM Hacking information, and is very likely inaccurate. If I am proven wrong by a master of the hardware, I'd be honored.
@@AnthonyMiele I think 3D renders were made by Pixar guys and given to TT as some sort of raw images sequences, which were converted into sprites. I don't think TT team was actually involved in animation process.....
Brilliant, as always. I enjoyed thinking about the different types of creatures and they damage they do and receive. Really fun and intriguing work as always.
This feels like seeing my magician uncle who dazzled me as a child , finally show how his magic was done. Thank you for the wonder then. And the wizardry now.
Wow cresting a level editor in game to make game development easier is such an amazing idea! Even though it's probably not that necessary anymore with modern game development, I think I'd love to do something like this for my game development projects. Specially if I'm making a game for consoles.
Amazing how stuff like this never really changes in game development, I added a debug mode to my game just by using the keyboard and mouse so I could quickly add things like enemies to test them in an area or add platforms to test an idea.
Thank you very much for this video, I loved it immensely as this game was part of my childhood, but from a developer's perspective as well, it gives quite the few inspirations for how you want to plan your own level editors and object logic. That VRAM allocation table was really cool to see!
One thing I have to commend you on is how you made what pop culture imagined games should look like. If you watch all the little gimmick references to games of the era, you'll see this style of putting bit-crushed photographic versions of characters in a side-scroller. I feel like you really pushed the limit and delivered what your clients wanted, even though you could have taken shortcuts like other IP.
How do you store the results? Is there anything like SRAM to help with that? Or is the development unit connected to the PC and able to export the level to it?
I never had a Mega Drive and yet this game in particular evokes a lot of memories for me How wild to imagine that 25 years later I'd listen to the game designer explain how it worked!
i wish you'd leave this as a cheat code or something. i ALWAYS loved game editors. i played more duke3d's "build" editor than the game itself. like 10 fold. same for doom, warcraft2 and a bunch others.
Wow. This is great. Toy Story was my favorite movie back then. My cousin had given us Toy Story for SNES and I remember insisting on buying it for Genesis too. I still have it in the box. It's a good game. Really hard toward the end.
Hey Jon idk if you will ever see this but I think I found an Easter egg for this game on the exact level you demonstrate in this video. Did you or someone you know sneak the initials of developers in the level with the letter blocks? If so that's awesome and possibly went undiscovered for 20 years! It was the game of my childhood and to stumble across that blows my mind! It was there hidden in plain sight yet overlooked for years, that's incredible! Thank you all for this amazing game that us kids in the 90s loved!
Just how much this game has packed inside? This is absolutely mind-blowing, it's got everything, impressive graphics, music, smooth gameplay, and only today I learn there's also a level editor hidden inside? This game sure deserves more credits than it already gets. You guys were really pushing the limits back in the day!
When you understand that this game was made in six months from start to finish it's kinda mind boggling. Do you think any developer today could create this extremely impressive for the hardware it's on, stunning in many ways actually, fully finished, and presumably pretty bug free game in six months?
Man, I feel your editor could’ve been a game in itself. Even your neat Memory Map GUI is just inventory control to a gamer. Sorta a Mario Maker 20 years earlier.
8:08 The first game to be released at the same time the movie did? And you did it in just six months?!! That's really impresive seeing the final product 😉👌.
Love your videos! Thanks for the effort you put it. It'd be awesome if you made a tutorial series on 2d game development in C or Java. Nothing fancy, just hitting essentials like collision, rendering, sprite animation, etc... I've seen a lot of tutorials on this stuff and seems like there are many ways to do these things. I'd love to see a real game developer such as yourself tackle these topics. It could even be a conceptual overview, no coding needed.
Now I'd love to see what techniques you used in Toy Story 2, for some reason that game gave me trouble when I tried emulating the PS1 version, figured your programming tricks could have something to do with that, it looked really good for a PS1 title and with some impressive draw distance.
This is awesome! Love your videos. I have a question though. This game was one of my favorites when I was a kid and I always wonder why the Buzz sprite of the lvl 3 is mirrored (you can see it due the chest buttons placement). I can understand the boss of the lvl 4 due it can be in the left side of the screen or the right in order to save memory and space, but not the lvl 3. Why not just do it correctly right away?. I understand you put a lot of detail in the game after watching your videos, so there should be a reason. This answer will help me sleep at night 🤣
![Seungmin "그렇게, 천천히, 우리(As we are)" | [Stray Kids : SKZ-PLAYER]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/kAzmhLHePqU/mqdefault.jpg)
This stuff blows my mind. Programmers like you had such a perfect knowledge of the hardware and exploited every little bit. The new games are impressive visually and story wise, but the fact that in these older games you needed to design the editor for everything while limited on storage is insane to me.
Toy Story is one of my favorite games on the Genesis. I could have never imagined, as a teen, that I would be - one day - watching the game's creator showing and explaining the tools used to design the game. I loved the games TT produced on the 16 bit days, and I have to thank you for dedicating so much time of Coding Secrets to those amazing pieces of software. Any chance of a Director's Cut of Toy Story?
Strangely, I only had Sonic 3D Blast as my sole Sonic game on my Genesis. I loved that game and never really understood its flaws until the director cut came out. Now it's one of my kids favorite games. I love hearing these stories and learning how they were able to take advantage of a limited system.
@@JosiahGould When I bought my Genny, I got two games with it, and one of them was Dracula. And I played the hell out of it and loved every second. I was always amazed by the scaling effect on the book on Dracula. Later I bought Toy Story and got hold of Mickey Mania and Sonic 3D, and also loved them. Usually, games developed on the west were no competition to Japanese stuff, but TT were always an exception (in general, games by UK developers were, usually, very good).
Top result when searhing game hut mickey mania
Exactly.
@@GimblyGFR Be sure to check out Puggsy as well if you haven't already, definitely one of Traveler's Tale's lesser known titles and a true hidden gem that could have been the next evolution in the puzzle platformer genre had it gotten the attention and recognition it deserved when it came out.
I am blown away. A full editor on a Mega Drive. And so smooth!! 🤩
people are making things like this possible with games and speedrun practice tools, but it's cool to see people were doing it for their own games already in some cases. I don't think this was very common
@@Valientlink plenty of games back then had debug modes for placing objects, but I''ve never seen one quite so advanced running on the system itself. Cool stuff!
@@Shaflugi What's so surprising, really? I mean there were already fully fledged PCs with GUI based OS and multi-tasking on much inferior hardware than the mega drive.
That editor is utterly amazing. I'm especially intrigued by the memory mapper tool, and how it's visually represented. I almost feel a bit sad that games and the tech powering them is complex enough nowadays that this kind of precision is probably a bad idea to have, because I would feel really happy having that kind of control to fine tune things and make them efficient.
If you get into Assembly programming for old consoles you end up having to be this precise
As a mere web developer your programming skills are mind-blowing to me. It would be awesome if you made a programming course, it feels like you have this cool old school programming wizard level of knowledge. The idea anyone managed to learn this much about programming pre-internet is unfathomable to me.
I can't begin to describe how much my childhood is thanking you for making these videos. I feel closer to these classics than ever before and it brings me a tonne of joy. Thank you, man.
How did you get that edited data out of the editor and back into the game’s code?
He probably had development hardware that could dump the rom
Came here to ask this
I'm also interested in this. I'm not sure if dumping the ROM from the developer cartridge would be ideal.
If not dumping the RAM via something like a ZAX ICE for the 68000 for directly porting through a custom tool, then likely just printing to the screen the active object ID list and attributes. Key them in on the PC per what the screen reads out. Individual creatures attributes are likely stored in a level as no more than a handful of bytes each making it very easy to type their hex values in to your assembly for the level's objects.
@@sails9311 I was thinking something like that. Either there's some debug connection to the PC, or you just go through the menus and write down the changes on paper for later.
I love everything you show in this video, but I particularly love the vram editor. It's so clean and simple, and it gives you an easy, visual way to arrange data in memory. Great work on this, and great video!
I love how the cursor looks to be a copy of the Amiga kickstart 2/3 default mouse pointer!
I thought exactly the same the second I saw it!
Even the menu font looks very similar to the glorious Topaz 8!
Probs the Kickstart cursor WAS the inspiration for the cursor.
@@DanielPinel Yes, I strongly suspect that is the case.
The music is sooo fitting to your videos, i love it as much as the content itself.
I'm trying to find it myself. I _think_ it's related to Minecraft. Maybe because the Minecraft RUclipsrs also use it.
Imagine if Jon used the background warping trick to simulate different sides of the room as you move through the level.
The one thing I didn't see was how you saved the data from that menu. Was there some sort of key-combo that let you store the level in it's current state? It is amazing to think that your team had an ingame level editor of that quality back then, because I still remember being blown away by the unreal editor when I was younger.
You programmed using a PC development system. You could issue a special command on the SEGA to upload a section of memory back to the PC
@@CodingSecrets I didn't know if it was some menu option or some sort of command on the PC that caused the data to be xferred back to you.That was the only thing I didn't know about was if the editor had that built in to it as I didn't see that bit. I know that obviously the perpiheral that you used wouldn't work anymore unless you rebuilt a DOS computer with a parellel(or serial) port. Just found it amazing that you had that level of a level editor way back when. I always love to see how developers make their games. Even if I never will venture down that road it's still fascinating learning the ins and outs of how they accomplished what they did. I wish more developers of old would do what you've done hear. The only insights I tend to get is from "making-of" bonuses in games or a GDC/other insdustry talk.
Thanks for the amazing content on your channel, I'll be sure to continue sharing the videos with my circle of contacts.
This fills a hole I've been thinking about for a good few years now. There are quite a few games out there that have left their editors in the code for fans, data miners and romhackers to find. And while they're always neat to look around in, it's usually only up to your imagination how they were used. Sure, some might be self-explanatory, but it's still a treat to see something like this be demonstrated in its use by a developer of one of these tools.
That’s incredible, and super intuitive, loved how you could just manipulate bounding boxes and paths on the fly.
I love how the creator of these classics tells us the secrets to how they were made. Nice work
>ads play
>come back, background is white
>”I don’t know why it changed the background to white”
The background glitch was what possibly triggered RUclips's algorithm to put an ad there, as it thought it was a change of scene.
What impresses me the most is all the tools and options work in real time. I would have expected that it would require a restart and test play.
Jon, you never cease to amaze me. I love this channel and how you let us peek behind the curtain. It’s truly fascinating. Thanks!
I'm a huuuuuuuge fan of 8- and 16-bit computers and consoles, in no small part because of the cool techniques programmers used to squeeze out every bit of magic from these systems. Thanks for not only making these games, but taking the time decades later to talk about how you did it!
Is it possible to release a public domain version of this editor? It will make a LOT of people very happy if you do.
Up
probably can't due to copyright. It would have to go through the process of free licensing the software.
Theoretically, if the tool is his (which it likely is if he designed it) then by scrapping the Disney materials like the Toy Story ROM and Mickey name, as well as any SEGA IPs, that could potentially be legal, provided he find open-source or PD stand ins for the removed content.
a rom hack file can be made.
@@dgamer5075 There’s so many bad assumptions here, I’m not quite sure where to begin. Let’s just go with the idea that messing with copyright with Disney is about as wise as doing so with Nintendo, and that odds are he developed this on company time and thus not at all his property to release or repackage.
I had no idea you could make tools like these back then. I thought all of them were really unintuitive because of the hardware limitations. This channel just keeps on giving :D
BTW, do you have anything from Toy Story 2 to show? that game was a HUGE part of my childhood and I'd love to see ANYTHING from behind the scenes!
Level editors running in-game on the hardware are almost as impressive to me as the games themself!
Six months! Sheesh, that's incomprehensible for a full game today!
i failed to launch a doom mod in 7 years. sure, it grew 100 fold in scope over time, but i couldn't finish it. got really close and burned out and started something else that i probably won't finish either (trying hard not to stop though)
That's amazing to create a game that looks that great and has so many coding tricks in six months!
Wow, this is more intuitive and more useful than the Mario Maker editor!
Laughed so hard at "I have no idea why that changes the background to white, though" The most appropriate software development reasoning
The key thng to keep in mind is that our narrator had to think about all of this to implement it. It wasen't just there when he arrived on the scene. The cornerstone of computer science is developing a mind capable of creative problem solving when given a set amount of tools.
I've been watching these since they used to be uploaded on gamehut. I'm so happy they are still coming out. one of of not my all time favorite series on RUclips.
With the game being released on the same day as the movie, did you receive renders from Pixar for things like Woody's sprites, or did you have to render the models yourself/find some other way of acquiring said sprites?
Like, how much of the movie was done when you started? You started in like April or May of 1995.
Great question!
This game was great in the day. I then went on to play clockwork knight 1+2 on sega Saturn which I also enjoyed. Keep releasing videos and I will watch coding secrets I do enjoy them and learn alot
Easily one of my favorite videos you've done. Amazing stuff. Your intuition and ability to streamline functionality to work within a set of limitations is admirable. I wish we had more people like you running for political office.
This is amazing. Surely you've won every video game award imaginable! You were ahead of your time. Thank you for not only sharing this, but for everything you did for us in these games that brought us joy. God bless you kind sir.
This is amazing! Please could you show off the level editor for Mickey Mania next?
this
It's actually pretty common for games to have their editing tools built in, as it saves work; you don't have to write a separate program that can render the game assets, test performance, etc. What's especially nice is when they're left in!
It's interesting to learn about how this game was implemented too. I don't think I've seen some of these techniques before. Having the "path" be a box, having a region explicitly control when they're visible, manually assigning VRAM with an intuitive UI... all very clever.
It’s cool to see with how far we’ve come, how much we still do in similar ways!
So much about this editor made me think of map editors, Construct, and Unity, with some of its features, even basic.
Good job! This is cool to see how things were done back then!
I remember playing this game as Snotty nose, now I’m watching the guy who made the darn thing explain the coding process for it, you are the GOAT SIR. I remember your games for how incredible they looked when I played it on the Sega Genesis
Please talk about Toy Story 2: Buzz Lightyear to the Rescue. It's one of the best games I've ever played.
Every time you post a video like this I'm amazed by your forward thinking. Seems like you did these tools (and hacks) not only because it would make a better game, but because it was the right way to do things. I'm willing to bet this "engine" was ultimately un-needed and an overkill for a single game, but you did it anyway... Because you could.
As a working programmer, I appreciate good tooling. I imagine this saved a lot of time when designing levels compared to having to re-burn an EPROM whenever you want to change something. Brian Provinciano gave a good talk on a similar topic: how he made Retro City Rampage deterministic. This made development, testing, and debugging a lot easier.
I just went back and beat this game, after about 25 years of owning it. Thanks for the game Jon and co!
6 months!? Wow, you guys did a great job for such a short times
Howard Scott Warshaw spun E.T. for the Atari 2600 in about 6 weeks.
@@theannoyedmrfloyd3998 I don't know if I would call that "a great job" though.
Another level editor for another awesome game, I've noticed that during Mickey Mania's development you really. started trying to figure out as many ways as possible to really make things even easier with development and I'd say you were very successful considering the fact you were able to not only get your games finished and out within strict project deadlines but still managed to provide such enjoyable and memorable experiences as well.
When you really stop and think about it, the legacy Travellers Tales and TT Games has behind it is truly astounding and it was forward thinking such as using things like your level editing technique that helped make something like that possible.
Also this episode is missing from the GameHut channel.
You showed me how the characters in my childhood game were done!
That’s an incredibly impressive editor Jon. I’ve always found game development tooling really interesting, not every team had such an aptitude for making things easier.
This is really neat. Makes it really simple to change things around.
I got this game in the box with my Mega Drive II- the very first console game I had! Thank you for sharing the secrets behind it.
Wow, this looks borderline intuitive. You'd have to still know about the video ram and dma and stuff, but still. This is really cool to see.
This is not meant for the general public, is an in house tool to help the coders' job. It doesn't have to be intuitive for you.
@@thefunkdroid2777 I didn't mean it that way. I was just observing.
@@thefunkdroid2777 I took it as that being exactly what OP intended. In that even though the editor did not have to be intuitive, it still ended up being far more so than it had to be.
Never seen so smooth level editor! Specially at this the time. Played with some game's editor on PC and they was slow and clucky. I'm also curious how did you store all changes?
I can't believe one of my favorite Mega Drive game that I spent hours playing back in the day is actually being shown by its creator in editor mode. Its weird and fascinating at the same time.
Always a pleasure to see a new coding secrets. I have no coding skills, it I can appreciate what you do.
Wow I can't imagine coding a full ui into my console
I still have this game on a disc lying somewhere.
This game made part of my childhood, and it's good to know that skill with editing is what made this game so great with such simplicity. Thank you.
This has got to be one of the most interesting videos I've ever seen in my life...
This is an amazingly easy to use editor tool!
A lot of editors available are REALLY tedious to work with.
Could we get more bts on stuff like the 3d models used for this game? I've always been fascinated by pre rendered 3d games like this and DK Country.
bump
I'd be interested in such behind the scenes as well. I'm not the best source for this, but I think the prerendered sprites are just that - 3D models that are rendered into 2D space from modelling software and converted into sprites. As for the exact process, I assume it would involve converting the image into a bitmap of the proper amount of colors for the Mega Drive, and dividing it into a sprite set and animation with, likely proprietary, Tile Editor software. Keep in mind, this is based off a rough experience with deprecated free tools and Sonic 1 ROM Hacking information, and is very likely inaccurate. If I am proven wrong by a master of the hardware, I'd be honored.
ruclips.net/video/96DO4V8qrR0/видео.html
@@gekk1985 that's not what I mean
@@AnthonyMiele I think 3D renders were made by Pixar guys and given to TT as some sort of raw images sequences, which were converted into sprites.
I don't think TT team was actually involved in animation process.....
I remember borrowing this game from the video shop and being amazed by the graphics. Definitely one of the best on the Genesis.
Brilliant, as always. I enjoyed thinking about the different types of creatures and they damage they do and receive. Really fun and intriguing work as always.
This feels like seeing my magician uncle who dazzled me as a child , finally show how his magic was done.
Thank you for the wonder then. And the wizardry now.
This is a fantastic idea. Being proactive can be really rewarding
Wow thanks for an in-depth look at a childhood classic
Nice video created by John Burton, the man who made games from my childhood.)
I love watching more and more about this game. It amazes me to this very day, such amazing work!
Wow cresting a level editor in game to make game development easier is such an amazing idea! Even though it's probably not that necessary anymore with modern game development, I think I'd love to do something like this for my game development projects. Specially if I'm making a game for consoles.
Amazing how stuff like this never really changes in game development, I added a debug mode to my game just by using the keyboard and mouse so I could quickly add things like enemies to test them in an area or add platforms to test an idea.
Thank you very much for this video, I loved it immensely as this game was part of my childhood, but from a developer's perspective as well, it gives quite the few inspirations for how you want to plan your own level editors and object logic. That VRAM allocation table was really cool to see!
One thing I have to commend you on is how you made what pop culture imagined games should look like. If you watch all the little gimmick references to games of the era, you'll see this style of putting bit-crushed photographic versions of characters in a side-scroller. I feel like you really pushed the limit and delivered what your clients wanted, even though you could have taken shortcuts like other IP.
I love stuff like this, thanks for taking us down memory lane!
Thanks for making my childhood tolerable. Props
Making your own tools can be surprisingly fun sometimes
Great stuff
I'm glad we don't have to worry about so many details when making games nowadays
How do you store the results?
Is there anything like SRAM to help with that? Or is the development unit connected to the PC and able to export the level to it?
Dev unit RAM dumpage to DevPC, most likely.
This is some intensely efficient development work
I remember this game. It was a blast. Fond childhood memories. That editor looks next level. That's what i really want!
Yeah, with all that 3D it sure was a blast!
This is actually really clever! Impressive work
I never had a Mega Drive and yet this game in particular evokes a lot of memories for me
How wild to imagine that 25 years later I'd listen to the game designer explain how it worked!
i wish you'd leave this as a cheat code or something. i ALWAYS loved game editors. i played more duke3d's "build" editor than the game itself. like 10 fold. same for doom, warcraft2 and a bunch others.
Wow. This is great. Toy Story was my favorite movie back then. My cousin had given us Toy Story for SNES and I remember insisting on buying it for Genesis too. I still have it in the box. It's a good game. Really hard toward the end.
This is absolutely beautiful.
I loved playing this at my cousin’s house but damn that bit where you had to whip climb several hooks in quick succession took us forever to do.
Reminds me a lot of the amiga. Fantastic tool for development.
That's amazing! Some of that stuff seems pretty accessible to the average person.
Wow, a built-in editor for the Toy Story game? Just like in Sonic! Man, this channel always delights a games and coding enthusiast like me!
It looks good for a genesis game !!!
This is insane, inspirational, truly
Hey Jon idk if you will ever see this but I think I found an Easter egg for this game on the exact level you demonstrate in this video. Did you or someone you know sneak the initials of developers in the level with the letter blocks? If so that's awesome and possibly went undiscovered for 20 years! It was the game of my childhood and to stumble across that blows my mind! It was there hidden in plain sight yet overlooked for years, that's incredible! Thank you all for this amazing game that us kids in the 90s loved!
Just how much this game has packed inside? This is absolutely mind-blowing, it's got everything, impressive graphics, music, smooth gameplay, and only today I learn there's also a level editor hidden inside? This game sure deserves more credits than it already gets. You guys were really pushing the limits back in the day!
The level editor isn't in the retail version, just the development version he had
@@kyler247 oh, I see.
I was excited for a moment.
When you understand that this game was made in six months from start to finish it's kinda mind boggling. Do you think any developer today could create this extremely impressive for the hardware it's on, stunning in many ways actually, fully finished, and presumably pretty bug free game in six months?
loved the idea! it's the early of what we have today in unity and ureal like engines
Man, I feel your editor could’ve been a game in itself.
Even your neat Memory Map GUI is just inventory control to a gamer.
Sorta a Mario Maker 20 years earlier.
love these educational video game videos
I'm not impressed by much lately but this impressed me in so many ways!
8:08 The first game to be released at the same time the movie did?
And you did it in just six months?!!
That's really impresive seeing the final product 😉👌.
Love your videos! Thanks for the effort you put it.
It'd be awesome if you made a tutorial series on 2d game development in C or Java. Nothing fancy, just hitting essentials like collision, rendering, sprite animation, etc... I've seen a lot of tutorials on this stuff and seems like there are many ways to do these things. I'd love to see a real game developer such as yourself tackle these topics. It could even be a conceptual overview, no coding needed.
Now I'd love to see what techniques you used in Toy Story 2, for some reason that game gave me trouble when I tried emulating the PS1 version, figured your programming tricks could have something to do with that, it looked really good for a PS1 title and with some impressive draw distance.
This is awesome! Love your videos. I have a question though. This game was one of my favorites when I was a kid and I always wonder why the Buzz sprite of the lvl 3 is mirrored (you can see it due the chest buttons placement). I can understand the boss of the lvl 4 due it can be in the left side of the screen or the right in order to save memory and space, but not the lvl 3. Why not just do it correctly right away?. I understand you put a lot of detail in the game after watching your videos, so there should be a reason. This answer will help me sleep at night 🤣
Nice, the pointer is reminiscent to AmigaOS's pointer. Just with a palette change.
Amazing video as always
He has returned! I already want more...
Thank you for these amazing videos!
I just saw you premiering this in my Recommended feed!
Please showcase the original Mickey Editor!