1988 Retro Game Tycoon - Chapter 83



Only Noblemtl

Episode 83 – Overload Test

Once the character trio concept was established, updating the character sheets wasn’t just the programmers’ job.

The art team also had their own character sheets.

It was a visual character sheet.

AD Choi Han-il created a large file box for each character. He organized the file box with concept art that encapsulated the character’s feel and graph paper drawings that studied various angles and poses that can be seen on the actual game screen.

“how is it?”

“Can I be honest with you?”

“Of course.”

“Honestly, I think New York is cooler than Tom Cruise in Top Gun.”

Ko Sung-beom said while looking at the romantic fist and New York concept art drawn by AD Choi Han-il.

In the concept art, New York is shown leaning against a black motorcycle parked in the grass, holding a broken reed in its mouth.

The slightly worn leather jumper and boots had a vintage feel, adding to the character’s coolness.

“Wow… what an enviable life.”

At first glance, New York exuded the feeling of a free spirit, unbound by anything.

If we’re only going by style, I thought that rather than Kim Do-kwon, New York should be the main character.

“But, sir, if you really want to, can’t you live like a real New Yorker? Even if it’s not a motorcycle, buy a sturdy jeep or something and travel around the world. Now you can travel abroad freely.”

“That’s right. If I put my mind to it, there’s nothing I can’t do, but not yet. Right now, there are more important things to do than traveling the world.”

Romantic world travel is great, but I’d rather travel the world with games I create.

What makes a character like New York feel romantic and cool is that he does things with style that others wouldn’t dare do.

It may have been different in the past, but traveling the world doesn’t seem all that appealing to me these days. I can buy a plane ticket right away, spend a lot of money, and enjoy myself as much as I want.

To me, it’s much more romantic to make a game that’s fun enough to stand shoulder to shoulder with legendary masterpieces. Romanticism is relative, after all.

“What do you think, Hyunji? If you had to choose between Kim Do-kwon and New York?”

“Me? Of course, if it were me···.”

Everyone’s eyes were focused on her. Without a second of hesitation, she opened the Hong Kong-woo character file.

The first page showed Hong Gong-woo with his arms outstretched and grabbing the bull’s horns with both hands, a show of strength. His overwhelming size and strength seemed to pierce through the picture through his dynamic pose.

“Ah···, I guess Hyun-ji likes these types of muscular men. A bit of a commando type?”

“Rather than saying that… your neck is thick.”

“yes?”

People are a little dumbfounded. I would understand if they said things like “I have thick arms or thighs” or “I have a firm chest.”

You say it’s good to have a thick neck? Are you joking? But your expression is too serious to be a joke.

“Then what about Hansol? Which of the three do you think is the most attractive among women?”

Originally, it was intended to find out game character preferences from a woman’s perspective, but the atmosphere changed to something a bit like an ideal type World Cup.

Kim Do-kwon, dressed in a stylish suit, takes off his bowler hat and greets people politely.

New York, a city that exudes the scent of romance and freedom.

Hong Gong-woo, a reverse-emission dragon that can compete with the bull.

Kim Han-sol looked closely at the concept art of the three people and then shook his head.

“I’m sorry, but I can’t choose. I don’t like guys who use their fists.”

“Hahaha, that’s right.”

“After all, peace is the best.”

The people who had been sticking out their arms from the side laughed awkwardly.

“You love peace, but you still work hard to become a fighter, right?”

“Of course. If it were my boyfriend, I wouldn’t want to fight. He looks cool on screen.”

Everyone has their own tastes. When a project that suits your taste comes up while you’re working, you tend to work harder on it.

But a true professional should always do his best in whatever he does, regardless of his taste.

The art team, under the leadership of Choi Han-il, completed the visual styles of the characters Kim Do-kwon, New York, and Hong Gong-woo.

The programming team continued to update the character sheets, distributing the abilities according to the characteristics of the three characters.

As each of them has their own unique personality, Kim Do-kwon with his fists, New York with his speed and kicks, and Hong Gong-woo with his close-range wrestling skills, their abilities are distributed accordingly.

They all use basic techniques like punches, kicks, jumps, and flying kicks, but even within these, each has their own style, and each technique has differences in speed and power.

It may not be easy for gamers to immediately notice the difference, but in order to face numerous enemies and defeat the final boss, it was necessary to make the most of the character’s characteristics.

While the player character was getting settled in, I had to look after the game and also pay attention to A1 board firmware development and system updates.

While developing the firmware, I also conducted performance tests on the A1 board.

Creating great graphics requires more than just a higher resolution and more colors. Those are just the basics.

In order for developers to develop games without stress and to create amazing scenes, various special techniques are also needed.

It should be easy to implement effects such as freely scaling characters or objects, flipping them left and right, freely rotating them, and adding translucency effects while adjusting transparency.

This applies to both stationary objects and moving sprites.

If this effect were not supported, it would be a huge headache when you need to give natural perspective as the background gets closer or further away, for example.

If you have a background zoom function, you can naturally zoom in on the background according to the distance as the character approaches. This can be easily done with just a few lines of code.

But if this doesn’t work, you’ll have to resort to all sorts of tricks to achieve a similar effect.

As a result, there is not much difference in what gamers see on the screen. However, there is a huge difference in the effort that game developers have to put in depending on the features provided.

Even among the high-performance boards released up until the early to mid 90s, there were quite a few that didn’t properly support special effects, which caused developers a headache.

Unfortunately, the A1 board doesn’t support all of these effects in hardware either.

To do that, they need to custom-make the GPU, but Starbit is still having difficulty entrusting them with such semiconductor design, and even if they were to make a custom chip, they don’t have enough capital to mass-produce it.

So my plan was to create a board that could run at the fastest speed possible using general-purpose chips available on the market, and then cover the specific functions with software.

It’s not as fast as hardware-supported, but it’s possible if you have a processor to support it. However, the extra computational work required can slow down the game, so the CPU needs to be fast.

So I built an A1 board using two 16-bit CPUs.

It may look expensive on the outside, but it’s actually all a struggle to save money. I’m so glad I developed retro games as a hobby in my previous life and have a grasp of the technology involved.

The performance of the A1 board has been verified to some extent by benchmark scores, but benchmarks are just benchmarks.

Since we didn’t measure performance while running an actual game, we need to test it again properly.

I decided to test my special effects skills myself and conduct overload tests to see how far the A1 board could withstand.

This was an important test because if it failed the overstress test, the board would have to be reworked, and there’s no telling how much further the release would be delayed.

I started the overload test while everyone in the company watched.

For testing, we took some of the for Motorola 68k that Team A had made for testing, mixed all kinds of resources into it, added a lot of special effects, and ran the game.

Jack was blocked by New York, with police officers and Japanese military police chasing him, heavy tile roofs rising up over New York apartment buildings, windows shaking and growing smaller as he passed, a smoky fog forming and dissipating, and the screen suddenly flipping left and right or upside down.

Dogs and cats were moving and pouring down from the sky. It wasn’t a game, it was just an overload test to see how far the A1 board could endure, so they tested all sorts of ridiculous things.

“It’s going really well?”

“That’s true, but I can’t rest easy yet. I have to keep going like this for a few more minutes.”

While adding various special effects and gradually increasing the load, Oh Hyun-ji suddenly asked.

“Hey, is that something like that possible? Where the screen moves like a whirlpool? Why is it that when you fill a sink with water and pull out the plug, it makes a whoosh sound and little whirlpools form?”

“A whirlpool? That seems possible? Just wait.”

I wrote a code to make the screen rotate rapidly and the axis of rotation move in a curve. When I ran the game again, the screen slowly rotated and then gradually spun rapidly like a top and swirled.

As I was watching, I felt like I was being sucked into the screen.

“Wow~!!!”

Oh Hyun-ji saw it and her eyes sparkled with joy.

“It’s a bit dizzying to look at. I wonder who would use this for game production, but I think we should add this feature. Just in case someone makes a game like Alice in Wonderland later.”

“Huh? Have you seen ? It’s really fun, right? I really want to go to a place like that. I like whirlpools, so sometimes I fill the sink with water and pull the plug out. When I watch it, I feel like I’m being sucked into that world, so I like it.”

Oh Hyun-ji is not usually a talkative person.

He said he liked having a thick neck, but his hobby is watching whirlpools. He’s completely absorbed in special effects. He’s a person whose personality is impossible to guess.

“Well, now that you mention it, I think it’s possible to make a game like Alice in Wonderland. Things like a rabbit in a tuxedo or a card soldier would look pretty cool. It’s also a good subject for attracting women who don’t usually play games.”

“That’s right! But don’t you think it’s a bit disappointing to just do it that way? How about mixing in some other styles? For example…”

“For example?”

“It’s like . What should I say? Alice in the Dark…?”

“Alice in the Dark?”

I asked back.

Creating a dark fantasy world with ?

That’s kind of interesting, isn’t it?

Games like became popular with that concept.

is an IP that doesn’t require copyright concerns, and there’s no problem with twisting the style as you wish.

It’s a concept that relies on a very unique and attractive image. I think it’ll work out well because AD Choi Han-il and Oh Hyun-ji are there.

“It might be too much for now, but I’ll put it in the game idea storage. I think it’ll come out as a unique image, but the homework is figuring out how to express it in what genre.”

“Then, in my spare time, should I do some idea sketches first? Oh, of course, I’ll start with first. Then, in my spare time.”

“If you’re doing it after work, I can’t stop you. But for now, please focus on . I’ll think about Dark Alice later.”

“Yes, sir!”

Oh Hyun-ji nodded with shining eyes.

Up until now, Oh Hyun-ji at the company was, well, good at her job, but she seemed a bit cold, didn’t talk much, and seemed a bit soulless.

Just now, a gun in my eye, no, that wasn’t a gun.

Yeah, it was vitality. It felt like vitality was sparkling.

Although he is a socially oriented nerd, does he act somewhat mechanically when in normal mode? If so, does that mean he only focuses on doing the work assigned to him accurately and is unable to display his own creativity?

I need to take a closer look at Oh Hyun-ji’s working style.

If you are the type of person who can only be creative when your taste and drawing style match, it is better to work in that direction as much as possible.

Although a company cannot accommodate every individual’s personality, it is also the company’s job to appropriately assign work to each employee so that they can draw out 120% of their creativity and abilities.

I made a good note of the concept called ‘Alice in the Dark’ that I came up with while randomly experimenting with the special effects performance of the A1 board.

First of all, I think it would be suitable for a platform game like Mario. It seems more suitable for consoles than arcades. Or it could be made into an adventure genre for PC games.

While thinking about how to make Alice in the Dark, I continued to add various special effects to the A1 board and conducted overload tests.

The two 16-bit CPUs showed off their capabilities to the fullest.

“I’ve always developed in 8-bit, so now that I’m developing in 16-bit, I feel like my insides have been blown away.”

“It’s so embarrassing to even compare it to the real Jamix.”

To be honest, 8-bit games had a cute charm with their palm-sized resolution, but they were far from enough to make full-fledged games. The processing speed was slow, the memory was small, and above all, the game capacity was too limited.

Then the A1 board came out and even a 16-bit CPU wasn’t enough, so I installed two of them and ran it. It felt like I switched from riding a bicycle to a sports car.

The golden age of retro gaming, the 90s, was now upon us.

Fortunately, the board was ready in time for that. As I was running the test, I got excited and summoned characters all over the screen and mixed up all sorts of special effects.

Although it is not yet stabilized, I turned on the ‘Turbo’ function created by Lee Ki-cheol and the overclocking switch. The scene where 24 characters line up and chase after me as I move the jack was spectacular.

I deliberately kept overloading the system by moving the character left and right haphazardly, aka ‘warigari’, and by continuously jumping while moving.

As the test continued, there were some parts where it slowed down slightly or the frame rate dropped, but the A1 board held on until the end without crashing.

Although the test version of is not of a commercial standard, I intentionally filled the screen with characters and added special effects, and I thought it wouldn’t be difficult to make to the level I want.

Moreover, the A1 board was still in development and had not yet been optimized.

“I think this will be easy.”

“Then, sir?”

The ancient dragon asked with an impatient look.

“Yes, it passed the overload test as well.”

Boom! Boom! Boom!

When I knocked on the table three times and declared, people cheered and applauded.

Now we’ve almost overcome the big mountain of hardware development. We all have a strong confidence that we can do it.