Seymour take one planned for Continuum 93 [PROGRESS THREAD]

Hi again,

As I hinted in the latest messages of this topic, I have a rather more interesting Seymour title planned for development and release at some later time. This is a great project to also to test the fantasy retro computer that I released a while ago, use it in the shoes of a developer user and this way take care of any bugs/details/features I may have ommitted.

However, recently digging the old Seymour take one flash project gave me the idea to actually start with this small title first. And conveniently this aligns quite a few stars out there:
- I get to start this project with a smaller, more controllable scope in which the level design is already there, having me concentrate on mechanics and proper graphics delivery;
- I get to pay an old debt of mine opened with the promise of delivering that flash demo as a complete gane, which I never did;
- Being a smaller scope I can structure this first project in such a way that it can act as a template for future projects;
- Being a smaller scope I can also create some video tutorials on the development process that would serve an educational purpose for Continuum (outside the scope of this community).

Also, I'll be able to show updates of my progress on this project since it's a remake of an existing game. And who knows, maybe along the line I can attract someone to dwelve in the depths of this monstruous assembly development that's really not that bad.

So, I guess it starts here and the first thing to do is to fire up Photoshop for some draft redesigns of the UI, font(s) and the start screen, matched on Continuum's native resolution:

Feedback no matter how critical is always welcome!

@enthusiastguy All sounding great. Best wishes with the project.  :smile: {characters}:sey:  

Would be excellent if anyone else has a go with Continuum 93 to attempt their own game in the near future.

I've also addressed the forum's spam security settings, you should be able to add attachments now.

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I’ve also addressed the forum’s spam security settings, you should be able to add attachments now.

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Hey, thanks! I'm about to put it to the test showing a draft of "the Y shaped room". :D

More screens. Needless to say, they are subject to slight changes once the implementation begins.

... and with this one I have about all I need for now.

Next, starting to write some actual code and with that, here are Seymours first steps over Continuum's video memory:

https://youtu.be/ySHTI57-Ls4

Next stage will involve a bit of procedural background design, collision and insisting a bit on the basic movement. However, I also designed new (draft) animations since this is a good time to include them all and thoroughly test over some sandbox training room.

Edit. Added eating animation following up on Adam's hint.

Really like the look of the custom sprites/animations, especially the swimming ones. :tup:  

I once attempted to give Seymour an eating animation by pasting Dizzy's eating mouth onto Seymour.

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Really like the look of the custom sprites/animations, especially the swimming ones.

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Thanks! Pixel art wasn't really my cup of tea but with enough monkeying around, I think I eventually got it to a decent level. :D

I'll probably use only the idle/left-right swimming animation since it's sufficient and easier for me to implement without worrying about diagonals and all that.

The swim animations below that are actually inspired by the Dizzy games, but I don't like them that much.

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I once attempted to give Seymour an eating animation by pasting Dizzy’s eating mouth onto Seymour.

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Actually, that could be a rather useful one. Opens up the door for some energy replenishing. I added it to the previous tilesheet. Thanks!

Opened up a public repo for the source of this project. Offcourse, not much to see now, barely unified the keyboard/gamepad controls in one abstract state representation to make it easy for me later on.

But... For now you can gaze at some invented assembly language architecture. :)

https://github.com/EnthusiastGuy/Seymour-Take-One/

Fun facts:

- the assembly architecture of the Continuum 93 CPU is heavily inspired (mainly) by the Z80 and Motorola 68000 CPUs, only, on steroids. Other architectures and innovations have also been included;

- Continuum's "hardware" contains a native compiler able to compile text sourcecode on the fly and run it. That's how I'm running Seymour Take One, for now.

... meanwhile, some fan art. Actually, this will also have a purpose later on, but until then, I'll put it here. :)

In the process of establishing the correct frame times for Seymour's animation I noticed its animations are usually 12.5 fps. Meaning the sprites of any animation change every 80ms. I decided to experiment a bit also since the Amiga version of Seymour goes to Hollywood seems to actually use double that when moving, so the character moves a pixel each 40ms, however for each such 2 frames the same sprite is used. This seemed odd so I decided to make the best of the two worlds and I created intermediary frames so the motion also looks more fluid.

Now, Seymour's movement (and that's my personal opinion) is one of (if not the) best fluid motion. Traditionally, it takes 8 sprites only for a complete two steps (left and right). I can't remember any games of that era that were that smooth. And that was also something that caught my attention at the time. So, Seymour would not necessarily need a remaster, but since I am planning on using it on a higher resolution, over a larger screen estate, I think it would benefit from that, so I am willing to invest a bit of early effort into this.

Coincidentally, the resulting 25 sprites per second are a rather good match for cinematographic framerate and, well. Seymour is about cinematography.

So, here's a draft of the remastered working frames along side the classic frames. It is indeed a draft, so improvements will be made, but if anyone is keen on offering some feedback of how the remastered animation "feels like" I would appreciate the feedback.

Aside from the actual doubling the number of animation frames for the remastered version and extrapolating the animations by hand, I also fixed two issues I never noticed before. Seymour's right foot weirdly disappearing after finishing his step and the left hand not doing a back-and forth motion, rather suggesting a circular one. Small details, but when you edit by hand, they tend to stand out.

Quick note, this is still actively on my radar, however, some rather critical issues forced me to switch tracks for a while, might take a bit more before I come back to this.

When I first read "Continuum 93", I thought you meant a retro event like a SAGE but it seems its a retro mini computer? Very cool!

I really like the sceenshots and the remastered walking animation looks very crisp.

I like the room designs, well packed and doing their job.

I hope your leave wont last long for this game is promising looking one.

Figured I need to scale the original fonts. Worked on supporting PNG fonts. so now that is working.

Also aligned the font weight between lowercase and highercase. A lot of work done in the emulator for that and a hell of a lot of unit tests there.

The Continuum 93 does look interesting and fun, something I could try out.

However, lack of any sound capability right now is not very appealing and pushes me away from trying it out.

The Continuum 93 does look interesting and fun, something I could try out.

However, lack of any sound capability right now is not very appealing and pushes me away from trying it out.

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Oh, how I was eager to say this. :D

Yes, lacking sound is the reason Continuum's version is still under 1.0 and has bugged me quite a lot since my expertise in that area was very low. However,

last week I managed to break through that. It is still unreleased, but Continuum 93 now has a complex signal generator and sound processor which is detached from the main CPU, meaning it can produce sounds async. I was absolutely not having Seymour without his jumping sound so I made a strong effort to tackle this final chapter before I would consider Continuum a complete machine.

I have attached the unreleased draft manual, take a look at the Sound chapter and let me know what you think.

Looks good. Im familiar with such structures. The question is now: will you providing a tracker with which music can be created.

I'd also add another audio channel for pcm...i just feels right.

Looks good. Im familiar with such structures. The question is now: will you providing a tracker with which music can be created.

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Yes, it is on my checklist. Technically, you could use the next release to play music, but you'd be forced to schedule the sounds yourself. That's a hassle and I know it. The ideal implementation is to delegate the whole song to the audio processor and it would take care of playing it. The internal implementation in Continuum does support scheduling sounds with delays but that's not exposed yet to the user. I need to design such a "tracker" logic first. In all honesty, it shouldn't be hard once I know what I need to do. For now, I settled with playing individual sounds but yes, means of playing compositions automatically is on my plan, probably deliverable somewhere next year in the first months.

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I'd also add another audio channel for pcm...i just feels right.

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Agreed, that's actually another thing on my checklist, way easier and cheap to implement. Plan is to support dynamically playing PCM wav files, even 4 bit (for voice mostly), but also ogg audio containers. By dynamically, I mean not even needing to load them in RAM, simply having the audio processor seek and play from the actual file. I'm kind-of hoping for midi play as well, but that could be complicated.

I guess that could be the middleground until I'd implement a decent tracker to have at least "something" that allows playing music, even if you'd end up composing it with a third party software.

Painting the hills using some bezier curves. Experimenting a bit with a procedural way of rendering the backgrounds since it might save time on the long run.

https://youtu.be/Pa-D5DO2D8M

Interesting fact: generating that background takes up less than 90 bytes in Continuum's RAM.