Shadow of the Beast Legacy semi-project

[bLAZER]

Sorry..hehe... damn you Google! I googled "dank passage" and Google said "Did you mean: dark passage", sorry I was too fast, my bad.

[darkfalzx]

Originally Posted by bLAZER

Sorry..hehe... damn you Google! I googled "dank passage" and Google said "Did you mean: dark passage", sorry I was too fast, my bad.

It's cool - those flavor-text things are kind of oddly written at times.

BTW - new build up. Minor changes.
* Added a checkpoint in the middle of the plains. It's at the point where music changes back to the quieter tune from the beginning of the game.
* When you are using a 360, PS3 or OUYA controllers the messages "Press Fire" will become "press"+appropriate button on your controller.
* Attempted to fix errors in music playback that created minor gaps in songs with an intro and a loop section. See if this helps.

[Neil79]

Originally Posted by Artlace

Hi,

I have seen a few remakes of the first part of the trilogy which was mediocre at best. This one is nearly flawless!

Welcome to EAB, how did you find out about this cool project?

[darkfalzx]

On a slightly unrelated note:
I have recently tried playing the Atari ST version of the game - good god is it freaking terrible! Slow, choppy, no music, bad sound effects, most art has been simplified to the point of being unrecognizable. Moreover - it's missing most enemies and even large chunks of the environment. Some quality programming too - every now and then a potion will be rendered impossible to collect, or a chest wouldn't spawn, and sometimes the skeleton boss would just stop its advance and will sit there like a dolt.

And yet - the difficulty has been cracked up to 11!
I now take it as a personal challenge to learn to beat it: ) - proven scientifically fucking impossible! The combination of super-rough collision, broken powerup spawning, overuse of random ground-spike enemies, choppy movement and constant drastic speed fluctuation makes this game absolutely impossible to complete without cheating. Hell - it's almost impossible even while spamming savestates! The jetpack section is ridiculous, as enemies rush you at speeds impossible to react to, while your gun is limited to firing only three bullets at a time. Has anyone ever completed this game fairly? Seriously!
I now fantasize about including the ST mode in Legacy: )

[alexh]

dlfrsilver wrote the the Author of SOTB 1 for the Atari ST aka Marc McCubbin and here is his response

Originally Posted by Marc McCubbin

Good questions, Shadow of the Beast did very well on the ST (it was no.1 two years in a row in the sales charts). As far as the details, happy to share them.
I know some ST demo scene guys thought it could have been done better and in reality there are areas where it could have been better, however, game development is about compromise and this was the case here. The first version of the game I did used all the same art as the Amiga running at 60/50fps, however, it required an ungodly amount of memory since the most obvious tricks were pre-computing the parallax scrolling ( for the underground section, which was only 2 layers ), then, simply movem.l the tiles to the screen as needed. The reality is thought that this wasn't reasonable ( it would have been a 1meg only game versus 512k ).

After several iterations/tickes, it was decided that this version would be launched either as 1 meg only or on the STE (and of course then we could use the HW scrolling too). In the end the version that was used for the underground sections used 1 bit plane for the background layer of parallax and 2 bit planes for the front layer, this allowed each layer to be independently drawn to the screen as fast as possible without having to have a huge pre-compute buffer. Although I still precomputed the shifted blocks, by carefully arranging the palette so that the odd and even colors were the same for the first 8 colors in the palette it meant that I could draw anything into the first bit-plane and it wouldn't affect the front layer. For sprites, due to memory constraints, again I couldn't pre-shift those for speed ( as always the fastest way draw was movem.l ), so I used another trick which was movep.l, which allowed you to write the graphics data on odd boundries across the ST interleaved screen. I had custom sprite routines for odd and even boundries for speed (versions that used movep and versions that were just straight movem).

There were similar compromises for the tree-sections ( the 11 layers of parallax sections ), I wrote a copper emulator on Timer B that heavily modified the palette to get all the colors needed, the large trees were all sprites pre-computed. Although of course, doing this reduced the overall CPU time available but was necessary to get the additional colors to get it looking half-way decent. The reality is, if I didn't actually have to have a game in there yeah, I could have had the nicely pre-computed scrolling doing it's thing, looking like the Amiga version ( I already had this for first prototype ). Psygnosis decided not to do a 1 meg only version or even the STE version, unfortunately. Around the same time frame we ended up doing the ST version of Flimbo's Quest, this was also a bit of a show-case on the Amiga. This time we could actually get two full color layers running because we could pre-compute the parallax.... Still, overall, I was fairly happy with it given the constraints, many of which you don't have for the demo-scene "

[darkfalzx]

Wow - that was actually very interesting and informative!
Doesn't make the game any less wretched, but the insight into how he did things is amazing! I wish someone could do a more detailed breakdown of what he's doing, like they have for the Amiga version.
Also - he still couldn't salvage 16k of memory for music: )

On a whim - added a troll mode to the game - the ST mode. Not accessible by proper means - it's something people will probably be able to activate only from debug. It drops the speed of the game by 20%, reduces the framerate to 10fps, then drops the game speed by additional 10% for each additional enemy on screen: )

Originally Posted by Neil79

Welcome to EAB, how did you find out about this cool project?

I am the worse kind of lurker who is always around but hardly registers or logs in but this time I couldn't help myself.

[Djemps]

Originally Posted by darkfalzx

I wish someone could do a more detailed breakdown of what he's doing, like they have for the Amiga version.

Ooh! Where can I find that? I'm always excited to read about the crazy twists and tricks that the original devs used to stretch their system capabilities. I remember reading a breakdown of Agony, and how the devs implemented various horizontal palette bands to extend the range of colors displayed in the background.

Also, Darkfalzx, I just want to keep encouraging you in your efforts. You have become kinda like the 'golden child' of SOTB lore. So many people have come before you, talking about their lofty goals of a 'Beast' remake. None have succeeded. You are building something that will most certainly become the definitive SOTB retrospective compilation. (Possibly just in time for the Play Station remake?) Keep up the great work!

P.S. Do you have a link to your other game projects out there?

[alexh]

Could he be referring to CodeTappers reverse engineering summary of the Amiga engine?

http://www.codetapper.com/amiga/spri...-of-the-beast/

[darkfalzx]

I believe you can find the SOTB effect breakdown article here.

Thank you for your kind words. I'm an obsessive Psygnosis fan, who would like nothing better than bring back those awesome games to the new audiences (who will most certainly hate the everloving shit out of them: ). In fact even if I finish this compilation - the mania will not end there. I'll just move on to the Psygnosis Barbarian games.

Oh - and you can see some of my other games all over the place.
I did a game called Ultionus: A Tale of Petty Revenge last year. You can grab its demo over here, or buy the whole thing on Steam or Ouya.


There is also a major project I ran a successful kickstarter for - The Legend of Iya. Think of it as kind of a SOTB2-like, minus the text parser.

You can pre-buy/support it here if you'd like.

[Djemps]

Originally Posted by darkfalzx

I believe you can find the SOTB effect breakdown article here.

Thank you for your kind words. I'm an obsessive Psygnosis fan, who would like nothing better than bring back those awesome games to the new audiences (who will most certainly hate the everloving shit out of them: ). In fact even if I finish this compilation - the mania will not end there. I'll just move on to the Psygnosis Barbarian games.

Oh - and you can see some of my other games all over the place.
I did a game called Ultionus: A Tale of Petty Revenge last year. You can grab its demo over here, or buy the whole thing on Steam or Ouya.


There is also a major project I ran a successful kickstarter for - The Legend of Iya. Think of it as kind of a SOTB2-like, minus the text parser.

You can pre-buy/support it here if you'd like.

You Magnificent Bastard!

Ultionus is fantastic. And the promo video got me hooked on A_Rival's awesome music. I will need to check out Legend of Iya ASAP.

On the flip side, HERE is a 'remake' I did of Roger Dean's Sentinels; which is the artwork featured on the cover of SOTBII.

[darkfalzx]

Originally Posted by Djemps

You Magnificent Bastard!

Ultionus is fantastic. And the promo video got me hooked on A_Rival's awesome music. I will need to check out Legend of Iya ASAP.

On the flip side, HERE is a 'remake' I did of Roger Dean's Sentinels; which is the artwork featured on the cover of SOTBII.

Oh snap! That's freaking awesome! Pretty close to the original! I had to do a lot of messing with that painting for the Legacy's front end, as I couldn't find it at high-enough resolution with the monsters still intact (yes - I know - the front end is low-res at the moment - but I'll worry about it last).

I also did a "classy" Ultionus box art in RD style:


Also producing a small number of the these:

[Neil79]

Originally Posted by darkfalzx

Oh - and you can see some of my other games all over the place.
I did a game called Ultionus: A Tale of Petty Revenge last year.

Oh hell yeh, I did a write up on this in the earlier days of Indie Retro News

[darkfalzx]

Originally Posted by Neil79

Oh hell yeh, I did a write up on this in the earlier days of Indie Retro News

I don't think so.
Mainstream press sites avoided Ulti like the plague because - "SEXISM!!!!". I made a few posts on other boards with mixed response - because again - "SEXISM!", so by the time I got around to posting on EAB I was pretty discouraged.
Just to state for the record - there is no sexism or misogyny of any kind in Ulti. It's all very tongue-in-cheek.

[s2325]

I thought it's remake of Lorna. Very good job

[Neil79]

Originally Posted by darkfalzx

I don't think so.
Mainstream press sites avoided Ulti like the plague because - "SEXISM!!!!". I made a few posts on other boards with mixed response - because again - "SEXISM!", so by the time I got around to posting on EAB I was pretty discouraged.
Just to state for the record - there is no sexism or misogyny of any kind in Ulti. It's all very tongue-in-cheek.

How can you say I don't think so when I'm the admin and owner of the site?

This was before we did our own write ups!
http://www.indieretronews.com/2014/0...-gameplay.html

We even featured Shadow of the beast legacy
http://www.indieretronews.com/2014/0...e-classic.html

[darkfalzx]

Originally Posted by Neil79

How can you say I don't think so when I'm the admin and owner of the site?

This was before we did our own write ups!
http://www.indieretronews.com/2014/0...-gameplay.html

We even featured Shadow of the beast legacy
http://www.indieretronews.com/2014/0...e-classic.html

Shoot - sorry man - misread your post - I thought it was a question about whether or not I posted news about Ulti's release on here.

Thank you so much for this coverage!: )

[Neil79]

Originally Posted by darkfalzx

Shoot - sorry man - misread your post - I thought it was a question about whether or not I posted news about Ulti's release on here.

Thank you so much for this coverage!: )

[Nova]

hey darkfalzx, nice work, what a great project.

now here is only a little suggestion, why not make the game save all relevant data to its root folder and make it portable? should not be a hard task to do

[Superman]

I tried this a couple of days ago and I have to say it's a very impressive port.