Eclipse: The Demo that Sold 3D to Nintendo | Hacker News Reader

Eclipse: The Demo that Sold 3D to Nintendo

gamehistory.org

234 pointsbpierre39 comments

On the topic of solo game devs... if this sounds like your jam (and modern mobile games isn't your jam) then consider the console homebrew scene as an outlet. All the "retro" platforms still have a pulse and several are thriving enough to have competitions and forums and podcasts.

8-bit NES and 16-bit Genesis (Mega Drive) both have a supportive community and one or two publishers who can take your game from ROM.BIN to physical cart and/or digital purchase.

Hardware limitations naturally demand fewer man-hours to build out a "complete" game. You won't make a fortune. Or a dime. But then neither did a lot of one-person shops in the original 8-bit days.

[1] https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-assembly-line-an-n...

[2] https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/homebrew-game-club/id1...

Or pick one of the ESP32/Arduino/Pi based handhelds, it will give similar vibes, with hardware designed for coding, instead of hacking cartriges, or being afraid to kill the only home computer available at home.

Pikuma has a 25 hour “NES Programming with 6502 Assembly” that is both accessible to beginners with little to no prior knowledge and being packed with content. [1]

He also has other interesting courses which touch upon “retro” programming in a very accessible manner. [2]

[1] https://pikuma.com/courses/nes-game-programming-tutorial

[2] https://pikuma.com/courses

I follow them on twitter and it looks like the next course will about programming the original Playstation!!!

There's something ingenious about coding with artificial restrictions that brings out your creativity and drive to come trough. I participate yearly in a Web game jam called js13k where you have to code a game under 13kb zipped. It drove me to learn better compressible code and generating audio and graphics. But in our case we can harness all the power of the modern Web platform. Coding for old systems probably is the same but on steroids.

It's good to see BallBlazer mentioned, but the article/video feels like it's incomplete without mentioning Dimension X (which also alternates between tank realtime combat and tunnel travel dodging walls) and Atari’s Battlezone.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dimension_X_(video_game)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battlezone_(1980_video_game)

There's an arcade near me that has a functioning Battlezone cabinet. The use of a periscope in combination with the 3D graphics is so genius.

Post-covid, it's hard for me to imagine replaying today how, as a kid, I used to press my face into that periscope viewfinder. I remember it sometimes still smelled of cigarette smoke from the previous adult player before I popped in a quarter. Was that salt on my lips?

Awesome 3D game, amazing cabinet design. Holy smoke super gross, too.

Also, Stellar 7 [1] and Empire Strikes Back [2]. Surprised these weren't mentioned at all.

[1] https://www.c64-wiki.com/wiki/Stellar_7

[2] https://www.c64-wiki.com/wiki/The_Empire_Strikes_Back

TOTALLY forgot about Stellar 7 until you mentioned it! Thanks for bringing that memory back!

I’m curious how he managed to get that much detail out of the GameBoy tiles and sprites. It looks like the engine is casually treating the screen as a bitmap (AIUI it’s not) whilst also rendering 3D meshes, which must have taken some clever caching/buffering. They gloss over that in the video, but it must have been a monumental achievement.

Yeah it does. Sharopolis discusses a little bit what they're doing in X, the game that came out of this demo [0].

[0] https://youtu.be/Ty-qFeYK2l8?si=sH1TSKzDzBG9VopW&t=750

Always glad to see Sharopolis get mentioned, his videos about old game tricks are interesting and tend to be more accurate IMO than a lot of others. He breaks it down and actually investigates in emulators rather than just regurgitating Wikipedia.

I suspect they use some cleverly constructed patterns in sprite tiles and then change the sprite attributes after each scanline during horizontal blanking.

edit: nope, the video from the sibling comment says they just used one of the background layers. BTW I tried running some of the games form that video on the GameBoy emulator I made and it didn't end well. It turns out all PPU timings are important, who would've thought :P

Eclipse, hailed as proof that one person game dev teams could work. Then he ended up chasing his tail with eclipse2, releasing it late, looking like a game from 2 years prior to the release date. Proving the days of the solo game dev was over, at least for a while.

It didn't need proof, that was just a couple years after a time when that would have been the norm. There have always been great, notable and successful games been developed by solo developers and bedroom studios, at any time. Introversion, Stardew Valley..

Gaming simply exited niche culture and the market became humongous. And of course in total numbers, the share of the lone wolves has dwindled when compared to the eight-figure production cost triple-A market. But does that really mean anything?

>There have always been great, notable and successful games been developed by solo developers and bedroom studios, at any time.

Rollercoaster Tycoon

He did that in a bedroom studio? Was he working elsewhere at the time?

He wrote the game himself at home.

Joakim Sandberg made, “The Iconoclasts” entirely solo, which was impressive for a modern Metroidvania that had 20+ bosses with all sorts of varying fight mechanics. It also included multiple console ports.

Granted, he’s done a ton of animation work over the years, including for WayForward, so it’s not a surprise that The Iconoclasts looks as great as it does.

Then Chris Sawyer wrote RollerCoaster Tycoon all alone in assembly (after finding success with Transport Tycoon also), proving that the days of the solo game dev was far from over.

Are you thinking of a different solo developer, or a different game, or something else?

Eclipse was the working title for the demo in the article. It was eventually reworked into a game released as X in Japan, and would have been titled Lunar Chase elsewhere.

The closest I can find to a match for what you're describing is Starfox and Starfox 2, but that seems like a stretch.

Oh shoot! you are correct. I was thinking of elite and elite2

The initial screen of elite is so similar to the article image i got confused

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elite_(video_game)

Is there any way to get rid of the banner that moves with you as you scroll down the page?

I use uBlock or Tridactyl (vim bindings for Firefox) to zap things like that temporarily.

I just use a bookmarklet that nukes any position:fixed elements on the page. Works on toolbars, cookie banners, full page interstitials — really shockingly useful on the hostile web.

javascript:(function()%7B(function%20()%20%7Bvar%20i%2C%20elements%20%3D%20document.querySelectorAll('body%20*')%3Bfor%20(i%20%3D%200%3B%20i%20%3C%20elements.length%3B%20i%2B%2B)%20%7Bif%20(getComputedStyle(elements%5Bi%5D).position%20%3D%3D%3D%20'fixed')%20%7Belements%5Bi%5D.parentNode.removeChild(elements%5Bi%5D)%3B%7D%7D%7D)()%7D)()

Kill Sticky bookmarklet[1]. Also works on mobile. Get in the habit of clicking it, you'll start using it a lot to recover that extra inch of vertical space that web devs love to take away from you for some bizarre reason.

[1] https://github.com/t-mart/kill-sticky

NoScript[2] often prevents them from showing up in the first place, but it's a bit bigger lift to get used to using.

[2] https://noscript.net/

Web devs do not love to take it away from you. However, designers, product owners and project managers do.

Whatever. I'm just glad I have the tools I need to clean up the mess y'all are making.

Very cool! I love seeing "behind the scenes" on this kind of stuff. I always check out these kind of articles the moment they come up because there's always some really neat history to learn about. I can only imagine what kind of awesome artifacts of video game history are still in some devs' attic or basement... Super thankful for people (like the author(s)) who seek and research/document this stuff. :)

Oh, the "tank" screenshot reminded me a bit of Spectre, an old Macintosh game, even though I imagine there's no direct relation there.

>Did you know that almost every 3rd-person cover shooter mechanic originated in the Nintendo 64 game WinBack?

No. I played Wolfenstein 3D many years before WinBack was launched.

I think "cover shooter mechanic" refers to ducking behind cover and a system for smoothly shooting from behind it like in Gears of War - or in Winback. This mechanic was not there in Wolfenstein 3D.

Wolfenstein 3D is not a 3rd-person cover shooter. The dead giveaway is that it is 1st-person and that there are no things to take cover behind.

This was a good read up until it began sounding like an advertisement for the "videogame history foundation".

It is literally an advertisement for the Video Game History Foundation. This is their fundraising month and to help people understand the work they do and the importance of saving these artifacts, they are posting a new artifact every day this month.

https://gamehistory.org/donate/

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