I found this to be very interesting and educational, a YouTube video about how Action 52 was made...
https://youtu.be/rLpEn0wmMrkApparently, a guy bought a Taiwanese NES pirate game with 40 games on it, and said, I can do that (he had no previous game dev. experience), hired 3-4 guys who had very little experience, and they banged all 52 games out in 3 months. They had literally no time to game test them. They borrowed music code and game menu code from wherever they could find it (pirate games).
Lots of people look at Action 52 and think... what awful games. I think, not so bad for 3 guys in 3 months, with no budget.
The only question I still have, is, who did they get to build the hardware? Did they reverse engineer a pirate cart? Wouldn't that require lots of technical knowledge? It's hard to believe that they actually got it to work at all, even if all the games suck.
E.T. for Atari 2600 likewise suffered from its time constraint, but at least it was eventually patched to be fun to play. I don't see how Action 52 games can be improved without reimagining them, such as was done by Mr. Podunkian for "Streemerz".
Man, I didn't know this cartridge cost the same as a Super NES! I always assumed the price was closer to that of a typical multicart. Who in their right mind would pay this much for a bunch of broken games?
dougeff wrote:
The only question I still have, is, who did they get to build the hardware? Did they reverse engineer a pirate cart?
At the time, you couldn't really be a programmer without having at least a toe's worth of experience with hardware.
The
hardware here is pretty simple as NES mapper hardware goes. No-where near the level of skill needed to design, say, the
Racermate cartridge, or ASIC design.
dougeff wrote:
Lots of people look at Action 52 and think... what awful games. I think, not so bad for 3 guys in 3 months, with no budget.
That's not an excuse. If they couldn't make 52 games, what about just doing one?
dougeff wrote:
Apparently, a guy bought a Taiwanese NES pirate game with 40 games on it, and said, I can do that
Kinda seems like looking at a turd and saying "people pay money for these? sure, I can squeeze one out."
darryl.revok wrote:
Kinda seems like looking at a turd and saying "people pay money for these? sure, I can squeeze one out."
True... I could never respect/admire that.
Huh. I'd heard about it being inspired by pirate multicarts, and the idea to do so to be cheaper in per-game terms, and "save money by using college students", but not all the details.
The whole idea of making 52 game in a single release is just not that great. Look at Super Mario Bros 3 for the NES. Did Nintendo try and make that a 52 games in one cart? No, Nintendo just tried to make 1 really good game.
When making a game you can either make 1 decent one or 52 crappy ones. Its your choice as a developer. The logical mistake is to think that more games implies more fun.
Really its all about the quality and not quantity of the games. If the people who made action 52 just focused on 1 single game like the Cheetamen and scrapped the other 51 games and cut out the copyright songs then it probably would have gotten the Nintendo seal of approval and who knows maybe the company would still be around today.
Its so interesting just how certain business decisions can either make or break a company. But the other interesting thing is that sometimes you can make an impact even if you do something terribly awful. Even though the game is total crap its funny to watch lots of youtubers make fun of the game and if you look up the original action 52 cart on ebay it sells for a hefty price, usually in the hundreds of dollars range.
Why would anyone pay hundreds of dollars for a piece of crap? Its because the item is cool and unique to have. It doesn't matter how good or bad the games actually are, what it represents is a piece of gaming history.
Erockbrox wrote:
The whole idea of making 52 game in a single release is just not that great. Look at Super Mario Bros 3 for the NES. Did Nintendo try and make that a 52 games in one cart? No, Nintendo just tried to make 1 really good game.
SMB3 includes:
- Original mario bros battle game
- Card matching game
- Slot machine match-3 game
- Dice game (unfinished)
- Pick a box
- Bonus levels, vertical levels, constant scrolling levels, etc.
Maybe not all of these count as an extra game, but I think there's at least a few more than 1 game in there,
Or as McLuhan maybe would have put it; a medium is a container for other media.
The content of smb3 can perhaps be viewed as a meta-game, or the carrieer of the symbol for one single game. A selection screen with many titles is the symbol for separate games or at least modes, while they may still share concepts, code and/or data.
Erockbrox wrote:
The whole idea of making 52 game in a single release is just not that great. Look at Super Mario Bros 3 for the NES. Did Nintendo try and make that a 52 games in one cart? No, Nintendo just tried to make 1 really good game.
Yet Nintendo put four times as many games as that into the first
WarioWare for GBA.
There's way more microgames than 4 times. He's talking about the fuller games like Dr. Wario/Pyoro/Pyoro 2.
WarioWare for GBA has 209 microgames and a few longer games ("Dr. Wario" and the "Pyoro" games). So by sheer numbers, it's 4 times as many as Action 52. It's also four times as big (8 MB vs. 2 MB).
Bregalad wrote:
That's not an excuse. If they couldn't make 52 games, what about just doing one?
The problem is that the person who came up with the idea was somebody who had absolutely no idea all the stuff involved in making such a thing. That somehow he thought that it was possible to practically make one game a day should have been a dead giveaway. It didn't help that the people who got hired had absolutely no idea of how the hardware even remotely worked at all, and so had to figure it all out within that short time as well. Ugh.
The main reason the Mega Drive counterpart didn't come out anywhere as shit is that it was developed by people who at least had experience working on the system. No idea how long it took to make that one, however.
Sik wrote:
That somehow he thought that it was possible to practically make one game a day should have been a dead giveaway. It didn't help that the people who got hired had absolutely no idea of how the hardware even remotely worked at all, and so had to figure it all out within that short time as well. Ugh.
Now that we mostly know how things work, I wonder if it'd actually be possible to improve tools to make a 1984-85 class NES game in 3 business days.
tepples wrote:
Sik wrote:
That somehow he thought that it was possible to practically make one game a day should have been a dead giveaway. It didn't help that the people who got hired had absolutely no idea of how the hardware even remotely worked at all, and so had to figure it all out within that short time as well. Ugh.
Now that we mostly know how things work, I wonder if it'd actually be possible to improve tools to make a 1984-85 class NES game in 3 business days.
This was made in 72 hours by a team of 2, and came pretty close, save one screen boundary bug with the boomerang. The game is rather short, but fully playable.
WheelInventor wrote:
tepples wrote:
Sik wrote:
That somehow he thought that it was possible to practically make one game a day should have been a dead giveaway. It didn't help that the people who got hired had absolutely no idea of how the hardware even remotely worked at all, and so had to figure it all out within that short time as well. Ugh.
Now that we mostly know how things work, I wonder if it'd actually be possible to improve tools to make a 1984-85 class NES game in 3 business days.
This was made in 72 hours by a team of 2, and came pretty close, save one screen boundary bug with the boomerang. The game is rather short, but fully playable.
How many libraries did they have ready to do generic things like load objects and maps? I can almost guarantee that they wrote those way beforehand and took more than 3 days. Especially one-off things, like the sound engine would take weeks, even if you knew everything you had to do.
The more libraries they might have used, the more sensible, IMO. Especially in a weekend compo promoting creativity. I don't think there's much to prove writing standard routines from the ground up.
To get on topic, the team behind action 52 might not have had the time to build their own code base, but that's thanks to their unserious producer. If they really had that tight budget, he could have said 'hey, i know i don't have much to pay, but you can get shares of the revenue instead, if you're willing to take the risk with me. The important thing is that we can produce something that will float.', or look for investors, or just about anything else than what he did.
According to Nicolas Betoux's Twitter account, he and Morphcat completed another NES game yesterday.
https://mobile.twitter.com/atelier_betouxI'll see if I can find a link to it. So far all I found was a German Facebook page that mentioned a "forum" with no link to it.
Yep, this was apparently showcased at computerspielemuseum in Berlin today:
http://bit.ly/1Taoi3mJulius posted the link in the comments field on his blog.
It looks stellar. And an addition in a field where the nes library is lacking.
EDIT: I think their mentioning of "forum" might refer to a physical space within the museum.
3gengames wrote:
How many libraries did they have ready to do generic things like load objects and maps?
Wouldn't that fall under tepples' definition of "improved tools"? (technically not tools but still part of your devkit, which is what matters)
Sik wrote:
3gengames wrote:
How many libraries did they have ready to do generic things like load objects and maps?
Wouldn't that fall under tepples' definition of "improved tools"? (technically not tools but still part of your devkit, which is what matters)
As the guy from
Super Smash TV put it: "Bingo."
I spoke to Nicolas, and his (and Morphcat's) newest game was not 100% finished... that's why it is not available online.
Quote:
If they really had that tight budget
Looking at Action 52's advertising, it seems like they had quite a significant funding there.
Clearly the games COULD have been better, but the programmers were given an impossible task. Good luck making 1 game in 3 months, let alone 52.
dougeff wrote:
Clearly the games COULD have been better, but the programmers were given an impossible task. Good luck making 1 game in 3 months, let alone 52.
I went from 0 to the version of
Thwaite shown at MGC in about three months of spare time. MGC
Thwaite was playable up through day 3. I forget what all I added from the MGC version (mid-March 2011) to the first public release for the compo (0.01 in late May). But from compo to "final" (0.03 in late December, which appears in
Action 53) was spit and polish, including mouse support, more music, and practice mode. At full time, I could have probably done all of
Thwaite well within two months, assuming I had testers to offer constructive feedback when needed (and not the "I'm too busy playing
Call of Duty" that I would often get when I tried to use NovaSquirrel, his brother, and his brother's friends from school as my play testing team).
If I were producing a game I would really care about the quality of the I was producing. I would be involved at several steps of the development. For instance I would tell the guys to make 1 game first and then we would all review it and see how it is. A decent game could have been produced that's for sure if they had just stuck with only 1 game.
It's as if the producer didn't even play the video games on the cart, but instead just told a team to make something and then sold it without any quality control at all.
The funny part about this whole thing is that lets say they did create an average NES game and it was published by nintendo and it got average reviews. I bet that it wouldn't be as well known as their action 52 game is. By making a terrible terrible game they created a spot in the history books.
I mean sometimes something is so bad that its good.
The crazy part about these games is that its as if they are almost eternal. The game was made many many years ago in such a short time. But tons of people have played it and people are still playing it today and giving reviews and making funny videos about it and such. Its as if games just dont die, especially when they are available for free on the web.
"A delayed game is eventually good, but a rushed game is forever bad."
--
Shigeru MiyamotoThat's easy to say if your company already has an established IP stable as big as the
Super Smash Bros. For roster. But some smaller companies depend on the
American fourth quarter shopping season so much that they'll
take "forever bad" over "not having any revenue to pay our developers this year".
Erockbrox wrote:
The crazy part about these games is that its as if they are almost eternal. The game was made many many years ago in such a short time. But tons of people have played it and people are still playing it today and giving reviews and making funny videos about it and such. Its as if games just dont die, especially when they are available for free on the web.
But is notoriety years later better than a publisher backing and decent sales numbers then? Which could also mean more subsequent titles and the possibility of still being a developing company in the market today?
By the way, this should be made into a movie. I think I'd actually watch it.
Jedi QuestMaster wrote:
By the way, this should be made into a movie. I think I'd actually watch it. It could look something like
this.
You know, I had only watched videos of this game, and not played it myself...
And, having played it, it is just bad in every way. Most games you either can't get much past the initial screen, or if you manage to do that, only loop back to the beginning of the game....or, it's too easy (just run and shoot and never get hit). Sprites are jittery. Controls are unmanageable. Music is bad.
Some games, I'm thinking 'am I hurting them or are they hurting me? oh, I'm dead, I guess they're hurting me'.
Every now and then you get a game that almost seems playable...and then you can't make an easy jump, or die for no apparent reason (maybe some hard to see enemy jumped out at you quickly).
There is no fun in playing broken games. Very frustrating and unsatisfying.