Phantom Gear for the Sega Genesis / Mega Drive

New cover art and rewards progress
over 3 years ago – Tue, Dec 08, 2020 at 02:16:39 AM

Hi everyone! Today we want to show you the work we are doing on the rewards.

First of all, we have the final designs for the cover art of the game. We decided to imitate old SEGA releases and have 2 artwork variants: one in an anime style that you would see in a Japanese release, and another in a Western style for America and Europe.

Just like the original SEGA Genesis/Mega Drive releases, you can choose between 3 region cover style. Don't worry, your game is going to be compatible with any console because is region-free. And all posters and box versions of the game are going to be double side print so you have the two illustrations!

Other Rewards

We are working with 4 artist friends from Argentina to produce the art of some of the rewards. Each of them is going to use their own style to show the world of Phantom Gear. We have a sneak peek of their progress here:

Comic Book

We are working with another artist for the comic reward. Right now we have the script and the first draft of all the pages completed. The artist is cleaning up the pages so we can't show you anything now, but we are going to show our progress with the comic in the next update.

This is all we have to show you for now. Next update we are going to show our progress on the game. See you next time!

New Boss + Programming Tricks
over 3 years ago – Fri, Oct 02, 2020 at 10:47:57 PM

Hi everybody! We want to show you a little more of our progress and tell you about some of the tricks that we use to optimize the game to fit m so we can fit in more exciting content.

The Snowy Mines's Boss: The Driller Worm

Inside the Snowy Mountains, Ocular Force has mines where they extract metals and other resources to build their arsenal. To dig deep under the mountains, Ocular Force uses this earth-shattering machine. Once you cross path with this driller it'll chase you relentlessly, so be aggressive to defeat it!

Programming tricks

The boss Magmus has multiple states when you fight him. This mean that we need to optimize his assets to leave space for other bosses. The most problematic state is his lava mode because a fluid magma animation could take a lot of frames to look right and take a lot of ROM space. To avoid this we use an old trick: color cycling.

To achieve  this we need to chose an amount of colors that are going to simulate the lava flow when they change in a constant cycle. Now we can use those color always in the same position in the animation. This makes the lava look static:

But wait, what are those blue colors? When we try the animation for the first time we noticed that the wobble animation didn't look good with the color cycling. So we decided to duplicate some of the cycling colors and leave it in a fixed position on both palettes. This make more easy to animate some actions and effects.

Now that we reduced the amount of frames per animation with lava, we can further improve the performance of the animation in the game. To use the animation we need to cut each frame in different areas:

Arranging the areas in the right way, we can improve the amount of tiles that we are going to load to the VRAM each frame. In this example, we can see that the center never changes because we use color cycling. Here you can see that the center is loaded only once (notice that the eye is in another layer):

This has another advantage: we need to save the center in ROM only once, leaving more free space!

Here is another example of an animation that use both color cycling and fixed colors:

And here we have an special case were we need to change palettes in the middle of the animation:

Demo Update

We are still working on the new demo, improving the Magmus boss fight and fixing the logic of the skeletal animation of Scorpikon. We want to amaze you when you see Scorpikon moving in your TV, so please wait a little longer. Here is a little sneak peek:

See you soon!

New release date and new boss
almost 4 years ago – Tue, Jul 14, 2020 at 02:54:52 AM

Hi everybody! We hope you are all doing ok. It has been nearly a year since the launch of our campaign, and we are SO excited to share our dream project of creating Phantom Gear for the mighty Sega Genesis/Mega Drive. 

We are also excited to share some news with you in the coming weeks on the Phantom Gear universe, as well as some free perks we'll be unlocking down the line for our original backers. 

COVID has not been easy for any of us, and we have had several challenges with both of US team, as well as our team members in Argentina.  We are sorry to say that we aren't hitting our original target release date, but fear not--we are determined to deliver the best game with the best quality that we can fit into a 32 Power cartridge!

To start, we have a new demo coming down the line in the coming weeks with two new sprawling levels within the Phantom Gear world, and two new exhilarating bosses that will challenge even the savviest Sega fan. 

Introducing the boss of the forest: Scorpikon

In the forest, a machine hides deep within the shadows, awaiting its prey. Scorpikon was originally designed to eradicate the forest. Anything in its path, it is programmed to destroy. 

Sneak Peek to Further Progress 

We couldn't help but share some sample animations of Magmus, the boss of the Under City Caves.

Here, you can look at how an animation looks in our custom editor while Leo is working on them.

Last but not least, we have some further refinements to the intro:

New Level & Game's Engine Improvements
almost 4 years ago – Thu, Jun 11, 2020 at 06:00:43 PM

Hi everybody! We hope everyone is doing well. We are excited to share another quick update with you all! 

Under City Caves

After defeating Titano, Josephine is going to chase him through the caves that run deep under the city. The volcanic activity is the biggest source of geothermic energy that the city uses, and it was the reason why the city was build in that location.

For this level, we are implementing some visual tricks to make you feel the scorching ambiance of these caves and give more depth to the background.

We are implementing a multi-phase boss fight at the end of the level. His name is Magmus. He's a special drone that can manipulate magma to change forms and attack.

 Engine Improvements

In the previous update we talk about some changes that we were making to the game's engine. We completed those changes and now we have the tank working in-game:

Now we have a more flexible engine that allows us to fit even more sprites on the screen at one time. This is an improvement we're planning on taking advantage of throughout the game to pack enough fun and enemies into each and every level! 

That is all for now. Stay safe. See you next time.

Development Diary & New Demo
almost 4 years ago – Tue, Apr 21, 2020 at 02:24:33 AM

Updates

Hi everybody! Agustín here. I hope everybody is doing well and staying safe given the current Covid-19 situation. After a few ups and downs we are here to show you a new demo of the game. You can download it HERE.

At the beginning of the year, Leo had a problem with his computer. One day on January it stopped working and we lost some of the level assets. Fortunately, he now has a new computer and he is hard at work creating exciting graphics for our stages and worlds. 

Meanwhile, I have been making improvements to the game's engine and fixing bugs. In particular, I was able to track down two big bugs that made the game crash randomly, and squash them completely!

Level Design Improvements

The old demo that we released in the campaign had a few limitations that we hit when we were implementing the new enemies.

First was a performance issue with larger levels and enemy spawn counts. To improve performance we decided to cut the level in different sections or "rooms". This gave us another advantage when we are making changes to the level design because is easy to modify each room individually and rearrange the flow of the level.

Video RAM Usage

On the old demo the assets of enemies and pick ups were fixed in predefined locations in VRAM. That left us with little room for the new enemies. So now the position of each object in VRAM is calculate at the beginning of each room.

Some objects (like green orbs and shooting animations) had all the frames preloaded on VRAM because multiple objects could be on screen at the same time and each could play its animation independently. Now we have a main animator that uses the least amount of VRAM possible for an animation and the objects point to the only address in VRAM (for example the green orb). For enemies, we decided to give a little of VRAM for each one so they can play their animation separately.

Sprite Limits

The Genesis/Mega Drive has a limit for the amount of things that can be on screen. This imposes a limitation of how complex an enemy can be. So we changed the design of the tank to use less sprites. Can you spot the differences?

However, after reducing these sprites I hit a new limitation in my engine. When I'm calculate the VRAM position of each object in a room I also reserve the amount of sprites that that object need. 

This approach worked in the old demo because we had few enemies, but now that we have a variety it has become a problem. Even if two enemies are never on screen together, they are still loaded into the VRAM, and consequently they are taking up valuable space that other enemies cannot use. Sadly, this means that the tank isn't in the new demo yet because I'm working on my game engine to improve the usage of sprites.

Assets Improvements

Watching people playing the old demo we noticed that a few couldn't see the checkpoints because it was small. So we decided to make one more visible.

And this is how it look now in game:

 We also added some animations to the game's background to make it feel more alive:

Upgrade Device

During our game you are going to unlock different skills through the levels. We needed a way to show you the new skill acquired so we created this new device.

Ingame assets:

And here is an animatic of the unlock animation sequence:

Beginning & End of a Level

On the old demo we didn't have a level intro or a message after you defeated the boss. So Leo had an idea:

Our team loved this idea, but we felt that  it was better for a stage intro, so Leo make another animatic:

And we all love it! So now it we have a stage intro:

 See you next time!