The Final Countdown!
over 4 years ago – Sun, Aug 18, 2019 at 05:09:43 AM

We're receiving a lot of messages with last minute backers asking questions about the ROM, manual & substitutions for people that already own Coffee Crisis.  Here is the quick reference guide!

ROM & Manual

The $70 tier also includes the ROM & PDF downloads.

Coffee Crisis Backers

We're not substituting any other games at half off this time around, but we do, genuinely, appreciate you supporting our first Genesis game the last few years!

Late Backers

Come one, come all, and help us hit some stretch goals! If you're not available to back until Friday, never fear, the actual payment from your account can debited after the Kickstarter closes!

Happy Sunday, everyone!
over 4 years ago – Sat, Aug 17, 2019 at 03:26:59 PM

A Big Sunday Thank You!

We are always happy, thankful, and excited to see so many of you that share our passion for hand-crafted retro games introduce yourselves to us! As creators, there is nothing more satisfying than sharing your project with a community that has the same ideals and interests. Getting feedback early in a games development makes it infinitely better - and Phantom Gear will reflect all of the great feedback you've provided!

3 Days Left!

In our home stretch, we want to hit our first stretch goal to show you all some of the really exciting things we can do with the Gen/MD that we have planned. Please share on social, keep sending fan art, and joining our live conversations on discord. 

Development Diary: Making music for Phantom Gear
over 4 years ago – Fri, Aug 16, 2019 at 11:42:47 AM

Hi loves, it's Toni Leys, composer and sound designer for Phantom Gear. Let us dive into the adventure of making music for a Sega Genesis / Mega Drive system!

As you may know, in a console like the Genesis/MD the sound is not played back from a sound file like we use nowadays in games (like a WAV or MP3).  Technology was not at that point when these bulky (and lovely) machines were invented. On the contrary, sound is produced on the fly via hardware by two dedicated sound chips: the Yamaha YM2612, capable of playing FM synthesized sounds and some small samples, and the Texas Instruments SN76489, this one can play square waves and noise.

To achieve sound using these chips, we have to tell them how to tweak each parameter of the synths and what notes to play. We also have to set up a timeline so we can arrange all of those commands which in turn will be sent to the chips and produce our craved music.

Luckily, we have tools nowadays that can help us with that, like Deflemask. It's a music program specially made so that we can write music in a way the hardware can understand. This kind of program is called a tracker, and it's arranged so that we can input notes, commands, instrument changes and other things discreetly to each channel of each one of the sound chips. If you're a nerd like me, most certainly you've seen one of those before, but if you don't, bear with me, it's not that complicated.

Unlike *normal* music or multimedia editing programs, the timeline here works vertically, time flows downwards, and channels are set in columns. The first 6 send data to the YM2612 and the last 4 to the SN76489.

So with everything set up, it's a matter of composing with the tools we have on hand. It's not the first time I compose music for a Genesis/MD, I actually released a full album compatible with the console a few years ago. Though, I had it easy at the time since the ROM would only contain the music. Now we have a full fledged game running and I have to move my stuff to the side to let the hardware handle the whole game. This means that for one I had to cut the quantity and quality of the samples I used, in fact I only used 5 samples in the demo, and won't be adding much more for the full game. As for the instruments we're trying to use the same set of instruments for all the songs.

In composition of the Phantom Gear tracks, I created something in-between familiar and original.  I base the style of the music in some electronic, melodic and kinda harmony heavy soundtracks like the Sonic franchise, Rocket Knight Adventures, Super Mario Galaxy and Ragnarok Online. With that foundation, I built away while searching for a sound that is more unique for the game mixing an electronic base with synthy sounds and some electric guitars.

For the boss fight song I had a bunch of different ideas. Ultimately, Leo (Co-founder and artist of the project), inspired me to go for a "Sonic 3D Blast" style, and it worked wonders!

After a while I found a kind of "palette" of instruments and sounds to use in the whole game, now I'm eager to keep using that same material for more tunes in different genres and styles!

So there you have it, a bunch of separate chips talking to one another and playing music for your ears. I'm having a lot of fun working on this, I hope you have a great time with Phantom Gear!

Development Diary: The First Steps Towards Phantom Gear!
over 4 years ago – Fri, Aug 16, 2019 at 11:37:15 AM

Hi everybody, Agustín Garcia (Co-Founder and Lead Programmer) here. I want to tell you about my journey developing for the Sega Genesis / Mega Drive before starting Phantom Gear.

In 2015 I had the idea to make a game for Genesis / Mega Drive but I didn’t know how to. Searching on the Internet, one of the first things that I found was Matt Phillips's (Tanglewood) assembly tutorials. Those tutorials helped me a lot at the beginning to understand the basics of the hardware limitations and Assembly. After a few months I was able to test my first test program: a single sprite moving across the screen.

After that I came with the idea to make a tool for exporting sprites and animations to binary. This took me another few months but at the end I was able to convert PNGs to binary easily and the exported data is optimized to use the least amount of memory possible.

Animation in the editor:

Animation on hardware:

The next step was the scrolling background. I needed a tile map editor capable of optimizing the exported data that the game was going to use, so I decided to make one too.

Making the tile map editor and making the data work in the console was tough but I was able to make it work.

The last big thing that I wanted to have working before I could start a proper new game was the collision detection. I implemented a simple tile collision editor to my map editor and exported the data for both together.

The most difficult part of my journey was making the collision detection work, specially the ramps, but after many months of hard work, I did it: multiple characters moving around the map using simple physics and landing where they should.

It took me almost 3 years working in my spare time to complete the first part of my journey. But now I was ready to find a team and begin our first project together...

Success!
over 4 years ago – Wed, Aug 14, 2019 at 05:20:56 PM

We did it! Because of all of your awesome support and encouragement, the Phantom Gear Kickstarter has reached its goal!

Thank you to everyone, from the bottom of our retro hearts!