Only a small number of PCE Fan issues from 1990 had these. They were titled ゲームができるまで which is something like "Until the Game is Done" and were little quarter-page blurbs where they gave developers a chance to reflect on a game they had already made.
There is nothing profoundly revealing here, but I hope you'll find it interesting to look at nonetheless.
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Space Harrier (Jan. 1990)
The original is a 3D-feeling arcade game. In addition to NEC Avenue’s PC Engine adaptation, it’s also been ported to the Master System and the X68000 personal computer. What follows is an account from Mr. Tabeda of NEC Avenue, who directly approached Sega for the rights to port the game despite being unacquainted with the company.
“When porting Space Harrier to a ‘hobby machine’, there are some areas where you have to push yourself, and to use the hardware to the fullest extent possible. A game like Space Harrier lets players see exactly where hardware limits lie. We picked this up when the PC Engine had only just been released and hadn’t yet achieved many sales; what we wanted to do with it was to distinguish the PC Engine from the Famicom and the Master System by realizing things on it that couldn’t be done with the others.
(Pink text: Everyone was really happy when Space Harrier got ported)
For the port, we extracted data from the original arcade game itself. The process began with disassembling enemy movement patterns, which we later modified. We shrank the enemy graphics and simplified them to a degree, and thanks to this, we were able to make the scrolling speed very fast. Also, by choosing to ignore the fact that putting more than 256 sprite pixels on one line causes flickering, we could put lots of enemies on the screen and make them very aggressive.
We were always asking ourselves how close we could make the game to the X68000 port, but because our version doesn’t stop in between stages and smoothly moves its backgrounds with sprites, I think it surpasses it in some ways.
R-Type (Feb. 1990)
"We thought that this would be impossible to port as-is, but that’s exactly what eventually happened.
For the most part, we ported R-Type by playing the arcade version and reproducing the feel of the visuals. We would say to each other “Get to the fifth stage without picking up any powerups other than the Bits!” and some guys could actually do it. All eight people on the team could clear the first loop. After all, anytime we wanted to confirm something, we would do it by playing the game. We would run our version side-by-side with the arcade version, which is why the movement really is identical.
In stage seven of the arcade game, so many enemies appear that the game slows down, but this didn’t happen in our port. We knew that the slowdown was deliberate, but we decided to let the PC Engine port be as it was. The original game’s graphics have sixteen degrees of gradation, which we had to reduce to four. The [worm in stage 2] originally had five movement patterns, which we reduced to three, and by rounding-out the graphics, we were able to make it less jerky.
(Pink text: Even with this many characters appearing, the game doesn't slow down.)
The biggest problem was space. We decided to somehow squeeze the first four stages into two megabits and split the game rather than hack off parts of it. We did things that pushed the hardware to its limits, and I’m actually surprised that there weren’t more bugs. Finally, this game brings back a lot of memories of working with Yuji Izumi, with whom I’ll no longer have the pleasure of working now that Nectaris is completed."
Mikio Ueyama (Hudson)
Dragon Spirit (Mar. 1990)
After their big arcade hit Xevious, Namco hadn’t made any auto-scrolling vertical shooters for a long time. Finally, they began work on Dragon Spirit. The basis for the game was the developer’s intense desire to create a dragon-world and a dragon-protagonist. Dragon Spirit was programmed so that it would have movement that gives a feeling of living creatures instead of inorganic machines.
(Pink text: The vertical scrolling shooting game. Its graphics and sound are both beautiful.)
For the PC Engine port, we struggled on how to partition the two megabit memory for graphics, music and program code. If we lost the gameplay, what would remain would be an entirely different game with only the husk of the original. What players want is the arcade game as-is, and coming as close as possible was of great importance to us. Despite this, the difference in memory between the arcade and the PC Engine versions was so dramatic that we were forced to make the regrettable choice to cut the “undersea” and “darkness” stages. We drove the melody and the rhythm [percussion?] separately, we flipped half of the dragon’s graphics, and other things to bring down the memory requirements. However, if we had wanted to squeeze something from the original arcade game “as-is” into the two megabit space, I don’t think there would be room for much more than a single boss character. We made adjustments to the speed of enemies since the game is being displayed on a horizontal screen rather than a vertical one, and completed the best PC Engine Dragon Spirit that we could.
Valis II (May 1990)
This time, we’re taking a look at the CD-ROM game Valis II, and we sat down with Mr. Hanari of Shin Nihon Lasersoft, a company that is actively involving itself in CD-ROM game development.
“First, the basic difference between CD-ROMs and HuCARD games is space. The biggest HuCARDs are four mega[bits], while CD-ROMs are 540 mega[bytes], and we always ask ourselves how we can use this tremendous space. For Valis II, this meant putting animations in every scene and asking voice actors to come record for us.
When we started production, we had not only programmers doing programming, but animators doing animation, and voice actors recording in a studio we rented. We had to deal with things other than game development, and it was tough. I think you can say this about all CD-ROM games, not just Valis II, but the cost it takes to make one of these adds up to several times more than the cost of a HuCARD game. That’s the most stressful thing.
With CD-ROM games, everything comes down to how you use that giant amount of space. Most CD-ROM games sell themselves on their animation, music and voice acting. It’s only natural that the amount of capital it takes to fund one of them is quite a lot.
If we compare games to movies, CD-ROM games are like the big [hundred-million dollar] productions."
Battle Ace (Jun. 1990)
This time, “Until the game is done” is looking at Battle Ace, the first game for the high-spec version of the PC Engine, the PC Engine Supergrafx (hereafter abbreviated as “SG”).
We spoke with the person at Hudson who developed it.
“One thing that was hard for us was that the SG hardware was in flux while we were making the game. When it seemed like we had finished the game to a degree, the hardware would change, and we would have to reprogram things to accommodate those changes. This happened again and again. It really was the most painful thing about the process. In the early versions, we had the player’s craft on screen like in “Afterburner”. This was when we were also pushing Tengai Makyo along, and we were pulling a lot of all-nighters.
When you see this game, I think you’ll agree that it has 3D graphics that use the SG’s capability for a high number of sprites to its fullest. We made lots of different enemies and bosses attack you one after another, and I feel like we got a good performance out of the system. Next, I want to make a game that gets 120% out of it!”
The first games to come out on a system get a lot of attention. Whether software meets people’s expectations or doesn’t affects their impression of the hardware itself. There aren’t many SG games yet, but the ones that do exist are uniformly excellent. If you try them, we’re sure that you’ll be able to understand what the developers were aiming for.
Moto Roader (Jul. 1990)
Everyone knows that the PC Engine has a multi-tap that lets up to five people play simultaneously. One unforgettable multiplayer game is Moto Roader.
NCS’s Moto Roader sells itself on diverse courses and 5-player simultaneous play. We asked NCS’s main programmer to tell us what was difficult about making it.
“The thing that gave me the most trouble was, in short, data creation.
(Pink text: Moto Roader, the car racing game that five players can play at once.)
In general, game programming has a way of just dragging on and on. Sometimes, when we should be making data, we sneak back to coding.
With Moto Roader, we created the course data primitively, by hand. I thought it was going to kill me. We wrote codes into graph paper, and I had to keep inputting those for what felt like an eternity. I’d close my eyes at night and see graph paper.”
Such were the difficulties of making one game, as told to us haltingly by the developer.
Despite the programmer being attacked by visions of graph paper, Moto Roader was completed without incident and released to the world.
Hearing stories like this makes us think that we must not make light of games as we play them.
Topic: A few short "Making-Of" featurettes from PCE Fan magazine (Read 620 times)
