Minotaur Arcade Vol 1 (Gridrunner/Goatup)

[gribbles]

>warm glow<

Anyone know of any self-help web sites that let you get control of chronic impatience?

[Jamesac]

Chronic impatience? I still haven't gotten to play Polybius in VR yet. My Rift hungers!

Hoping the release for these is a little closer together, PS4 and PC.

[gilesgoat]

Chronic impatience? I still haven't gotten to play Polybius in VR yet. My Rift hungers!

Hoping the release for these is a little closer together, PS4 and PC.

Blame the localisation of T4K ...

[edit] - speaking of OR/PC/etc. "if I can be arsed this week end" it's been AGES since I've done an SDK update I should have a look into .. I think there's going to be "quite a huge amout of superfanculo" before I'll have all things again "aligned to the latest version of".

First of all .. I have to find out where was my login/pwd for all that thing .. goat if it's been AGES since I used that ...

[Yak]

I'm pretty pleased with how this is turning out.

It started with something I began just before Xmas, with Giles busy on the T4K ports I needed to find something productive to do myself, so I had the idea of making some kind of environment that would let me take something sprite and tile based, and be able to present it in interesting ways both in and out of VR. One of the things I'm most interested in doing with VR is placing players "inside" arcade-style games as I am sure anyone who's played our VR stuff so far will realise. Sprite and tile covers a lot of ground and having a decent tool to use to work on and expand such games seemed like it could be a good way to spend some dev time.

After messing with it for a few weeks I had something that I thought I could use for a trial run, and the old Minotaur Project games seemed like a good place to start since they are fairly small games and very tile-and-sprite. So two weeks ago I started porting Gridrunner, I had a functional if rough port done by a week ago and I've got a pretty nice enhanced port working, in VR and out, within two weeks, which I think proves the concept nicely.

I'm also learning by doing the port and further enhancing the environment to make subsequent ports easier. There's quite a few tricks it can do that I haven't exercised yet too.

Gridrunner's come out really nice, it's hella fun to play and runs great in VR even in debug mode. I'll be adding a few more things to it before calling it done, already it's a lot nicer than its mobile original version .

It's built on the Neon engine so it should be pretty easy to have it working on anything that supports that (ps4, pc and x1 a given thanks to Giles' work on T4K). As for when it gets released that's down to how we chew through the work in hand, we have to finish the T4K stuff, and there's still the PC port of Polybius to consider too.

If it goes well there's the possibility of bringing over more of the Minotaur Project stuff (and those were good games, and deserve release from mobile purgatory). And as I said it's designed to let us do cool stuff with just about anything sprite and tile based so there's all kinds of possibilities beyond just the MP stuff.

[Markie]

Excited again and it will be great to see the old IOS games on the big screen. GRVR leading the way, fantastic! I can only hope to see a Mutant Camel or Cippy at some point in the future :-)

[Whiteball]

Yes! very much looking forward to this and hopefully more stuff to follow.

Would love to see a vr hover bovver with flying grass clippings, petals from shredded flowers and all

[Markie]

CAMELS! Been really too long since we have seen the humped beasts! So much cool stuff to come, this is so exciting :-)

[Jamesac]

Doing two Gridrunners close to each other would be silly but I'm still hoping to see my absolute favorite Llamasoft game, Gridrunner++, get the updated treatment. I'd love to see that starfield fade back to infinity.

[WiteWulf]

Thanks for the lovely, detailed, progress report Jeff. It's really appreciated. I started coming here so many years ago for the similar updates on Unity for Gamecube

[Jamesac]

Looking forward to finding out what the release plans are for the new engine games, just because there seems like there could be a lot of possibilities. Take a month to brush up an old classic and release it on Steam/itch.io, work the Minotaur Project games into either standalone games or a collection, and of course design something all-new. It seems like there could be a lot of fun options there.

Speaking of itch.io, any thoughts of tossing Space Giraffe on there, maybe with a Pay-What-You-Want structure? Or does it have a few more years left in it before that would be a consideration?

[toxibunny]

I like the sound of this 'being inside the arcade game', tiles/sprites engine thing.

[Yak]

The wobbling musk ox of pausing.

[Markie]

Cannot wait! and very excited about more of the older ones making a return too ...

[Markie]

I was just trying to imagine how something like Revenge or Ancipital might work in the VR world, something like Revenge is a side scrolling game so perhaps VR would be able to give it some depth of field while keeping the game action on a single plane, the same for Cippy I suspect or any game like that, VR comes into it's own for everything apart from the main control character.

[WiteWulf]

I'm loving the fact that, in the early days, everyone assumed VR would be about first-person immersion. That put me off, as I suffer from crippling motion sickness. What's fascinating, particularly with PSVR, is the processing power isn't *quite* there yet for really solid, smooth, first person games and that, instead, there are some gorgeous third-person games coming out that side-step the issue.

Moss, Lost Bear, Rez, Thumper and Polybius are the obvious ones here. Dropping the first-person view and, in some instances, taking a fixed-perspective, lower the complexity of the games and make them *far* more usable for those of us who get a bit icky. These, imho, are the really innovative VR games as they're not "just" taking pre-existing first person games and slapping on stereoscopic rendering (yes, I know there's a little more to it than that )