Just read The Masters of Doom

[Hobie-wan]

As pointed out, crunch time when a publisher set deadline is coming up and people are trying to crush as many bugs as possible happens all the time. People sleeping under desks, 16 hour days. Happens a lot. The EA Spouse thing was about that.

As for the smaller teams making games back in the day, remember that Most Atari 2600 games were done by a single person each. Programming, art, music, everything. The poor guy that made ET only had a month, which is why it turned out so terrible. All of the US Odyssey² games were made by one person. I'm not sure if some of the European games were made by other people.

The book is a good read for anyone else thinking about it.

[RCBH928]

I can understand atari 2600 , am not sure how it was back in the day, but I think even back then it was simple to program a game for the atari since the games were very basic, it looks like it has been drawn quickly using MS paint. There is not much going on too

But something like DOOM , its still good enough today! Let us not forget the great jump DOOM is in graphics, multiplayer, weapon selection, and playing online as far as I understand.

None the less, I still can't imagine making a game in 1 month or 2 even back in the atari days.I was surprised when the book mentioned that part.

[noiseredux]

I can understand atari 2600 , am not sure how it was back in the day, but I think even back then it was simple to program a game for the atari since the games were very basic, it looks like it has been drawn quickly using MS paint. There is not much going on too

what you don't seem to appreciate is that back then a program like MS Paint would have been considered mind-blowing.

[RCBH928]

oh am not making fun...
I am just willing to accept that this:



was programmed with one person, than this:

created by 6 to 8 people

its like 18 years later, and I still don't think that any programmer can create DOOM alone while atari pac-man can be like a programmer's graduation project

[gtmtnbiker]

but I think even back then it was simple to program a game for the atari since the games were very basic, it looks like it has been drawn quickly using MS paint. There is not much going on too

Keep in mind that back then, you had no tools whatsoever to help you build a game. There was probably very little documentation, examples, google, etc to help you. You also had to work with the confines of limited memory space, assembly language, etc.

It'ss easier to create a game today then it was back then. Mind you, a simple game, not something like Gears of War 3.

[RCBH928]

yea but back then creating a game on your own was nothing like creating Gears of War 3 on your own.

it would probably be equivalent to something like a flash game today. But i heard that joe Danger on ps3 and World of Goo was created by only 2 people, so....

Also I heard that Crash Bandicoot on psx was created by 2-3 people. I think I am wrong , I am still reading that article on it posted here on some other thread.

What seems to be the problem with Assembly language? Forgive my programming ignorance

[MrPopo]

What seems to be the problem with Assembly language? Forgive my programming ignorance

Assembly is extremely low-level programing. Essentialy you are writing out each individual instruction that the processor is going to execute. It is slightly more human readable than the raw binary, but not by much. Without extensive commentation the code is pretty much unreadable. By comparison, a language such as C++ (which most games are written in) looks fairly close to english.

Comparison:

C++

Code: Select all

void main() {
     printf("Hello world!"); 
}

Assembly

Code: Select all

.model small
.stack 100h

.data
msg     db     'Hello world!$'
 
.code
start:
        mov    ah, 09h        
        lea    dx, msg
        int    21h
        mov    ax, 4C00h        
        int    21h
end start

Both these pieces of code do the same thing.

[gtmtnbiker]

The other part of assembly is that you are completely responsible for manipulating all of the registers and memory. You also need to know the instruction set for the processor you're working on. If you switch to a different processor, then it's a whole set of different instructions although there are similarities.

If assembly was so easy to use, we wouldn't be using C/C++/C#/Java/etc today.

There were no libraries that you could use such as "was a key pressed and what is the value" or "draw this image on the screen". You had to do all of the work yourself.

[noiseredux]

The other part of assembly is that you are completely responsible for manipulating all of the registers and memory. You also need to know the instruction set for the processor you're working on. If you switch to a different processor, then it's a whole set of different instructions although there are similarities.

If assembly was so easy to use, we wouldn't be using C/C++/C#/Java/etc today.

There were no libraries that you could use such as "was a key pressed and what is the value" or "draw this image on the screen". You had to do all of the work yourself.

this sounds horrible. I dabbled VERY little with VBasic in the past, which of course uses some C (or C++ ? I don't really know what I'm talking about)... I cannot imagine working with Assembly. Wasn't Halo 2600 coded in Assembly even? So impressive.

[MrPopo]

The other part of assembly is that you are completely responsible for manipulating all of the registers and memory. You also need to know the instruction set for the processor you're working on. If you switch to a different processor, then it's a whole set of different instructions although there are similarities.

If assembly was so easy to use, we wouldn't be using C/C++/C#/Java/etc today.

There were no libraries that you could use such as "was a key pressed and what is the value" or "draw this image on the screen". You had to do all of the work yourself.

this sounds horrible. I dabbled VERY little with VBasic in the past, which of course uses some C (or C++ ? I don't really know what I'm talking about)... I cannot imagine working with Assembly. Wasn't Halo 2600 coded in Assembly even? So impressive.

For small projects it's actually not bad. Back in high school I wrote Breakout using assembly and had a blast. There's also some really cool optimizations you can do with assembly by taking advantage of the way the processor is designed. But it is time consuming. Higher level languages like C++ were developed explicitly to make coding larger projects easier. And a ton of work has gone into compiler design to allow compliers to create as efficient assembly code as possible.