The developer behind Retro City Rampage walks us through making an 8-bit game.
Making videogames today is a no joke job. Making videogames back in the 8-bit era ruled by Nintendo, especially so.
Game programmer Brian Provinciano, the creator of the indie hit title Retro City Rampage, brilliantly presents this challenge in The Making of: ROM City Rampage, a short YouTube video detailing how Brian took his open-world romp and tuned it into a true NES release, ROM City Rampage.
Said 8-bit port will also be a cool bonus coming with this week’s release of Retro City Rampage for Nintendo’s WiiWare, and not only shows the programming skills Brian has – and boy does he flippin’ ever – but also the true beginnings of RCR which began as a homebrew project more than 10 years ago. Oh, how the time flies.
Long before working on Retro City Rampage, Brian made his own NES development kit and used it to recreate an 8-bit version of Grand Theft Auto III called Grand Theftendo, which at that point before moving his ideas onto better capable hardware, served as a good learning tool for the intricacies of the NES hardware and its limitations.
Just seeing Brian’s video really gives you a humble understanding of the effort – the tricks and programming loopholes – game developers from that time had to pull from their collective butts to make videogames work on those systems. It’s amazingly insightful… and albeit kind of boring for us simpletons, but thankfully Brian tackles the subject as straightforward as possible.
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hvx4xXhZMrU&w=600&h=338]
As a reminder Retro City Rampage arrives on the WiiWare storefront this week – I hear many good things about it – and as I alluded to earlier, you’ll receive ROM City Rampage as a neat bonus with your purchase. It’s also available to anyone who buys RCR off Steam, which I believe is half-off for a limited time only. So get at that, folks!
Oh, and don’t forget to get at this restoration of the Delorean time machine and these 8 mashups of real life villains & comic book supervillains here on Walyou.
