On the topic of solo game devs... if this sounds like your jam (and modern mobile games isn't your jam) then consider the console homebrew scene as an outlet. All the "retro" platforms still have a pulse and several are thriving enough to have competitions and forums and podcasts.<p>8-bit NES and 16-bit Genesis (Mega Drive) both have a supportive community and one or two publishers who can take your game from ROM.BIN to physical cart and/or digital purchase.<p>Hardware limitations naturally demand fewer man-hours to build out a "complete" game. You won't make a fortune. Or a dime. But then neither did a lot of one-person shops in the original 8-bit days.<p>[1] <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-assembly-line-an-nes-homebrew-podcast/id1247222547" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-assembly-line-an-n...</a><p>[2] <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/homebrew-game-club/id1592405358" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/homebrew-game-club/id1...</a>
It's good to see BallBlazer mentioned, but the article/video feels like it's incomplete without mentioning Dimension X (which also alternates between tank realtime combat and tunnel travel dodging walls) and Atari’s Battlezone.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dimension_X_(video_game)" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dimension_X_(video_game)</a><p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battlezone_(1980_video_game)" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battlezone_(1980_video_game)</a>
I’m curious how he managed to get that much detail out of the GameBoy tiles and sprites. It looks like the engine is casually treating the screen as a bitmap (AIUI it’s not) whilst also rendering 3D meshes, which must have taken some clever caching/buffering. They gloss over that in the video, but it must have been a monumental achievement.
Eclipse, hailed as proof that one person game dev teams could work. Then he ended up chasing his tail with eclipse2, releasing it late, looking like a game from 2 years prior to the release date. Proving the days of the solo game dev was over, at least for a while.
Very cool! I love seeing "behind the scenes" on this kind of stuff. I always check out these kind of articles the moment they come up because there's always some really neat history to learn about. I can only imagine what kind of awesome artifacts of video game history are still in some devs' attic or basement... Super thankful for people (like the author(s)) who seek and research/document this stuff. :)<p>Oh, the "tank" screenshot reminded me a bit of Spectre, an old Macintosh game, even though I imagine there's no direct relation there.
>Did you know that almost every 3rd-person cover shooter mechanic originated in the Nintendo 64 game WinBack?<p>No. I played Wolfenstein 3D many years before WinBack was launched.