Demon Attack Postmortem

introduction

My name is Harold. On the internet I'm also known as Henricus or Deth_good. Coding remakes is just one of my hobbies. Apart from a few VBA macros I only code for the fun of it. Before Demon Attack I finished two games: A straight clone of Space Invaders and a clone/remake of Scramble. You can download these games from my website.

Choice - When the Retro Remakes 2006 competition started there were two games that I wanted to remake. The Atari 2600 version of Demon Attack and the arcade version of Vulgus. Demon Attack is a simple yet fun shooter that I played a lot back in the days. Vulgus is a gorgeously looking scrolling shooter. Allthough Vulgus looks really great, the sound and gameplay could be improved a lot I think. In the end I choose Demon Attack because it's easier to code and because I really wanted to create my own graphics this time.

what went right

Ideas - When I was working on Demon Attack the ideas just kept coming. A lot of them didn't make it in the game though , others did. For example the fading sprites thing that I used on the demons. Initially I wanted some sort of glow effect for the demons but when I finally got them to work they just looked crap. Then I got the 'fading sprites' idea, and it worked out just like I had in mind.
The idea of the old scifi-ish intro came up when I saw a large version of the font that I'd picked. So I made up a little story and created some music and the scifi-ish intro was born. The music was inspired by the title music of the movie: "The day the earth stood still".

Gameplay - This is not a pixel perfect clone but a remake so I tried to grab the feel of the original Demon Attack by playing it a lot. This approach worked fine and is a lot more fun then counting pixel movement. Another thing that I worked on is timing and smoothness. The game had to play like an arcade style game.

Graphics - I'm not an artist but I wanted to create my own graphics for this remake. I had already worked with Blender and for Demon Attack I used it for almost all the graphics. Blender is not easy to learn. In order to learn it well, you really have to go through a few tutorials. Ones you have something done in Blender you can put lights on it, maybe put some effects on it and then tweak everything till you're satisfied. Worked great for Demon Attack. Will it work for other remakes? I don't know.

Music - The main music in this remake was made in just a few hours before the competition end. It's mainly based on a loop with some melodies on top of it. Initially I wanted to make heavy metal kinda music for the game with grunts and stuff but I just didn't have enough time (maybe for the best?). Listening to the music now, I think it's not that bad.

what went wrong

Gameplay - I wanted to extend the gameplay with some extra enemies and/or challenges, but in the end I only improved the gameplay just a little bit by putting more demons on the screen.

Screen resolution - I really like those classic, low resolution, video games where you can see pixels. For Demon Attack I used a screen resolution of 640x480 because it was the minimum screen resolution for the compo. Looking back it would have been better to use a higher resolution. The graphics and the font would have looked much shinier I think.

Coding - Coding the game engine of Demon Attack was easy, coding the menu screen together with the accesibility options was not and took about a whole month. As a result I didn't have time to code a highscore table.

conclusion

Remake - Like you can read in what went wrong I'm not very happy with the way this remake turned out gameplay wise. Still the overall feeling about this remake is good. I did something that I wanted to do for a long time: Create my own graphics and music. It also feels good to have the perseverance to finish a playable game in three months.

Competition - Looking back, I have to laugh. It was Thursday 31 August 2006, 22:30. "shit!..." My Demon Attack remake that I made for the retro remakes competition and that I had worked on for 3 months had to be ready and uploaded before 24:00. I still had a lot of things to add but I knew the time was short and the actual upload could be slow due to many people uploading at the same time. So I finished the in-game music and even recorded something on guitar. I mixed the music, saved it as an ogg file, compiled everything and run it so I could check/test the music for the last time. "...shit!...". The music was ok but the graphics were choppy. "...shit! shit! shit!...". With my guitar still on my lap and a sweaty head full of panic I started searching. After half an hour or so I still didn't find the problem. Would I've been younger I certainly would have smashed something just out of frustration. But I'm older now and calmed down a bit, got myself a cola, went to the living room and watched tv for a few minutes, then came back and immediately saw what the problem was! Nothing! The choppy graphics were only caused by the recording software with several plugins that were eating up processor time in the back ground! "...aaaarch!...". Quickly zipped and uploaded the thing. "...yeah!"

information

The original Demon Attack for the Atari 2600 game system was released by Imagic in 1982. Additional information can be found on: www.atariage.com
The Demon Attack remake was released on September 1st 2006 and updated on November 10th 2006. The updated version can be downloaded from my site: www.henricus.eu

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