As I dug through my archives of old images, I came across another complete set of graphics from 1995 for a wild Sinistar clone that was never released. I own all the copyrights and figure, what the heck. Some crazy fool who is still obsessed with the glory of pixel art might find a use for them.
Complete descriptions of all the graphics after the link. Enjoy!
This is the complete list of all the graphics. Since it was a space game, the number of tile sets is rather limited. We originally built the game map as a big bitmap that stuff was randomly blitted to. It had super smooth scrolling and pretty decent physics.
ActGrid: Spawn point for player's ship
Barrel: Repulses the players ship if it gets near
Base: Spawn enemy drones
Beacon (Destroyed, Searching, Red Alert) Sensor that looks for any enemy
Beacon2: Alternative sensor type
Blood: Splots of animated blood if you kill a space man.
Bomb1: Classic pulsating bomb. Exploded with great force, inevitably.
Bship: Battleship with cool rotating turrets. This thing was 3 times as large as your ship!
Bubble: What the hell?
Bullets: 6 types of bullets, each with 3 levels of power.
More bullets: Powerups and different color bullets for rock, paper, scissor attacking action.
Canister: The crate lives! Holds powerup, naturally
Cargo1: Ook? Alien nasty.
Cargo1b: Alien nasty damaged
Cargo2: Another cargo ship
Check: Checkpoint. When the player reaches this checkpoint, they regen from this location.
Crystal1: The cash of the game. The evil drones use this to make the Killer.
Crystal2: You have to realize that we didn't have the ability to rotate things easily. This was a radical attempt to create 16 rotational positions. 8-bit technology at it's peak.
Debris: The stuff that spews out when an asteroid is mined by drones
Debris2,3: More of the same.
Doomsday: Think of this as very nasty big bomb. If you hit it, the entire screen went 'foomp' and no more little player.
Drone: These little fellows run about gathering crystals in order to build the Killer. They'll orbit an asteroid, fire at it until a crystal appears and take it out.
Drone2: A more efficient type of drone
Exhaust1, 2, and 3: This flame comes out the back of a spaceship.
Explode1, 2, 3, 4, and 5: Ah, the glory of highly animated explosions with 1-bit alpha.
Face1: This fellow was the store keeper when you bought upgrades.
Factory: An enemy installation that made drones
Factory2: An enemy installation that made super drones
Factory 3: This is where the Killer was built.
Factory 4b: This is where the mini-Killer was built.
Flame: Fireballs stolen from Mario, no doubt
Flamer: Everything you need to make a flame thrower of death and burnination
Font: I'm in awe. Font with *high light selection*
Formref1: Reference on how formations worked. Galaga, move on over.
Gamemenu: The basic menu for the game. Check out those gears.
GravBcon: A gravitational beacon that sucked the player towards the deadly rocks.
GravGrid: Bubbles in space that acted as a simple form of terrain. Very fun.
Guard: These trigger happy campers guarded the drones. No one ever said plot was important to video games, dammit.
Gun: It looks more like a blimp, but this fired out little round bullets in streams.
Hiscore: Enter your name, record your score. If we had come out a few years later, we would have licenced some sweet Tony Hawk punk/death/metal sellout music for this screen.
Hunter1, 2: Attackers that come straight at you.
Items: All the great powerups you could get. I have no clue what they do, but I like shiny things. (Let's see: Generators to improve energy recharge, shields, health, rubber duckies, various weaspons, and the Amiga Checkmark)
Junkdrtst: Energy gates
Joystick: Back in the day you needed to calibrate your joystick. These are the interface graphics.
Junk: Destructable junk that acted as mazes for the level. You could blow holes in it...cause that's fun.
Keyboard: Keyboard configuration
Killer: Ode to Sinistar, my ass. Talk about exact copy. This happy looking fellow was a pain in the arse once he came to life.
Killer2: The mini-killer. Not quite a munchkin, but still damn sexy. His eyes would slowly come alight as he was built. He could also split apart when he was built.
Knife: Um...seems rather morbid.
Launcher: Another enemy ship. This one flew around spawning little ships
Mage: A logo for our team
Main: The intial interface. We went with a much more minimalist look in the end.
Main2: The final minimalist UI
MainMenu: Yet another menu template
Mine: These fellows floating around caused mucho pain
Missle: Hmm. Sloppy, sloppy. The high light is off in the lower left corner.
Mouse: UI for selecting mouse control.
Names: All the cool folks in our development team. I still talk to Leinad (music), and wReam (Hmm...what did he do?) and Zoombapup (programmer...he ended up working on Worms for ages)
Nebula: Gotta have background graphics
Options: The options screen. In the end, it is all about 'Exit to DOS'
Pointer: The mouse pointer. It changed when you clicked.
PShip2: The player ship. I spent time on the 16 rotational animations so that it would be smooooothy. Like the fine inner thigh of a lovely amazonian princess right after a day of mudbaths and waxing. I was such a proud young artist.
Rock: An asteroid that contains crystals and be blown to smithereens.
Ship: One of my first attempts at 3D graphics. This took ages to render on a pirated copy of 3ds running in the old computer lab. I think we ran it on the fastest machine on campus, a 486.
Ship2: Sweet!
Ship3, 4, 5, and 6: Enemy! (Really, all the explanation that was needed)
ShipGun: Imagine this...a ship with a rotating turret. Man, that would be so cool.
Smasher: Ever have those days when the programmer laughs and laughs and laughs at you? This enemy had an animated energy ball on a chain. Add some primitive physics and you put that little cutie from Kill Bill to shame.
Spaceman: When certain ships where destroyed, little guys fell out. They really only existed to be shot. I think I stole the idea from the joy of running over little people in the Amiga game "Firepower."
Spacestor: If you made it here, you could buy cool stuff
Spike: Dangerous walls
Store3: The interface for the store.
Sun: The central sun that all this junk floated around. If you fell in, you got hurt. Flares flew out of it periodically.
Teleport: A jump gate between sections of the map
Test1: A mockup showing the store in action
Test2: A mockup showing the game in action
Warp: No clue
Wave: A giant gun that fired huge waves of fire at the player.
Mining a 12-year old game design for innovative game mechanics. (Plus the complete set of 8-bit graphics available for download.)
In 1993, I worked on an unreleased RTS game design called Hard Vacuum. Dune 2, the father of the modern RTS had just come out in 1992, revolutionizing the the gaming community's perception of the possibilities of the strategy game genre. We believed that RTS games were the future and that we were the inspired game developers who were going to popularize this hitherto ignored genre.
Some historical perspective is in order. Warcraft wouldn't come out until late 1994. Command and Conquer wouldn't arrive until 1995. What many PC gamers today consider to be one of the most burnt out genres was at that time new, fresh and completely unknown to most gamers. The term 'RTS' hadn't even been invented as far as I know.
As I write this in 2005, I'm bemused by the path the RTS game genre has taken from stunning innovation to stagnant maturity. The latest Age of Empires is certainly a gorgeous game, but the core mechanics of the genre have changed little since it's peak in the late 1990s.
From this perspective, I revisit a 12-year old game design conceived near the very birth of a genre. In particular I'm interested in the unexpected solutions to common problems. What sort of bizarre innovation occurs when a game designer can't steal from the latest best seller?
Hard Vacuum: The Basics Hard Vacuum was set in a science fiction world run by large corporations. You were a mercenary battle team, out for hire to the highest bidder and ready to kick ass. Admittedly, a rather generic plot, but then again entries into a new genre are rarely concerned with plot. Hard Vacuum also had most of the basics of your typical real-time strategy game.
Resource Gathering: There were mineral deposits that you could build mining towers on to gather resources.
Base Building: You could build a variety of building for generating units, new buildings, and additional resource gatherers.
Fighting: There were a variety of units that could be deployed to attack enemies, destroy bases, etc. You could select them with a rubber band and send them towards the enemy.
Hard Vacuum: Innovations There were several interesting systems in Hard Vacuum. Some made it into future RTS games and some did not.
Supply Lines: When you built a mining tower on a resource deposit, there was no need to manually build and manage drones to carry the minerals back and forth. Instead, a road was built from your base to the mine. Drones were automatically created when the mine had a full load and sent along the road to your base. Enemies could blast your supply line and interrupt your flow of resources. So protecting fixed supply lines became a bit part of the strategy.
Variable Height Terrain: This was a 2D tile-based game intended to run on 386 and 486 machines. We had a full system of variable height terrain. Units on higher ground would have targeting advantages over units on lower grow
Deformable terrain with flowing water and lava: You could blow huge holes in terrain with artillery in order to divert streams and lava. Drop a water bomb on a city and watch it wash away an entire troop. Drop a dirt bomb to create a mountain.
Walls: Walls played a huge part in the game to give large defensive barriers to attack. These existed in Dune2, but were extended in HV
Player created landscapes: Walls, base building, supply lines, and advanced terrain modification all contributed to a game where players built intricate maps during game play. We couldn't afford to spend lots of money building maps so instead we had to create fun systems that let players create unique and interesting combat situations.
What We Lost as Game Players All all the mechanics in HV, the one I fail to see in new games is the focus on player-created environment. With our bloated budgets, we can afford to spend a two dozen man years creating intricate content that players use once and then throw away. Oh, you spent and hour playing map 3b in the single player campaign? Blizzard spent 5 months designing that. Now you are never going to play it ever again. What a waste.
There is a big lesson here. Without a successful game to promote the concept of player-focused creativity in the RTS genre, this intriguing game mechanic was stillborn. The concept certainly has some validity since we can see that it blossomed in the sim genre in the aftermath of SimCity's success. But without clear examples of successful application in the RTS genre, designer never really had a chance to steal it, implement in their 'next generation' games, and evolve it into something more polished.
I believe strongly that genres evolve in simple steps based on modifications to previously successful games. Games like C&C and Warcraft solidified the major conventions of RTS games. Unfortunately, in the game industry, massive success breeds design stagnation. Once a successful formula for creating a RTS was discovered, gamer designer copy the basics and then focus on polishing the basic formula. Better cut scenes, improved graphics, tweaked unit control for expert users, etc. As game designers, we only look back as far as the last successful title.
Let's play "What If" Imagine for a moment, if a game like Hard Vacuum had achieved popularity. The ripples of a successful early title have a profound effect on future titles. Would it be obvious the most casual game player that terrain modification is a fundamental part of the basic RTS formula? Would things like supply lines and dynamic player created environments be the standard?
An even crazier thought branches off from here. If these design mechanics had become standard, what would a modern RTS game complete with physics, 3D graphics, and king-of-the-genre polish look like today?
When we look at the evolution of genres, these are intriguing questions. Game designers are too complacent in their acceptance of genre norms. It is up to us to shake things up a bit.
An Exercise for the Reader Pick up and play an ancient copy of a game that fathered a genre. The further back you can go, the better. Clear your mind of all expectations and knowledge of what the genre evolved into. That cool thing that Half Life did with conversations. Forget it.
Now reinvent the genre. What are the core primitive concepts and where can you take them that would result in addictive player experiences? You have the opportunity to reinvent an entire decade of evolutionary game design in your head. Chances are you will spawn a few original ideas.
If you can get the final project through the miserable distribution system that plagues our industry, you might even have a new genre buster on your hands.
The Hard Vacuum Team The team that made Hard Vacuum was typical of many groups in the early 90s. We were small, self funded, still in school and willing to work crazy hours. A team like this today can not even hope to create a major block buster game.
Yet, in that time period, this seemed to be the standard. Id took the world by storm with it's first person shooter Doom in 1993. Tim Sweeney and James Schmalz were busy starting up Epic with a titles like Epic Pinball. Most teams were still below 10 people and a large number of successful games where released with core teams of 4 or 5.
I've only been able to keep track a few of the folks involved.
Daniel Cook: I did the artwork and a bit of the HV design. I went to work with Epic and created a game called Tyrian that paid my bills for a long while. After that I designed a program called Anark Studio, which is used to create thousands of interactive 3D project. We even started selling it to the game developers this past year.
Ryan Geithman: Ryan was our rocking lead programmer. He went on to do some amazing work on Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance and the new Bard's Tale game. An industry man.
Patch: Patch was another programmer. I have no idea what happened to him. He would call me up on pay phones to talk about game design. Every few minutes he would have to play a series of tones from his little blue box to get another few free minutes of talk time. Conference calls through phone phreaking. Those were the days. :-)
Free Artwork I don't have the design documents any longer, but I do have a large number of the game tiles. These were done primarily in DPaint and Brilliance using an Amiga 1000. We didn't have no stinking Wacom tablets so these were all drawn with a mouse. Pixel art at its finest.
~60 vehicles
~120 terrain tile sets
~30 misc graphic (bullets, blood, clouds, etc)
~30 buildings
Interface screens
Use them, abuse them. If you make anything interesting, let me know.
I found a bunch of my old 8-bit graphics. Woot! Here's an example. I'll post more as I get this site up and running. This one was an ode to Sinistar. Such a classic.
This site is about art and game design. You'll find galleries of my latest illustrations. Also, I have extensive ramblings on a wide variety of game design topics.
Why people read this site
"[...] probably the most interesting article I've ever read." Tycho from Penny Arcade on the Nintendo Innovation Strategy article
I've been a game designer, pixel artist, painter, tools designer, product manager and marketing guy. I got my first job while in college working on a shooter called Tyrian at a little company called Epic Megagames. These days, I'm designing games deep in the forests of the North West.
I remain, to this day, not a chickadee plucker. Despite the rumors.
