Old School Game Development

[JesseDavis]

everything was made with mspaint on a win 3.1 machine. :)

just kidding, I would like to know the answer to your question as well though.

[SuperDre]

They where all using specifically designed tools, and back then they did cost a bundle of money and where mostly provided by nintendo/sega, that's why there weren't much hobby programmers doing nes/snes/sega megadrive etc.
But when the copiers (devices for copying your game to disk) came out, and some people got hold of some 'secret' hardware documents (which you can find now on the internet if you look hard) then it was also possible for the hobbyprogrammer, but they used ofcourse normal paint packages like 'Deluxe paint'/'paint shop'/whatever.. and a lot of self made utilities..

[Tom Pawlik]

The CPUs in this babies were known very well. Every good coder knows the Z80 or the 65000s-asm. The only problem we had was the cartridges. Way too expensive and not available to everyone.
The biggest mistake is that the copystations brought life into game. Nope, it was the emus. As Emulators came out, the coders could interactively test their efforts and this made the people code the old machines (Too bad that it was too late to make money out of it).

cu
Tom

[SuperOstrich]

Back in 94, I worked for a game developer called Clockwork Tortoise. We made two games: The Adventures of Batman and Robin on the Sega Genesis, along with the completely different version of the game on the SegaCD.

We had two real tools that we used on the art side. Deluxe Paint or "Dpaint" as it was called, and tUME (the Universal Map Editor). Basically, Dpaint was a pixel-pushing 2D art tool. tUME was a map editor that basically allowed a designer or artist to piece together 16x16 blocks of graphics and make a level out of it. It also had built-in tools for trigger positions and stuff.

That's about it. Most of the design work was done in a script, and I think most of the game was written in assembly code.

BTW, I think the budget for Batman on the Genesis was somewhere around the ~$450K mark. The game ended up selling like 275K units in the US. I'm not sure about the SegaCD version.

[erikN]

thanks alot :)

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