Inspiration - Part 1

In the fall of 2021, I had a lot going on. My daughter was only a few months old, my son had just turned two. My family had just moved into a new home. It was less than a year after my mom had died. In all that chaos, things were starting to settle back into something resembling normalcy, at least as much as they could during the COVID-19 pandemic. This was after dealing with the immediate aftermath of a parent's death (though the grieving process was, and still is, far from over). This was after welcoming our second child, and all the sleepless nights and worries that come with a new baby. This was after working hard to get our chaotic home ready to list, house hunting in a brutal market, and then somehow getting the packing and the move done with a newborn, a toddler and a dog.

When I was still in the thick of the first half of 2021, I found myself turning to retro games. Initially, the ones from my childhood. I distinctly remember firing up Yoshi's Island and feeling like I stepped into a time warp. Three key moments in my life came to mind when I played it: 

At a friend's house, he had just rented it. I'm about seven. He's a few months away from moving away and our friendship ending.

At my dad's house, my parents have just split up. I'm nine. I dragged my dad to the local used game shop and saw this game I had always kind of wanted for $10, just the cartridge.  He's probably thinking about how he just bought us a Nintendo 64 a few months ago and now I'm buying a Super Nintendo game.

At my mom's house, I'm a teenager. I'm revisiting my SNES a lot. I've become entrenched in thinking and reading about the "greatest games of all time" and decide to finally go back and beat Yoshi's Island. I'm in my bedroom and finally reach the credits. I can practically feel myself there. The smells of home. Our dog, long passed, probably watching me or sitting on my foot. Maybe I'm being called for dinner.

-----

My experience with Yoshi's Island was mixed. It's still a great game, and I had that amazing time warp feeling. But I was playing it on my modern TV, via Nintendo Switch Online. For the first time ever, I found the buttons just didn't quite do what I expected. Something was off. 

I went down a rabbit hole of learning about input latency, display latency, emulation errors. Where it took me was MiSTer FPGA, a device for hardware emulation (as opposed to software emulation), with the appeal being game performance and presentation extremely accurate to original hardware, with the best possible image quality you can get (I still have my SNES and games, but composite signal on a flat panel isn't great) and any latency you might experience is down to your own controller or TV, with lots of resources for finding the controllers and TVs that have the least latency. I could even hook it up to a CRT, if I had one.

In the fall of 2021, I still had retro games on the mind. Though I had moved away a little bit from reflection and more toward discovery. I was waiting for my MiSTer to arrive, shipping from Europe to Canada. I found myself listening to reviews and retrospectives about classic games on YouTube while working, mixed with retro tech discussions and general MiSTer news.

When I wasn't working, the kids dominated. Our routine at the time was that my wife would go to bed with our son, our daughter turning out to be a relatively easy baby who had just recently moved out of a bassinet and into her own crib. I would have an hour or so by myself, then my wife would leave our son's room after he fell asleep and we'd hang out for a bit, then we'd go to bed. I never really knew what to do with my hour alone. I'd do some cleaning up, then I'd sit there overwhelmed by my options. I had been so busy for so long that I really didn't know what to do with the time. I had just recently stopped being the parent my son wants with him at bed time (and soon after, I'd become that parent again and remain that parent to this day).

For some reason, after moving I had decided to charge my 3DS in the living room. I was not a frequent user of my 3DS at the time. This one evening, I picked up the 3DS. I can't even remember what my intent was. Maybe to dive back into an eShop game I never finished. What ended up happening was seeing a game I had completely forgotten I ever bought, Sega 3D Classics Collection. With retro games firmly on my mind, it was an obvious choice.

After trying out a few of the games offered in the collection, I finally landed on Fantasy Zone II and played for a while. I had always been curious about the Fantasy Zone games, but had never played them. One of those 80's "arcade classics" that didn't seem to stick around into the 90's arcades of my childhood. It's a sidescrolling shooter series with infinitely looping stages filled with surreal imagery. You play as a tiny winged ship that shoots at enemies and takes out their bases to cause a boss to appear, and move on to the next stage after the boss is defeated. Almost like Defender on acid (and a lot more approachable than I'd ever found Defender to be, personally). 

A standout element of the game for me was the shop feature. You collect money in the game, and when you encounter a shop you can purchase upgrades for your ship. It got me thinking - it's fun to save up some in-game money to buy items, but it kind of sucks to have to restart that whole loop after running out of credits. Surely that's arcade game design - you've sunk the cost in to upgrade, why not put in some more quarters and keep going? In a world without credits, how could this design evolve? My mind immediately went to rogue-lites like Rogue Legacy, which let you upgrade your character (or lineage, in this case) between runs and progress along the upgrade path is saved.

I've lived much of my life with game ideas floating around my head, and occasionally I try to make them. At this point in time, it had been a while since I'd put serious effort into any of them. In 2019, I was very much into fighting games and decided to try to make a basic 3D fighter in  Unreal. I made some okay progress on a camera system and UI, then started to do some animation and felt good seeing it on-screen, but I pretty quickly lost steam. I had this idea that I'd animate one character, only allow local PVP, and release the game as a 1.0 version on Itch.io and if I wanted more (or the game somehow found an audience) I'd slowly add features in sequels. Even with that relatively small scale, the thought of animating one character and then trying to code everything in Blueprint (or learn C++) was daunting. The bit of Blueprint scripting I'd done already was feeling super complicated for something meant to be "simple". I remember trying to work on this a bit when my son was born, thinking I'd have time during parental leave, and then just dropping it and never coming back.

In the fall of 2021, I was inspired again.