Tales of Popolon (new MSXDev'17 entry)

Very nice game, so smooth /fast in turbo r mode!

Btw am I the only one who remapped controls to WASD (the correct way to play 3d games IMHO) in emulator?

(I had attack/spacebar mapped to numpad 7, which sorta feels like left mouse-click)

I think what impresses me most about this game is that it's actually really well-balanced and well-designed. This could've just been a "tech demo" showing off the raycasting engine, and even if the level design sucked and the difficulty level were totally out of whack, it would've been worth playing. But somehow, you managed to actually create a dungeon that's fun to explore, with a really steady difficulty progression and some genuinely intense moments.

This makes Tales of Popolon legitimately one of the best homebrew MSX games out there, period, as far as I'm concerned. It's on the same level as games like The Cure, Caos Begins, and Tina's Adventure Island -- all games that I rank among the best titles available on the MSX period, homebrew or otherwise.

-Tom

Thanks again for the comments guys! I tried my best

But also, with the faster speed of the RAM version, I feel I'd have to rebalance the behavior of the enemies to adjust the difficulty. Some parts might be very hard at this speed, specially later in the game when enemies start firing projectiles at you!

I think that's a good idea! and I think it should not be too hard since the way the renderer works it's already detached from the game logic.

In fact, I run 4 "game logic frames" per each complete renderer loop. I render the first 1 quarter of the screen, and then run a game logic cycle, then the next quarter and another game logic cycle, etc, and at the end of each 4th cycle I dump rendered frame to the VDP; that's why enemies, etc. move a bit smoother than the background. When running in turbo R mode, however, I only run 2 game cycles per frame to keep the speed under control. So, that could be generalized, and just keep the renderer running free in the background, while the game logic runs each X number of VDP interrupts, to keep speed constant. Great idea!

I also did some quick experiments with the idea of running the game engine in VDP interrupts and it seems that running the engine once every 5 interrupts seems to be quite a good speed. Now I stop raping your game and let you have a nice holiday.