How to Code 2 Scrolling Layers on Sega Genesis & Mega Drive - Beginners Game Dev Tutorials

[@PigsysRetroGameDevTutorials]

It was fun to combine graphics from 3 of my favourite Mega Drive games to demonstrate background scrolling with a camera (which is much trickier than implementing the auto-scrolling we learnt earlier). I hope it all makes sense.

[@todessehnsucht]

I've begun watching these series last night and it sparkled my desire to make a game again. I have no programming knowledge whatsoever but I seem to have grasped more or less how it's done. I suppose there's still lots of things to teach, like programming player and enemy behavior, like attacking and doing damage, or enemies chasing and hurting you, projectiles, HUDs, screens like starting screens, menus, cutscenes and whatnot? Please don't stop.

[@PigsysRetroGameDevTutorials]

Glad to hear it, I wish you luck! Eventually, I want to cover pretty much every aspect of making games, but the tutorials take a lot of time to make, plus I have my own projects to work on (SotN and GG Shinobi games), so it's going to take awhile!

[@AFourEyedGeek]

Another great tutorial from you. I have been enjoying them so much I have subscribed to your Patreon, I hope you keep making these and helping others learn not just about coding Mega Drive games, but also learn C programming along with it.

[@PigsysRetroGameDevTutorials]

Thanks, I appreciate the support! I think I can continue to create roughly 12 per year without burning out (they take a lot of time to produce!). That would normally be 1 per month, but this year I'm trying to do 1 per week for three months so that people can spend the rest of the year making stuff. There's so much more to learn/teach, so I hope to be able to continue to do this in the years to come :)

[@piccolo1976]

These really are great tutorials, thank you for your efforts with providing a greater education to us all, I do appreciate it

[@PigsysRetroGameDevTutorials]

They take a long time to make, so I'm glad to hear that people are finding them useful. Thanks

[@SpiralPegasus]

You're a God amongst men.

[@ThatOldTV]

Thanks!

[@PigsysRetroGameDevTutorials]

Thanks!

[@NukeOTron]

Hmm... I get the feeling that your next tutorial in parallax scrolling would be to teach people how to make one background layer look like multiple layers by making certain parts of it scroll horizontally/vertically individually. I know the Genesis can do that. Of course, I could be wrong, and you definitely don't have to take it as far as The Adventures of Batman & Robin.

[@PigsysRetroGameDevTutorials]

Tile/line scrolling is a bit more complex, as it involves using arrays and loops, which I haven't really introduced yet. A lesson on that will come eventually though

[@igodreamer7096]

Awesome!

[@zabustifu]

Thanks for another cool video. Maybe at some point you could make a video about what can be done during HBlank or VBlank, like changing colors? I believe you planned to use that for the water in your Castlevania game. I also wonder if it's possible to toggle the shadow & highlight mode during HBlank. That'd be useful.

[@PigsysRetroGameDevTutorials]

Yes, you can turn S&H mode on and off during HBlank. It can be a good way to simulate water so as to avoid any CRAM dots (which appear if you try a palette swap). While I have the basics of the raster techniques down, I still need a lot of practice before I feel good enough to be able to give a lesson on them, so those lessons will probably come sometime next year

[@zabustifu]

@@PigsysRetroGameDevTutorials I've tested it and it works nicely, indeed. However, it seems changing sprite priorities during HBlank won't work reliably. I was hoping it would allow having different priorities for the top and bottom of a given sprite, for example.

[@damin9913]

My favorite ninja game shadow dancer!

[@PigsysRetroGameDevTutorials]

One of my favourites too!

[@damin9913]

@@PigsysRetroGameDevTutorials thats awesome I know everything about Sega genesis shadow dancer I play it a lot

[@StaticTV80]

Inceptional said you are clueless and incompetent, ban him.

[@PigsysRetroGameDevTutorials]

Try to keep any drama out of the comments section and just focus on the content of the video please. Life's too short to worry about what someone may or may not have said about you. Besides, I still consider myself a beginner who's in the process of learning how to make games (I won't claim to be an expert until I have actually produced a finished game), so saying that I'm "clueless" wouldn't be too far from the truth right now anyway, although I'm slowly getting better! Thanks for the warning anyhow :)

[@gamesandplanes3984]

Don't be a weasel

[@inceptional]

Man, I'm going through a strange realisation/revelation watching your tutorial videos: That being, generally speaking, what you are showing code-wise and in-game wise thus far is about on the same level as the stuff seen in the early builds of my own games created in GameMaker 8.1, before I actually start to properly polish the game and think about stuff that really makes the difference between something passable and something great. And, interestingly, my learning there is that it's really easy to do this basic stuff, but the hard part is once a game gets complex and then managing all that code, making sure there's no bugs, and actually ending up with a truly high quality, polished and fun experience at the end--something that feels properly finished quality release standard. So, my own takeaway from this is absolutely that if there was a similar SDK like this for SNES, something that's as apparently easy to work with as I typically find stuff like GameMaker 8.1 and Unity and so on, at least in terms of getting some code up and running, I 100% believe we'd be seeing a whole load of stuff getting made for it. Now, that stuff probably wouldn't be of the overall high quality standard I'd want personally in most cases, which is honestly true of most of the new stuff coming out for Genesis too, but at least there'd be a bunch of brand new games for it in modern times. The more a learn here, the more I realise SNES is so close to be in just the right place for something similarly special to start happening on that system too--it just needs someone to make a software development tool/environment that's as apparently easy to get to grips with as the Genesis SGDK seems to be. I'm still keeping my fingers crossed it's coming in the not to distant future. . . .

[@dcboys4195]

Owen Wilson wow....

[@StaticTV80]

You also need to realize the snes hardware is obsolete to modern standards because of that CPU, while the genesis CPU is still in use by programmers.🙂

[@DarkbluesEXE25]

What If Shadow Dancer Arcade with Shadow Dancer Mega-Drive Mix levels

[@PigsysRetroGameDevTutorials]

Shadow Dancer was a short game (just 5 levels iirc), so adding extra levels from the arcade would be a good idea.

[@DarkbluesEXE25]

@@PigsysRetroGameDevTutorials yeah Inosuke

[@GimblyGFR]

Very useful lesson. If the game needs a foreground, apart from the two backgrounds you already have, do you build it with sprites? Thanks for the video.

[@PigsysRetroGameDevTutorials]

Yes, you can use sprites to add more background/foreground layering (and also clever tile/line scrolling), although you have to be careful to keep within the VDP's sprite limits

[@GimblyGFR]

@@PigsysRetroGameDevTutorials Thanks for the answer.

[@AFourEyedGeek]

Playing with your code I realised you could use bit shifting and fix32, I'm not sure if that is useful in game play though or another method is better. An example is: num_to_bit_shift = fix32Add(num_to_bit_shift, FIX32(0.1)); bit_shift_result = num_to_bit_shift >> 1;

[@PigsysRetroGameDevTutorials]

Thanks. I think that bit shift should work with any number, but I can't remember using it with fix32. We will see bitshifting again in the upcoming collision tutorial

[@srrocknroll4755]

I loaded first the background than the foreground into the main and the background appears like a mess. When I put the code like is in the video, first the foreground (BG_A) and then the background (BG_B) appears perfect. Is there any reason for that? It's how works the VDP? Do you always have to load first BG_A and then BG_B?

[@themadmallard]

just wondering, have you looked into segaCD development at all as well?

[@PigsysRetroGameDevTutorials]

There is a MCD dev kit in development, but at the moment it's still very rudimentary, with no support for the kind of stuff I would like to do with the hardware (sprite scaling/rotation etc)

[@themadmallard]

@@PigsysRetroGameDevTutorials exactly the kind of thing i was wondering, since the guts of the thing is basically a whole nother genesis worth of silicon.... it'd be neat to understand more not just about how it managed accessing the singlespeed drive, but what the additional chips can all do and the extra ram

[@mxggo9046]

Is it possible to trick the player into thinking that a game has 4 layers? I mean like 3 background scrolling layers and the foreground?

[@samaeldrakul4191]

awesome🎉

[@falksi3182]

Pigsy you little legend, do you know of anyone who'd be able & willing to make a Bare Knuckle 3 hack which replaced the music in that game with the music from the first entry? I love Bare Knuckle 3 to play, but the God-awful tunes just ruin it for me.

[@PigsysRetroGameDevTutorials]

Sorry, I only know how to create games from scratch, not how to hack them. If you have a Mega Everdrive or Mega CD then I believe there is a way to replace the soundtrack with a CD version of your choice