SEGA Saturn 29th Anniversary Game Competition

[nando]

Here is my 'original game' entry: Pixel Poppy Pong!

Pixel Poppy Pong!

Pixel Poppy Productions Presents: Pixel Poppy Pong! Play as Macchiato or Jelly Bean, who are desperately in love with Poppy (or something like that). Battle each other to score goals, avoid bombs, eat fish, gain hearts, and learn the secrets of...

segaxtreme.net

Still working on it, but at least I have something working that can be entered. I'm actually pretty happy with what I have so far, even if there are things that I don't like or aren't finished yet.

From my resource description:

Play as Macchiato or Jelly Bean, who are desperately in love with Poppy (or something like that). Battle each other to score goals, avoid bombs, eat fish, gain hearts, and learn the secrets of the universe. If you win, you will earn Poppy's affection forever. But if you lose, press start and try again!

Each player gets 9 lives (hah! get it?). When you lose all 9 lives, the other player wins the match, and gets a star. Whoever gets 3 stars first, wins the game.

The controls are fairly simple:

• Up/Down - move your paw up and down to block your goal
• A/B/C - start your attack (note, these might not work exactly right in this version)
  • When blocking your goal, hold down:
    • A - basic attack
    • B - slow attack
    • C - fast attack
    • If you don't hold down a button, you will still block your goal
• When the round is over, whoever wins gets a star. Press "B" to start the next round.
• When the battle for Poppy's affection is over, press Start to reset the game.
• press ABC+Start at any time to reset the game.
• Start when the game is running pauses the game.

Pixel Poppy Pong supports 2 players with standard controllers. If a controller isn't present, the AI will automatically take over - so you can play P1 vs AI, AI vs P2, or AI vs AI (to be clear, calling this AI is a stretch, lol).

Several items can appear on the field. The main 3 are hearts, bombs, and fish. Whoever touched Poppy last, gets the item. The other items, you will have to play to find out - one is super rare 😉

• Hearts give you an extra heart.
• Bombs take away a heart.
• Fish can give you either 3 extra hearts, or bonus points, depending on Poppy's mood. She's a cat, after all.
• The other ones? You'll have to find out..

Poppy has 12 different moods which affect scoring and what the items do to the player who touched Poppy last. Currently, the scoring system doesn't affect the end result of the game - and I probably won't have time to implement that by the contest deadline. But I plan to incporporate it in the future.

This version is "playable" enough although not completely finished. I still plan on using as much time before the deadline to fix/add stuff.

It's definitely most fun played with a second person - the AI is probably too hard.

It's frantic and goofy with 2 humans though! I play tested with my son, it was actually pretty hilarious. I still need to tweak the goal hitboxes a bit and make some of the initial kickoffs less aggressive. But it was still fun enough.

Currently, there is no sound or music. I hope to get at least some sound effects into the game by the deadline. I intend to use Ponesound, although I'm not clever enough to add a cool logo on the game startup sequence yet!

I really want to add a title screen, but I probably don't have time to draw anything. At least I added a loading screen!

 

[Cobradile]

Here's my entry. I have started to port Telocation: Gemini to the Sega Saturn. This is my first attempt at 3D on the Saturn, (and really my first attempt at 3D on a level lower than Godot as a whole) and I have learned a lot from it! I was only able to finish a prototype in time, but I plan to try and finish this once the contest ends.

The game has some issues still. The geometry is for now much simpler than N64, there are no sound effects, the teleportation back to land if you fall doesn't work yet, and the game had slowdown issues for which I had to throw together a last minute solution.

However, the Saturn port does have enhanced versions of the original N64 tracks by the original composer, making use of the CD audio, so it has that going for it. ;P

Graphics: Me, lambertjamesd
Music: jtn191
Programming: Me (based partially on the original source code by lambertjamesd)
I'd also like to thank this forum's Discord server for putting up with me and the constant problems I needed help with....

Screenshots:

Video:


Source code is here.

Controls:
D-Pad - Move
A - Jump

 

[cafe-alpha]

My entry is "Jacky Car" which is a racing game adapted from the eponym game for TI calculators here : Ti-Fr v3 !

Basically, it's like OutRun, but viewed from top, and without beaches, and without open cars too. It also shares some common points with PONG (regarding the lack of fancy graphics), Sonic (regarding the choice of the color of the road) and also Radiant Silvergun regarding the fact that the score is displayed in the top left area of the screen.
Apart from the race itself, the game features a small demo that can be displayed when the score reaches 999999 points.

Controls :
- Left / Right : move the car
- A or B or C : exit the race
- Start : exit to Saturn multiplayer

Last year I promised @vbt to publish an entry in this game competition, and despite the poor quality of this entry I'm glad I could fulfill this promise 🙂

 

[hitomi2500]

This year I'm participating in the Utilites category with 240p Test Suite. I did the Saturn port, and the original software is developed by Artemio Urbina. There are other contributors, please refer to the credits page for the full list of contributors.

Please keep in mind that this port of the Suite is a work in progress, and the calibration results based on this port could be unreliable.

The archive contains 2 versions : a .cue/.iso for CD/ODE, and .ss for flashing the cartridge. The cartridge format is supported by mednafen emulator.

Here's an excerption from 240p README:

The 240p test suite is a homebrew software suite for video game consoles developed to help in the evaluation of upscalers, upscan converters and line doublers.

It has tests designed with the processing of 240p signals in mind, although when possible it includes other video modes and specific tests for them. These have been tested with video processors on real hardware and a variety of displays, including CRTs and Arcade monitors via RGB.

As a secondary target, the suite aims to provide tools for calibrating colors, black and white levels for specific console outputs and setups.

For full documentation and source code, please visit: Page Redirection

 

[am.25]

Sonic Boss tech demo

ShadowJackal and I made this small showcase in 24 hours based on the Egg Hover boss fight from Sonic Adventure for the Dreamcast, with improved controls for Sonic, we will most likely be updating it as time goes on,
if any of the judges have any questions about the development time you can message me on Discord, I´m present on the SegaXtreme discord server!

the .rar contains the .iso and .cue files
Hope you all enjoy it!
[IF AVAILABLE USE MEDNAFEN OR REAL HARDWARE]

 

[vbt]

due to lack of time some features and artwork were not included

 

[TrekkiesUnite118]

For the Translation Category I am submitting a current Work In Progress build of Soul Hackers. This is very much a work in progress so expect bugs, crashes, and complete trainwrecks from time to time. While a good chunk of the text has been inserted from the 3DS version, there is still a lot of Japanese text floating around simply because I have either not gotten around to getting it converted over, or I have not been able to match up the text between versions yet.

The long story short here is that while you will see a lot of similarly named files in the 3DS version, the game doesn't always use them. It seems that Atlus for some of the text created new files and then wrote some glue code to get the game to just use their new files instead. So this has made tracking down things like items, demon names, attacks, shops, menu screens, battle text, etc. rather tricky to find and inject. The other issue is that some of the data is too big. The Saturn version in the look up tables uses 16-bit values to tell the game how many bytes it needs to jump a head to find the right piece of text. However the text on 3DS for at least 2 files for Demon Negotiation text (at least I think it's that), is too big and exceed the max value you can store in a 16-bit value. On 3DS to fix this they increased the look up table values to be 32-bit values. So to fix this on Saturn we'll need to either do the same kind of hack to make the game use 32-bit values (no idea how well this will work), or edit the text to be a bit shorter and take up less space.

It is for these reasons that the Variable Width Font system is not enabled in this build. The implentation of that uses the space the Japanese Font takes up to use for buffers and code to perform the variable width logic. So if this is enabled the Japanese text wont show up. This makes it difficult when debugging to figure out if there's an error in the script, or if it's just untranslated Japanese text. So for now that system isn't included in this build.

The patch should be able to work with the Patcher included in Grandia, as well as the latest one in the resource section. This patch is ONLY FOR DISC 1.

DISCLAIMER:
THIS PATCH IS NOT INTENDED FOR WIDE SPREAD RELEASE! Please do not distribute it on other sites yet. It is simply not even close to finished or really what I would even consider playable at this point. This is simply to show off what's here for the competition.

 

[SuperReye]

My entry is "Utenyaa", which is about catgirls riding on tanks.It's my original game based on multiplayer tank-smashing games. The basic weapon is the main cannon under button A. The Secondary weapon, under button B, is the mine or the bomb which can be obtained from crates that sometimes drop from the sky.

Controls:
Cross : move the tank
A : Fire
B : Plant mine or throw bomb you picked up from crate

Credits:
Am25 - art
Random - music
AnriFox - terrain textures, levels
Reye - art, coding
dannyduarte - coding

EDIT: POST DEADLINE FIX!!! (I was able to fix this after getting some sleep)
Second version of the game (see Utenyaa_FIXED.zip attached) should no longer crash (at least every time, I have not gotten it to crash during testing, but it still can).

Changelog:
- Fixed: Game crashed on levelchange
- Fixed: Game crashed when selecting Valley level
- Fixed: Timer was not reseting after level change
- Fixed: Music was not changing correctly when exiting level
- Fixed: Player was not able to shoot first 3 seconds of a round due to uninitialized value

THE FIRST VERSION HAS A BUG!! Game will crash after end of a match or when starting new match after already playing one. I want to fix it, I just do not have the time before contest ends.

The game is written in latest version of C++ and uses jo-engine. There are few bugs we had to tip around to have the game to even run.
I will share games source and map editor used for the game later for those curious how the maps were made at later or when you DM me on discord.

 

[privateye]

My submission to Hacks, Patches, and Translations :

Radiant Silvergun - Text Removal Hack

Hack for Radiant Silvergun on Sega Saturn which stops "PRESS START BUTTON" and "PLEASE WAIT" from appearing during gameplay, thus making it behave like the PC / Switch / Xbox 360 ports. Due to the basic nature of this hack, it also removes...

segaxtreme.net

This extremely simple hack :

• Stops “PRESS START BUTTON” and “PLEASE WAIT” from appearing during gameplay.
• Slightly improves the experience of playing Treasure's STG masterpiece on Saturn.
• Works with vanilla game discs by activating the appropriate cheat code in Pseudo Saturn Kai v6.545.
• Has a 99.9% chance of placing last in its category

Thanks to @cafe-alpha for mentioning Radiant Silvergun in his surprise entry which made me decide to submit this 🙂

Video demonstration :

 

[Ervilsoft]

Hello,

My submission this time is a PICO-8 emulator for the Saturn (no relation with last year's submission). For those who never heard of it, PICO-8 is a fantasy console created by Lexaloffle Games that mimics the limited graphical and sound capabilities of the old 8-bit systems. PICO-8 runs inside a Lua-based environment, which makes creating games for it quite easy.

Although PICO-8 attempts to mimic those classic 8-bit systems, it does so mostly from the aesthetic perspective, as when it comes to the processing power requirements it is light years ahead of any of those systems. For instance the hardware recommendation to run is around ~700MHz CPU, which is quite a lot when compared to the Saturn's measly dual 28MHz CPUs

So just the idea of even trying to run this on Saturn is insane, I can not even describe the amount of work that went into making this a reality from porting LUA to the Saturn to writing a super-optimised PICO-8 emulator from scratch, it was no easy task.

Now as you may expect there are few limitations:

Although almost every functionality described in the PICO-8 documentation is accurately emulated, there may still be the occasional odd behaviour here and there, as not exactly everything is well documented about the PICO-8 and it keeps getting expanded all the time, so some games may have graphical glitches or even just refuse to run.​

​

Complex games tend to run fairly slow, they may appear simplistic on the surface, but most of the times their code is jut not well optimized since there is no need given the amount of CPU power available.​

​

Lastly and unfortunately there is no sound, I just didn't had the time to look into it.​

There are two disc images, one is PAL region only and the other one is multi region. The difference is that the PAL version runs slightly faster and at a higher resolution (320x256) which allows for a pixel perfect 2x scaling of the PICO-8 screen (128x128) this is the preferable version if you have a PAL console or if you are playing in an emulator. Either way by default the screen is scaled by 2x, so its just that in the multi region version you will lose some pixels at the top and the bottom of the screen, but you can always change the scaling in options menu to any size.

There are thousands of PICO-8 games that you can download from the official page, I included just some that I found funny and that run at an acceptable frame rate, and a couple that look really good but run slow, there is even a Metal Gear Solid game, yes for real this time, you can finally play Metal Gear Solid on your Saturn, enjoy.

 

[fafling]

In the Hacks, Patches, and Translations category, I submit a fix patch for the original Japanese Sega Saturn release of Doom.

It includes what I already released as Action Replay codes, the unused inferno sky and the nightmare difficulty (this time available in the main menu with the other difficulty levels, and with saving of the difficulty in the password as it's been implemented in PSXDOOM-RE).

There's also a number of fixes for sound :
- Stereo CD audio.
- Correct pan and pitch, increased range and volume for sound effects.
- Unused music (well on Saturn, it was playing on PSX) on the main menu. Automatic exit to the title screen after 30s of inactivity is disabled to allow to hear the full track without having to press buttons regularly. Exit to title screen is still possible with the classic A+B+C+start.

And a *small* performance improvement (the game still very much goes into slideshow territory).

Oh and say hello to M. Nightmare Spectre (capture from the 3rd demo) :


Edit : reuploaded after deadline with a more complete README file. The patch is unchanged.

Edit 2 : to see the nightmare spectres in game, both kind of spectres are present at the beginning of level 5 in ultra violence and nightmare difficulties. Here are passwords to get there :

• Ultra violence : 9F5MQ3TP97
• Nightmare : S!N47G959Q

Survival tips for nightmare difficulty :

• Spectres and pinkies are very dangerous up close, and they move faster in this mode. If you're cornered, the chainsaw is you best friend !
• The chaingun is very useful when shooting at imps because it prevents them from churning out fireballs.
• Accelerated strafing will save your butt (maintain X pressed when using shoulder buttons in the default config).

Edit 3 : created the ressource, which lists the patch features in full and gives the technical details of the patch.

 

[ROS]

3
2
1
GO!

 

[slinga]

Contest organizers: I changed my zip file at 19:06 PM, after the contest deadline due to an issue in my .cue. Please deduct points as necessary.

Ran out of time, but here's Sweeper Squad 0.9. 12-player Mine Sweeper clone. Runs at 480i and includes mouse support. Will finish this blurb tomorrow.

 

[7shades]

Oops, accidently posted this in last years thread

Here's the a rushed contest build of Cubecat. Plenty of work and polish left to be done、I dint have time to fully test this build yet, so if something is horribly broken let me know

Complete Features:
-New rendering pipeline- basically the whole project is reworked
-New content- A hub and 2 levels to explore
-New gameplay and controls-
-The Tutorial Textboxes Didn't make it in time, so I will explain them here:

-A button: Jump and Double Jump as usual
-B button: Dash-Pounce
hold down to aim, and release to dash forward.
You can also Aim and dash midair- When aiming in midair you will hover in place
indefinitely, so take as much time as you need to line you trajectory up
dash into lots of things to see what happens!
L and R to rotate camera
X and Y to pan camera up and down
Z-press at any time to trigger a small story blurb explaining your quest

Yarn: the yarn now spawns from a portal that you can discover on the map. touching the portal respawns the yarn to that
Location. If you push forward against the yarn you will auto grab on to it. Jump or press in the opposite direction of travel
to disengage.
Dash into the yarn to knock it around-
- If pressing B while holding Yarn you will shoot it up in an arc
- If you dash into it from a distance you will shoot it straight ahead instead
Try bouncing on the yarn to reach high places

Water- Cubecat doesn't like water you will respawn at the last CP you touched if you fall in

Rats- You can now attack them with a dash- They cant be damaged normally, but if you knock them into the water
they will be defeated

Springy thingies- these red placeholder objects will bounce you up and recharge your dash if you dash into them!
try chaining dashes together to clear gaps!

Goal: the Yarn no longer has to be returned to the start to complete a level. Instead, must find a special collectible in the level Called a
Sacred Stitch in order to clear them.

Features that are missing:
- The Background LODs for the levels didn't get finished in time, so there is a draw distance cap. In the options menu you can freely adjust it
But know that it WILL tank performance if set too high.

- Sound Effects: Ran into some rare crashes on emulator that I believe are being triggered by the PCM sound effects, so they are turned OFFby default. You can turn them ON in the options menu at your own risk. I have never personally encountered a crash on actual hardware with them ON, so it may just be an emulator thing.

-Textboxes and Tutorials- as explained above I ran out of time to add them

-Good level design- I kid, but they are pretty rushed and under baked at the moment- since these are planned to be the bases of some levels in the final game, They will be updated and polished as time goes on

Known Bugs that should be patched in the next 24 hours:
-Misaligned background scrolls
-Random UI and text bugs
- Anything super game breaking

 

[7shades]

Looks like my last export corrupted the lighting data for level one, here is a fixed version. I'll post any further updates in a separate thread

 

[7shades]

Looks like my last export corrupted the lighting data for level one, here is a fixed version. I'll post any further updates in a separate thread

Ok I lied, One more version here- just replaced the wav tracks in the zip with lower bitrate versions to work with ODEs

 

[Ponut]

To ALL JUDGES:
Please DISREGARD Slide Hop 1.2.
ALL JUDGES PLEASE DISREGARD AND DELETE SLIDE HOP VERSION 1.2
it broke the textures and i'm an idiot for not checking it

Now, you, the judges have an option:
Continue judging with Slide Hop 1.1, which is totally fine since that was submitted before the original deadline.
Or continue judging with Slide Hop 1.2A, which fixes the texture issue.
Thank you and goodnight.

 

[TrekkiesUnite118]

If this is ok, I have an update I was able to get after the deadline for Soul Hackers. This should translate the demon names, item names, atttacks, etc. There are still probably issues, and it does now garble the names in the battle HUD, but at least now you know what items are what, what attacks are what, etc.

 

[vbt]

little update :
- new hidden car
- press X ingame to return to the first screen

 

[EmeraldNova]

Original Games Category Rankings​

Game	Christa Lee	David Gámiz Jiménez	Jason Steele	Jenovi	Johannes Fetz	PandaMonium	Saturn Dave	Segaholic	TraynoCo
Red Moon Lost Days – Sansigolo	3	3	4	7	5	5	6	5	6
Slide Hop - Ponut64	2	2	3	4	6	3	3	2	3
COLD CASE – JBeretta	4	1	1	2	1	2	1	1	1
Cinepak Demo Reel – TrekkiesUnite118	10	15	12	8	13	13	11	6	9
Saturn Wordle – not-AI-generated	14	11	9	16	15	7	10	16	12
Flashback – vbt	16	10	16	12	14	14	16	13	10
Maria Renard's Revenge – z-team	13	9	8	13	3	12	8	4	2
Pixel Poppy Pong – nando	11	13	11	6	9	10	9	9	11
Telocation Gemini – Cobradile	7	7	10	11	7	11	13	7	13
Jacky Car - cafe-alpha	12	14	13	15	12	16	15	14	15
Sonic Boss Tech Demo - am.25	6	8	15	9	10	9	12	8	14
VTT Championship - vbt	5	15	14	14	16	15	14	15	16
Utenya – SuperReye	9	5	5	5	4	8	5	10	7
PICO-8 Emulator – Ervilsoft	15	4	7	10	11	4	7	11	5
Sweeper Squad – slinga	8	12	6	3	8	6	4	12	8
Cube Cat - 7shades	1	6	2	1	2	1	2	3	4

Rank	Game	Score
1	COLD CASE – JBeretta	14
2	Cube Cat - 7shades	22
3	Slide Hop - Ponut64	28
4	Red Moon Lost Days – Sansigolo	44
5	Utenya – SuperReye	58
6	Sweeper Squad – slinga	67
7	Maria Renard's Revenge – z-team	72
8	PICO-8 Emulator – Ervilsoft	74
9	Telocation Gemini – Cobradile	86
10	Pixel Poppy Pong – nando	89
11	Sonic Boss Tech Demo - am.25	91
12	Cinepak Demo Reel – TrekkiesUnite118	97
13	Saturn Wordle – not-AI-generated	110
14	Flashback – vbt	121
15	VTT Championship - vbt	124
16	Jacky Car - cafe-alpha	126