ONE MAN. ONE MISSION. ONE BUTTON.
Superfly awoke from troubled dreams. He sensed something was wrong – something missing. He turned to his left – KYLIE WAS NOT THERE!
“KYLIIIIEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!”
There was no reply….
He knew he had to find the note…. The note that would tell him the news he dreaded….. The note hidden by Professor Evil, Kidnapper and Inventor!
SuperFly DX is a horizontally scrolling action game with deceptively simple one-button control and rock-solid 50/60fps gameplay. Beneath the initial simplicity lies a challenge to test the skills of even the very best gamers.
Featuring:
16 levels over 4 worlds, Use 8 SuperVehicles & Gadgets on your journey to rescue Kylie.
Discover secret unlock codes and find more ways to play.
Memory Track (CD/BJL) and EEPROM (ROM) save support.
Two initial game modes, “Hunter” and “Freeflight” – Unlock two more as you progress in your adventures.
Gain stat XP to unlock additional game features – every game counts!
Use stat XP save codes to return to your game at a later time.
Enter webcodes on this site and compare your scores with SuperFlyers Worldwide!
Random obstacles and pickups ensure unique gameplay every time.
One-Button gameplay – Initially seems simple, soon becomes a challenge, then has you begging for one more game!
SuperFly DX – Technical & Background Information:
With SFDX, we had a clear idea of what we wanted to achieve and a good plan of how we could go about it. What game could be better suited to Reboot? Press The Button! Our main goal is always to have fun making our stuff and produce games we’d want to play ourselves. At the same time, expanding our library of general purpose routines in future productions is also key. So the plan was to do just that, explore a little more of the Jaguar while keeping within the restrictions of a true homebrew release (a single load into the Jaguar to allow the maximum amount of Jaguar fans to be able to play the game, i.e. to support all homebrew devices, the Jaguar CD, emulators & all development systems).
With the original Atari ST game of SuperFly being graphically sparse, relying almost completely on gameplay alone to succeed, we wanted to see how hard we could push the Jaguar hardware using the same MC68000 and the OP alone – without resorting to using the GPU or compromising the quality of the game in favour of too much eye-candy… so SFDX was a little challenge to ourselves & a way of exploring more features of the system. The DSP is used for the sample playback interupt routine only, the actual sample preperation is all done on the 68000. As the outcome was unknown & we were unsure if our plans would suceed, all the constants (assembler “variables”) in the game are longwords. While this is highly inneficient coding (as it takes longer for the 68000 to process a longword than a word – most could be words), it was done to facilitate porting to the GPU at a later date as a fall-back. As it turned out, there was no need to do this. The performance obtained was sufficient to realise the game we envisioned, but also bodes well for possible re-working of parts of the code either optimised for 68000 or ported to GPU.
From a code library perspective, what we got out of the project includes a database driven menu system, the virtual keyboard code entry and much more robust code generation & security. There is also a flexible, reusable game framework ready for future use, unlock/achievement mechanisms (Jaguar Trophies/Achievements anyone?), improved object list management code, 2nd joypad support, general purpose scaling routines, hex to ascii/decimal scoreboards and several other key features that can be used in future productions. So we managed to tick that box quite emphatically.
Statistics:
The final product contains no GPU code whatsoever. This is not because it is too difficult or that we don’t know how 🙂
It was a design decision & a personal challenge to get some performance out of the Jaguar without it. Not really to prove a point to anyone else, but rather to challenge ourselves to see if the 68000 + OP can deliver a playable & technically interesting game.
The end result is a fluid, fun & challenging game with the following features:
50/60 FPS gameplay (PAL/NTSC)
Full screen, 11-layer overlapping parallax scrolling.
Pseudo-random terrain generator (Each time you play, while the general trend of the level will be the same, no two levels will be identical)
Two terrain modes – blockers and islands
4 channel music, plus one additional channel for sound effects
4 themed worlds to play in
16 levels spread over the 4 worlds
9 collectable items
16 playable characters & vehicles, (8 with 8 alternates for 2nd player)
4 different game play modes (2 of which are unlockable features)
Story mode with set challenges
Intermissions and Game Complete sequences
Simultaneous 2-player action
Unlockable features earned via in game achievements
Stat Exp load/save without additional hardware
Webcode based highscores for competitive play
Credits/greetings screen with music jukebox
Over 30 minutes of audio
Superfly DX Build Facts
There is approximatly 452k of source code.
The game contains 979,856 bytes of unpacked graphics.
1,048,633 bytes of unpacked audio data have been crammed into the game (over half an hour of music in 8 seperate tracks, plus sound effects!)
All of the game data is loaded into the Jaguar’s limited 2mb main RAM in one go, there are no further data loads during gameplay.
There are just 6 lines of code from the original Atari ST Superfly by Reservoir Gods in this remake/reboot – these generate the rise and fall table in order to retain the same sprite movement feel of the original game.
We produced 115 builds of this game during it’s development cycle (alphas and betas), 7 of which were release candidates RC1-7.
Versus Challenge mode was completed very late into the development cycle, with just 5 days left to the Outline deadline of 29/04/2010!
Development on SFDX began on 06/02/10 and was completed on 26/04/10, a total duration of 80 days (in our spare time, of course, not 24/7!).