Another World

https://www.filfre.net/2018/06/another-world/

by doppp • 8 years ago

183 37 8 years ago

This brings back such good memories of playing this for this first time on my Amiga 2000.

The article offers a wonderful breakdown of the fairly astonishing amount of invention that went into development. Especially given that it was primarily the work of a solo developer.

I also enjoyed the observation that the Amiga's hardware-level support for a laserdisc peripheral (which was never released) was repurposed for the rotoscoping work used to develop the incredibly smooth character animations that still look AAA, even today.

I love this blog. Can't wait to read the book.

jacobush4• 8 years ago

Oh my, that game is art. I believed that was the future of games. Instead we got decades of murky textures stretched lazily over too few polygons to look good, too many to look abstract and evoke imagination.

digi_owl3• 8 years ago

He has been breaking down the blog into ebooks by year covered, been reading them almost as fast as he posts them.

jacobush4• 8 years ago

So all the genlock magic and TV station usage was the unintended result of a never released laserdisc peripheral!? :-)

garaetjjte• 8 years ago

This is also interesting game from technical side: vector graphics, runtime is virtual machine interpreting custom bytecode.

There is also runtime for modern platforms using SDL, reverse engineered from DOS binary: http://fabiensanglard.net/anotherWorld_code_review/

digi_owl3• 8 years ago

The VM trick is old hat. Even Infocom used it to allow their games to be playable across a range of micros. Oh and they developed their games on a PDP.

jacobush4• 8 years ago

Still, that it was done by one single person, such an immense game, before the Internet. I could pull it off now, (hi google), then, not in a million years.

Also Infocom games were text, much simpler things.

exikyut2• 8 years ago

Thank you SO much for this link.

I was going to come in here and mope about how hard this is to play. (As in "get running", not even mentioning in-game difficulty! :P)

First I tried a random Amiga ROM I found, which seemed like it was trying to cooperate but couldn't (the game kept freezing after the intro but before the interactivity began).

Next I tried the DOS version, which fared better but was still a little glitchy in terms of latency (old computer).

Both versions had the silly code wheel thingy as well. Completely respect it, but it's VERY annoying to deal with. ("another world code wheel" has a very very nice result from oldgames.sk.)

This VM emulator is awesome. It Just Works™ on Slackware, only uses 12-16% CPU on a decade-old machine (very nice!), happily picked up the resources from the DOS copy I'd found, and the transparent load/save system works very nicely to a) make the code wheel (which is built into the game bytecode, not the runtime/EXE) less of a nuisance, and b) deal with "30 deaths per minute" syndrome :) (I've been meaning to find the full version of this for years.)

And it's also really impressive that this was reverse engineered like this... heh.

Btw, the original bytecode system was all Forth, wasn't it?

bananaboy• 8 years ago

Another World was re-released on Steam by Eric Chahi a few years ago for Windows, Mac, and Linux: https://store.steampowered.com/app/233550/Another_World__20t...

bluedino• 8 years ago

How did they get this engine working on sprite base systems like the SNES?

klodolph2• 8 years ago

You can put a coprocessor inside the cartridge. I believe that Another World used the Super FX coprocessor.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_FX

jgtrosh• 8 years ago

I suggest reading Chahi's own telling of making the game : http://anotherworld.fr/anotherworld_uk/another_world.htm

I came across it last week and it's very subjective and personal and I quite enjoyed the descriptions of the VM and ports.

corysama• 8 years ago

That article series is great!

You might also appreciate this video interview with Chahi: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2PLLDpzwwUI

He also did a postmortem for the game at GDC: http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1014630/Classic-Game-Postmortem...

j1elo3• 8 years ago

Played the remastered version of Another World a couple months ago, after ages of staying in my list of "pending classics". Good game, controls weren't much of a problem to me (unveilable how much people complain about this, I felt them okayish), very cool aesthetics. Took me like two hours to finish. A HUGE shame that Steam doesn't include the original soundtrack in the game but they don't warn you in the game's description.

Also, THE most disappointing ending, ever. Yeah I know there was a sequel, not made by the original author and only released on Sega CD. That doesn't change the feeling it left on me... I want my three-act structure, had a Setup, had a Confrontation, now I want my Resolution! :)

utopcell• 8 years ago

Echoing the feeling on the ending. I finished it ages ago but never knew there was a sequel. Wonderful game.

abritinthebay2• 8 years ago

It had a resolution! It just wasn’t the cathartic, neat, hero-walks-into-the-sunset resolution that so much American storytelling ends with.

It’s a more thoughtful, open ended, resolution. One that leaves you asking questions rather than nodding in conclusion.

Lester has escaped. He’s not alone anymore. He’s (potentially) sacrificed himself for the freedom of another who helped him.

Does it wrap everything up? No. Does it have to though?

j1elo3• 8 years ago

To be honest, it was a mismatch of expectations we have based on prior knowledge of a medium, and what the game had actually to offer. Just like you know that after being 45 min into a movie you're reasonably not even close to its ending, it didn't even cross my mind that what I was seeing was the game finale.

I sat down there, looking at the screen like a fool, not understanding that the game had ended. I won't deny it, I wanted to bring Lester back home, through many more adventures! :)

partycoder• 8 years ago

The "lion" in the first level scared the hell out of me as a kid. More than the flying masks from Super Mario Bros 2.

ekianjo• 8 years ago

For a long time, saying a game was French was a shorthand way for an Anglo to say that it was, well, kind of weird, off-kilter in a way that made it hard to judge whether the game or the player was at fault.

Pff. This is only true for about 0.1% of French games, most of the other ones were typical generic games you'd find everywhere else and not particularly original at all. It's like judging Japanese movies by taking Kurosawa's movies as representative.

pavlov2• 8 years ago

The point is that the boring run-of-the-mill stuff doesn’t get exported.

Western film audiences got to form a highly positive opinion of Japanese movies from the works of Ozu, Kurosawa, Oshima.

Similarly American gamers in the Amiga era got a handful of the most original French games and formed their opinion of “Frenchness in gaming” based on those.

makapuf2• 8 years ago

Would you say that by example Ray man was weird/unusual ? It sure has exported itself. Also raving rabbits.

jccalhoun2• 8 years ago

I think it is like when people in the USA say that all BBC shows are of such high quality compared to all the garbage we have here. We only get the best of the best from those countries so we think everything from them is amazing.

d--b• 8 years ago

Ha, good times! Missing from the article were the amazing “manoir de mortevielle” and “maupiti island”. First games with speech synthesis. All the character sounded like Stephen Hawking but they were great!

BadassFractal• 8 years ago

There was something really magical about that game the first time I tried it. It gave you no direction, no instructions, the world was hostile and ready to blast you away at the smallest mistake. This is going to sound cliche' in 2018, but it was somewhat Dark Soulsesque in its nature.

crtasm• 8 years ago

First had this for DOS, was blown away that even just the intro could fit and run off a floppy disk. Also the first game I played that got my 486SX's PC speaker to create grainy but decent sounding music and SFX!

guyromm• 8 years ago

while the thing did fit on a 5" 1.2MB floppy and ran fine on my 286, i do recall bringing this to a friend on multiple 360KB 5" floppies, and being amazed to discover it ran, albeit with serious framedrop, on his 4.77 Mhz PC XT computer after unarchiving the game to his 5MB HDD.

Another World

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