The Retro League is a weekly podcast I co-host that celebrates video games from 70s, 80s, and 90s. Each episode features discussion about the latest retro gaming news, re-releases, community developments and reviews of our favorite games.
A look back at 16 and 32 bit wars from the perspective of a lowly retail clerk. Relive all the highs and lows of the era - from the Sega CD launch to the rise of the Sony PlayStation and everything in-between.
September 8, 2018
Since there are still technically two weeks of summer left, let's hit the beach and enjoy some 16-bit games. Hmm.. playing 16-bit games at the beach sounds like a bad time. So this one is for those who would rather sit in the cool air conditioning playing Super Nintendo than go outside and suffer heat exhaustion.
May 15, 2018
I say we put an end to ugly scene transitions in the Retail Clerk '89 demos by implementing some fade-in/fade-out effects. This article is also a good refresher on palettes since it's been something like three years since I wrote that tutorial. Hmm, I thought I'd have more to show after three years. That's alright, I'm still on pace to hit the 2040 holiday shopping season.
February 26, 2017
It's time to force some sprites to walk around against their will. What's that? You don't think 16-bit sprites have free will? What if our world is just a sophisticated computer simulation and everything we do is part of a table written in assembly language? Now what do you think about about making these little sprites walk wherever we tell them to? If you now have a moral objection then too bad because we're doing it anyway. Also this will be the last Genesis programming article I write for a while but not for a bad reason.
February 12, 2017
The next step in building a one-room demo is inventory management. In this installment we give the player a (small) inventory with basic add/remove item functionality. While we're at it, let's add some dialogs that allow the player to select items to give or take.
January 29, 2017
So far our little sprite can only look at objects and engage in one-sided dialog with NPCs. Let's fix that by adding a menu that gives them more interaction options. While we're at it, let's add the ability to respond to NPC questions.
January 16, 2017
The second stop on our journey toward a one-room demo takes us to processing actions. In this article I built out a simple table that's used to respond to player actions based on the game state. Multi-page dialogs and default object description text were also built along the way.
January 2, 2017
I decided to focus on turning this crazy experiment into a simple one-room demo that contains all the basic mechanics of an adventure-like game. The first part of this involves supporting an arbitrary number of NPCs than can be moved between locations.
November 27, 2016
This is a fairly large installment that looks at how to store & load scenes, creates a font, and displays dialogs with text based on what the player is looking at. This is getting closer to almost resembling a game of some sort.
