Making of Solstice

[Movax12]

Quick search, I didn't find this posted anywhere on the forum.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=894_PNqBkx4

[noattack]

The production is so awesomely awkward. Love the prototype shots with the sprite masking. Good stuff.

[rainwarrior]

Pretty cool.

I've actually been meaning to take a close look at the masking technique. I'd originally assumed it was done with sprite priority, but it's actually done in CHR-RAM!

[Dwedit]

For comparison, Time Lord used sprites for masking, low-priority sprites behind the scenery to mask just like SMB3. (Time Lord also has that impossible Mexican boss whose health regenerates quickly, and you need a turbo controller to beat him. Maybe that's why a used copy only goes for $1.)

Neat video. Really crappy production values, but they didn't exactly have Final Cut Pro back in 1990. Only major problem with the video is the voice recording, the people are very hard to hear.

[ccovell]

Very Cool -- Follin's music program was made by Steve Ruddy:

http://www.c64.com/interviews/ruddy.html

As it says on screen. Has a raster CPU meter visible too! 8)

[Hamtaro126]

I put it under investigation in The Cutting Room Floor's Content to Expand page, since Solstice does not have a page!

[Bregalad]

It's interesting to see the faces of the guys behind that game (I always liked it by the way). They... really looks like total nerds !
As dwedit says the voices are hard to understand....

It's intersting to see the music player's debugger.

[Bananmos]

Great clip! I really should play through Solstice the next rainy day... (of which there are quite a few here in the UK)

What I'd be most interested to hear the developers talk a bit more about is the heavy influence from the legendary Knight Lore that I used to play as a kid, which was already 5 years old by the time Solstice was released. While they may just have decided to make a copycat based on scores of a top-selling game for an older platform, I'd like to think they must have been some pretty heavy fans of the original. Maybe Knight Lore was even what inspired them to venture into game design itself? But I guess we may never know...

I find the interview with the young Tim Follin a gem as well... I don't think any other composer managed to make videogame music sound so alive like he did, and I'm still pretty impressed that he started his game music career at 15, and made his most memorable tunes as a teenager.

Fun trivia: At the time when Years Behind was being developed, PhD of Retrocoders was discussing with Tim Follin about including a new original tune from him in it. For some reason none of us ever got to know, he suddenly stopped answering his mails so it never happened. Might have been related to his emotional farewell to his videogame music career I guess... anyways, Years Behind turned got some pretty damn cool tunes anyway to stand on its own, but I can't deny it would have been cool to have an original Tim Follin tune included in its release... :)

[koitsu]

Look familiar?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IwFZyogy2tk
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ixev_JMeDW8

I'm still not sure why the British have such an intense interest in "perspective" games like this. Friends of mine were discussing this fact a few weeks ago; the number of games during the late 80s/early 90s era that came out of the UK that used that style was preposterous.

I also found it interesting that Tim Follin didn't actually write the music/sound engine himself -- Steve Ruddy did. This was somewhat rare during that era; most composers were also the engineers/programmers of the music/sound engine. I was always under the impression that Tim did the engines himself. Surprise!

P.S. -- Try playing Solstice in an emulator sometime and drop the speed down to say 20-30%, then enter a room. It's interesting to see how they went about drawing the individual floors/tiles and objects, and more specifically, in what order. It wasn't quite what I expected.

[ccovell]

Isometric games were all the rage in Britain. I quite like their look-- they pack in a lot of realistic detail into monochrome hi-res graphics.

By the way, I actually translated (from a Japanese book) an interview with the makers of Solstice II (Equinox) and put it on my page last week: http://www.chrismcovell.com/secret/sp_Solstice2int.html

[Drag]

The ZX Spectrum's screen is basically a giant 1bpp bitmap, with an attribute table at the end, which specifies the two colors, the "bright", and the blinking setting for each 8x8 pixel region. (The actual layout of the bytes -- which byte represents which 8-pixel line on the screen -- is a whole other story though)

Given the bitmap nature, it'd be a lot easier to do an isometric 3d projection (with masking and everything) on British 8-bit computers than it would be on an American/Japanese tilemap/sprite based game console. That's my hypothesis on why it was so popular in the UK, anyway. Keep in mind, having "halfbright" palettes is also popular over there, so it could just be a fluke.

[RLError]

Follin's music is awesome.

[WedNESday]

When that video in the first post started I was like 'How did they achieve that spinning title screen effect on the NES?'. Then I was like 'Oh, wait...'.

Or it could just be that;

1. Because of hardware limitations on different platforms at the time an isometric game was about as good as it got.
2. It was a successful formula so they just repeated it.
3. The isometric engine was either copied from company to company or was just re-used.