PSX: Boulder Dash, Exolon

One small local game development company asked our team to develop tech demos of 2D action games for PlayStation 1 in a short period of time. We have developed 2 classical game clones: Boulder Dash clone and a typical 2D platform shooter.

The core of the tech demos including rendering, animation support, collision detection, input processing, basic game logic and studying PSX platform/PsyQ libraries were done in slightly less than 2 weeks. CDROM streaming, video player, memory card support, improved rendering, parallax scrolling, additional game entities and fully functional game logic – were added in 1 month. Both tech demos were tested on real PSX (ePSXe emulators were used during 80% of development).

Boulder Dash

A clone of the classical arcade game with the same name. Main purpose of this project was to study the PSX architecture and PsyQ libraries. The latest game build features 4 different levels and ~90% of original Boulder Dash functionality.

• Aras: sound and music module, drawing sprites for game.
• Renaldas: rendering and animations code, utilities, prototype game logic.
• Valdermar: 2nd iteration game logic.

Exolon

A 2D platform shooter game prototype with 4 layer parallax, PSX memory card support (with async functionality), movie player, CDRom reading/streaming and a simple UI. The latest build features 2 different levels, 2 different weapons and enemies.

• Aras: movie player, drawing sprites.
• Renaldas: rendering code, game logic, memory cards, parallax, CDRom reading/streaming, simple UI.