I liked to play this as arcade game and many coins found their way. I gave it a try in WinAPE. In my opinion it is not bad, but also not really good. The game works. The sprites use a bunch of animation frames. The gameplay is as expected, the music resembles the original. But:
A simple platformer on two(!) disks.
Data is loaded after every level, even if graphics still looks similar. At least loading does not take long. The nice scrolling effect from the arcade original is missing.
The frame rate is perceptibly low.
The usual arcade flicker to indicate invulnerability is poorly synchronized - the sprites sometimes get invisible.
Sometimes it happens that enemies are completely untouched from snow balls. Maybe there is something wrong with collision detection.
The CPC can equip a game with better colors than used here. Also the dithering interferes with finer details.
The advertized “Full overscan screen” is in fact 32x28 mode 1 characters, common to many games, but only 55% full.
While the game is playable, as a programmer I’m a bit unhappy. Games with this quality usually were designed with much less ressources for the 464, without memory extension, and without multi-loading. An acceptable starting point, but much more is possible.
It would be interesting to know how much ressources were used to build this game. How many prompts, how many correction cycles, how many tokens, in which time.
Yes, this is a definition of slop. To me it is obvious that this is from a person who tells an AI to produce something, but then is entirely unable (either doesnt care or is clueless) to refine whatever the AI exports to produce something decent. This is from the same person who did the Flicky slop a few days ago, and had that ‘dispute’ with @reidrac.
I think we need a tag for ‘AI Slop’ to distinguish the rushed crap from the very few creations done properly while using AI assistance. @Gryzor boss?
Also, I am dropping the game files here. However, being two sides, I don’t know if it’s possible to make it work within the embedded Emulator…
As far as how much RAM it needs, it isn’t efficient at all.
The data for the backgrounds could be massively shrunken by using tiles (I don’t know if it is already doing that, but it’s doubtful).
It takes time, testing, and a lot of back and forth with Claude to get something of quality, and it looks like that sort of time has not been spent on Snow Bros.
I’m working on a decomp (with Claude) of a famous isometric game, and each feature is being carefully directed and tested in isolation of all other features. The decomp is being ported to cpctelera, so that I can learn how isometric games worked. It is incredible what can be done with it, but still needs a lot of care to be taken.
For me personally, this is like a hobby; I prefer retro over modern stuff, but in almost everything, not just video games. Every time I get on the CPC, I turn back into the little kid I used to be. Even though I have less patience and worse gaming skills than I used to, I still enjoy it just as much. Naturally, I understand there are differences when it comes to the technical side of each title… and yes, I do like to support the scene financially by buying homebrew games and other add-on hardware for my beloved Amstrads!!! Even if sometimes it’s a bit too much haha
I understand what you are saying, but before nostalgia should come critical thinking and good taste. And because we are talking about a hobby and not about a profit driven consumerist marketplace, one should add ‘ethics’ to it. Anyway, this isn’t a comment aimed specifically at Snow Bros or any other particular game; rather it would fit in the general discussion about AI.
This is colorful and fast (50 Hz), although obviously sprite deletion does not work properly yet. Technically, this might have been a better basis for a full game.
