These have been a long time coming. A set of 3D renders in Blender for (almost) all of Atari’s classic gaming consoles. Atari 2600, 5200, 7800, and Jaguar consoles. I have had an Atari Jaguar model for years now. I have used that for past videos for JagCorner and BitJag, but I have also used it as a tracing aid in some of my illustrations. For example, my 2016 Inktober book | Atari Propaganda.
Why Model These Old Consoles?
As mentioned, I have used my Jaguar model for my video work and illustration work. I also want to produce illustrations for everyone of these consoles eventually, and even approach video work for myself and others. I eventually want to get to the Atari Computer line (400, 800, ST), and the Atari Lynx, but that will have to wait for another day.
Another reason for modeling these consoles is that I don’t get to do this kind of work very often. Pure modelling, from real or photo reference. Most of my work entails some highly simplified character design, to basic symbols, to title motion and visual design.
Notes About My Approach
Since I only own two of these consoles, the Atari 2600 and Atari Jaguar, coupled with the goal of creating a realistic facsimile, this presented a unique problem that I haven’t approached before. Having to model from poor photo reference, and extrapolating form and textures from that bad photo reference.To combat this, I forced myself to keep the geometry as simple as possible. This had advantages, and a few disadvantages.
The biggest advantage was relatively minimal time spent. Each model from start to final render took about 4 hours a piece. Because I was building all geometry, materials, and textures from scratch, I knew I could spend more time than I would want if I didn’t adjust my approach to avoid spending unnecessary time. The other advantage was that simple geometry forced me to get the overall form of the model as correct as possible. Things like angles of the form, proportions between the console/controller/cartridge, and materials all received special attention. So, even though the poly count is small, the final result would be attractive to those who see these shapes more often than I do, and are generally convincing to newcomers to these consoles.
“Minimalism is nice when you want to get the big picture things right, but you can quickly paint yourself in a corner if you aren’t planning on moving into more geometry eventually.”
The disadvantages? Even though most of the consoles are fairly minimalist in design, the Jaguar in particular require extra geometry to accommodate the hybrid of natural curves and angles that occur in its design. Both in the console and the controller. Minimalism is nice when you want to get the big picture things right, but you can quickly paint yourself in a corner if you aren’t planning on moving into more geometry eventually.
The most obvious disadvantage is the limited polygon count. This keeps me from getting too close to specific parts of the these consoles for renders.
Conclusion
Modelling definitely falls into the same category as sculpting in clay or carving somethings. I enter a sort of trance or meditative state of mind. It is hard for me to justify the time to do this kind of work though. I will eventually get to modelling allot of Atari’s other hardware, but I will need to wait until I have work that justifies the time that will need to be spent to produce those models.
Three years of learning. Three years of programming. Three years of drawing. And it all should have taken three weeks. Flappy McFur is finally in the hands of the masses, or at least the 80 or so individuals that were actually interested.
The beginning
Atari Jaguar programming has been something that my brother and I have been interested for years, and ever since returning from my church mission from Taiwan, I have made it a primary goal.
With the formation, branding, and online presence establishment, all that was left was for me to learn a bit of programming, and start making games. To help facilitate the programming learning curve, we took on a request from Paul Westphal to put together a demo specifically for his booth at the Portland Retro Gaming Convention.
Programming at this time wasn’t completely foreign to me, but C programming was. So this little demo was a great opportunity to start my C coding adventure, and it led well into Flappy McFur.
Development
Version 0.3 was the first fruit of my efforts, and the fruits were bearable. The gameplay was there, but it was far from enjoyable. McFur moved around more like a horizontally locked fly than a disembodied Jaguar head falling in style. But, the core gameplay was there, and this little demo was well received by those out there who look out for anything new for the Jag.
After the demo though, there was polish. I planned out menu systems, with a simple achievement system. Worked out four different play modes that changed the speed of the game and how the pipes behaved. With Bryce’s help, a simple text engine was implemented to facilitate menus, and he also implemented the save code system. All of this along with an end game made Flappy McFur a much more noticeable product and a more enjoyable experience overall, with a bit of depth to the gameplay.
Development also included some play testing. Usually I would setup our Jag-In-A-Box at family parties, Draw Nights with friends, or just let all the nieces and nephews have a go at it. It was interesting to see how some people caught into the gameplay really well, while others found it impossible. It made balancing the difficulty a bit of a challenge, this is one reason why the additional play modes were added. To try and accommodate a wide spectrum if players.
Even though the game overall is fairly simple, there was a massive learning curve for me to overcome. Overcoming that learning curve has had its payoff though, and I feel much more prepared to takle our next project.
Art
Sprites and Palettes
Though few, painting sprites for this game was a highlight if the whole experience. Working with reduced color palettes and putting together simple animations like rotations of objects and the achievements, to more complicated animations like Cutter’s run cycle, all were a joy and remind me how much I love animation in general.
We used the Gimp primarily for sprite work. I have been using the Gimp for nearly two decades now, and it is great support for paletted graphics with a more than adequate tool set. I did use Krita for Cutter’s run cycle animation because they had recently implemented a basic 2D animation tool set in Krita, but with the lack of palettes graphics support, I still needed ti pump those graphics through Gimp to prep them for Jag. Krita is supposed to have palettes graphics support in the near future, and I am looking forward to using Krita exclusively in my pipeline.
With all that in mind, when I actually started putting together Flappy McFur, I was a bit lazy in figuring out how to do 8-bit paletted graphics. So, for a long time, I was dealing with performance issues, especially when music was implemented. It wasn’t until late in development that most of the graphics were converted to 8-bit paletted sprites for 16-bit sprites. This was a good switch though as it allowed us to do fade transitions easily.
Box and Manual Art
I initially wanted to do more artwork for the game, but the 3 primary illustrations ended up working really well for our needs.
The first illustration was used to establish the character relationship and heavily influenced the game in both tone and narrative. The colored pencil and crayon look of the artwork was intentional as well. It gave it an elementary, non serious feeling throughout, inviting everyone to come and pick up the controller and play.
Video Content
I tried to keep any video advertisement minimal since the beginning. Primarily because if how time consume it is, but also because of the uncertainty of actually releasing the game.
When we decided to actually finish up the game and release, effort was spent to get a good video for advertising the game, and a good gameplay video. At the end of the day, I am not too sure how much these videos helped at the end if the day, but they were nice to have, and will be good to have for history’s sake.
The release and marketing
Newsletter
In and effort to reward our mailing list subscribers, we made sure that everyone that had signed up knew about the game first, we also provided a small discount for them as well. The discount was taken advantage of by a handful of our subscribers, and is something that we will definitely do in the future.
Press Release
It was fun to actually learn how to put a press release together for news websites. I distributed to a handful of people, with little response. Again, this was good to get familiar with, and it serves a good historical purpose. You can read the press release here.
Before people actually had the game in their hands, many of the comments were about the pixel art, and general support for the release. Responses to gameplay have been… mixed, maybe. Its hard to tell if people don’t want to say anything bad about it, or they are just a bit frustrated about its’ difficulty. Either way, below are a few reactions for the AtariAge forum thread.
My wife and I enjoyed spending the evening playing Flappy McFur a couple nights ago. It’s certainly addictive. I found myself getting the controller back less and less. My wife and I probably haven’t played Jaguar together in 10+ years. She buys me Jaguar games as gifts and watches me open them. Maybe she’ll watch me play a bit. It was nice to actually play together. Thanks for the effort you put in to it!
So, during my long hiatus from posting, many projects, many new pieces of art, have been brought into existence, through the sacrifice of time. By myself and others. Unfortunately, this includes the time that is spent putting together videos and posting on my blog. If you are consistent to my blog, or my YouTube Channel, thank you, and sorry for not being more consistent. But enough of the excuses, lets get on to the good stuff.
This time around more Jaguar projects, and this will be the first of a few posts. As you already know, my brother and I are involved in homebrew development for the Atari Jaguar. One of the projects we are working on is a Flappy Bird clone called Flappy McFur. There is more information on the project page, if your interested. In a nutshell, we are about halfway through development, and I am in the process of getting some art together for packaging and inserts, while my brother closes in on our end goals for the game. This is the first piece of official artwork for Flappy McFur.
Before I get started though, just a thank you to everyone in the Thor Media office for feedback on the piece. It is always great to get feedback on my work, when I am too blind to see the mistakes.
Because of the light nature of the game, certain design choices for maintaining a consistency across the artwork became apparent. First, match the saturation of game. Simple enough, yellows, greens, and reds are saturated, while everything else not so much (I guess that leaves my blues…) Which medium to use was a simple choice for me as well, colored pencils. I love working in colored pencil, probably the first medium I truly dove into and experimented with. Because of it’s affinity to the the look of crayons, but still maintaining the ability to create the detail I want in my drawings, I feel that it will match the mood of the game well. Also, Krita simulates pencils pretty darn well, and it feels almost as good as the real thing.
With these few design choices, I believe the next 3 or 4 pieces will maintain a consistent feel.
Speaking of the next pieces. I want to go with a cute and sometimes funny theme for each. Where McFur and his friend are in a playful mood. We might be incorporating McFur’s friend in the game some how. I like her design so far, but it may need a few tweaks for the game. I am hoping to put together a small comic for the game manual as well, but we we’ll see what happens there. Stay nearby, I will have a few more of theses over the next few weeks.
My brother and I have been working hard on the Atari Jaguar stuff, and new ideas, art, writting, and code, trickles into each and every project everyday. Flappy Mcfur is the first fruits of our efforts.
Obviously a Flappy Bird clone for the Atari Jaguar, this program really was just a training ground for me in C programming. It was fun getting the basic assets together, and code the various aspects of game. From menus, to score keeping, and movement of Flappy McFur. Speaking of movement, it is very rudementary, and the next version will have movement more akin to Flappy Bird.
The box art and CD art were both put together in Inkscape, with screenshots from the actual game. Currently we are not sure if we will actually be making and selling physical versions of the game, but I though it might be nice to give people who download it, the opportunity to put together something nice for it if they wish.
The Pre-Release trailer was a blast to put together. I wanted something that would build up, and then let the viewer drop, realizing it isn’t anything too amazing. I really like the way the fly around with the console came out. I haven’t used lattices in 3D animation for a long time, and they poved really effective for bending the flowing text around the various contours of the Jaguar console and controller. The footage of gameplay was captured using the Virtual Jagauar emulator, and it plays almost exactly how it does on the actual Jaguar hardware. It’s such a simple game, why wouldn’t it? Also, this video, and the next one, were both completely done in Blender, with 2D assets in the Gimp.
On another small note, Bryce noticed that out YouTube subscription counter, on the JagCorner channel, was almost to 64, and he came up with the idea for a little video to celebrate the 64th subscriber and the 64-bit glory of the Atari Jaguar. Check it out, and subscribe to our channel to keep up with other video content we will be producing in the future.
Another JagCorner video to talk about. We have kind of been all over the place with the kind of YouTube videos we would like to do. We know we will continue to do the BitJag Development Journals, and we are pretty sure we are going to keep doing the JagVirgin episodes as well.
I guess the reason why we are jumping all over the place is because we are trying to counteract all the negative coverage of the Atari Jaguar. Lets just say, this console doesn’t get the highest score on most gamer’s Hi-Score lists, but it’s unfortunate that there is so much negative for a system that has so much positive. I guess one of my personal goals with doing these JagCorner videos is to promote the great things about the system.
Moving on, what I really wanted to talk about was the opening skit for this review video. I am taking these videos as an opportunity to build a portfolio and push my visual effects skills, and I was glad to see that this shows well in this video.
Jacob and Bryce helped me come up with and execute the concept and it came together almost flawlessly. Everything was done in Blender. Modeling, Texturing, Rigging, Animation, Camera Tracking, Compositing, Editing, and Rendering of the entire video included. I love the Blender tool set, and it never seems to fail me.
The hardest part about this video was the camera tracking. There were no purposely place tracking points in the shot, and the one section I had trouble with was when I stepped out of TV Specialists back door and then the camera swings to the left, revealing the Iron Soldier. I had to manually track 20 or so frames to get the camera swing, simply because all the information in the show was too blurred to track. Other than that, the track was fairly easy, with just a few minor slides and jitters in the final result, almost noticeable. At the end of the day, the entire production was 30 man hours. I wanted to spend more time, but we set a goal to have it released by Thanksgiving.
The end card is a bit special. To achieve a more nastalgic feel, I rendered it out at 320×180 (a 16:9 resolution) and then scaled it up to 1920×1080 with no filter. This maintains the jagged edges on the polygons making it still feel like a low resolution, up-scaled to a high resolution.
Overall, the result was almost exactly how we imagined it, and I love it when that happens.
Isn’t it amazing? A console that was so commercially unsuccessful, is still very much alive and kicking today. This console did much worse than the Sega Saturn commercially, and for a console that is under the great Atari name, this is surprising, and was quite surprising back then as well.
For those of you who aren’t familiar with the Atari Jaguar, click on the name to go to the wiki, or continue reading for a quick run-down of what this console generally is for many fans.
Without going into much detail, lets just say that the Jaguar’s history is rough. It was released in November 1993, with much anticipation. At first it did well, but unfortunate set backs began to determine it’s future, early on in it’s life. There are many reasons for it’s commercial failure, but I really only one focus on one for now.
The leading consoles of the time had something that the Jaguar couldn’t really get a handle on. A mascot, a title franchise, a symbol, to help sell the console. While Nintendo had Super Mario, and the Legend of Zelda, and Sega had Sonic the Hedgehog, Atari really didn’t have much in the way of recognizable characters or symbols or something that the player could relate to on a more personal level. Besides their logo and maybe Pacman, they didn’t have much. (Ironically there was never a Pacman game on the Jaguar.) The arcade generation was beginning to close around this time, and titles like Tempest, Centipede, Space Invaders, and Pacman didn’t appeal to a larger audience as a whole. Players wanted story, worlds, and most importantly, characters.
Sure, Atari tried to create mascots with Bubsy and Trevor McFur, but these characters lacked appeal, not to mention, the games they were in, weren’t that much fun to play. So, as consoles with more appealing franchises took the market, the Jaguar slowly sank into the background, and eventually disappeared with the advent of the Playstation and Nintendo 64. The third party developers moved on from the console, and, in 1996, Atari was sold off. Also, official support for the Jaguar ceased.
With all of it’s faults, the Atari Jaguar was still revolutionary for its time. It was one of the first consoles to push out games that were entirely 3D. Titles such as Iron Soldier, Hover Strike, Battle Morph, all showed that the Jaguar was leagues ahead of it’s competitor’s. And while Nintendo, Sega, and Sony didn’t really have any sort of online capabilities until 1999, the Jaguar had support for online and locally networked games. Which included the only console port of Doom that had multiplayer support. As for those who grew up in the arcades, this system had amazing reincarnations of arcade classics, such as Tempest and Defender. And for the people who grew up with Atari, those who played the games, or programmed for the systems, who went to the arcades, the Atari Jaguar represents a culmination of everything that made Atari what it was.
This brings me back to why the Jaguar is still going strong. The last system that Atari ever made, and the embodiment of everything that Atari was. For someone who grew up with Atari this means allot, and is one of the pinnacle reasons why my brother and I want to make games for the Jaguar. Not because we want to make games, but because we want to make games for a console that represents our childhoods. Proving that a console’s success isn’t based solely on sales. That a community of dedicated gamers and programmers can bring value to a system, and hopefully the bi-products of that dedication is good games.
In May of 1999, the hardware, and development code was released into the public domain. Allowing developers to make and release games without having to worry about licensing. This is the catalyst that allowed the community to grow. This along with that dedication to the Jaguar is what allowed for many titles that were initially canceled, to be restarted, and eventually release later on. That dedication, is what kept developers together, and has given us great titles like Downfall (produced by Reboot), and Elansar (produced by Orion), Games that were released 17 years after the console’s “death”. Very few consoles can tout that they have this strong of a community, many years after official support has ceased. It is a testament to the consoles quality, and the quality of people who support it.
I am not sure where the Atari Jaguar will be in another 20 years, but I am enjoying the great success it is seeing today. BitJag hopes to contribute to this success, and we hope to see many more people flock to this console, and many more games in the future. Here’s to 20 years of the Atari Jaguar.
Please excuse my silence over the last few weeks, but I have been involved in some fun projects, and one of those is my brother and I have officially started our Atari Jaguar development.
Our dev name is BitJag, and we are using the JagCorner name for our YouTube videos and other media. I have mentioned in previous posts about the project that we have been working on for the Jag, but we have expanded, to three separate projects.
We often find ourselves way over our heads, when it comes to the scale of projects that we do. So the other two projects, which are nameless right now, are much smaller, but will be used to stretch our abilities considerably. Check out the Projects page at http://BitJag.com/ to see some of the details for those projects.
We also have our first development journal posted. It isn’t much, but there is some cool footage of an animated sprite character test on the Jaguar console. There is definately more to come. I have been working on some visual design concepts for the battle system, and working on story as well. We will be talking a bit about this stuff in the next dev journal entry, along with some more details about our other two projects.
