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November 11, 2018 10:56 AM   Subscribe

GameHut is the personal YouTube channel of industry veteran and Traveller's Tales founderJon Burton, featuring short, yet thoroughly explained programming tricks and behind the scenes material from his career, such as how TT accomplished the FMV intro on Sonic 3D for the Sega Mega Drive/Genesis and the super smooth SEGA logo on the same game, the origins of the bizarre game cartridge wobbling "cheat" to select levels, how they squeezed the minimum possible space to draw Sonic, and well as coming back to the game to fix some common grievances towards the game, and releasing those changes as an xdelta patch as the Directors' Cut.

There is, however, a lot more content, from explaining how the incredible looking graphics in Toy Story were accomplished with old 16 bit systems, from the 3D depth on side-scrolling levels, the high quality cutscenes with stills from the movie, how the music of the game was composed with the hardware's limitations, and how they fit the 3D sequences in such limited hardware. Other game Burton has devoted some time on the channel was Mickey Mania, where he plays the game giving some directors commentary on how (and why) the game was designed, how TT did their best to prevent grey market imports, and how the famous rotating tower and 3D chase levels were programmed.
If this is not enough, there are also prototypes, from the quasi No Man's Land Haven and LEGO Star Wars (and even deleted levels), the PS2 particle engine from Crash Bandicoot: Wrath of Cortex, and even the technical considerations to have PUBG-like style gameplay on a 16-bit console.

Finally, as the founder of Travellers' Tales, celebrating the first year of the channel he uploaded an unboxing unframing of the original drawing by British fantasy illustrator Rodney Matthews previously used as a logo of the company, as well as commissioning a new logo for GameHut based on the same character.
posted by lmfsilva (7 comments total) 26 users marked this as a favorite
 
The palette tricks for the SEGA logo are very cool. I remember doing full-speed color cycling animations on an Amiga, it’s a great technique.
posted by migurski at 11:06 AM on November 11, 2018


This is a great channel, highly recommended.
posted by GallonOfAlan at 2:35 PM on November 11, 2018 [1 favorite]


The bit on clever offloading a particle system on to the vector processing unit is pretty brill to these non-coder, non-maths eyes...
posted by Samizdata at 4:47 PM on November 11, 2018 [2 favorites]


I've been following this for a while and it is indeed great.
posted by JHarris at 3:22 AM on November 12, 2018


I really respect this channel and Burton’s coding skill but he does have the one episode where he describes all the Christian Easter eggs that he put in games over the years. It raised for me some unanswered questions about the professional ethics of putting secret non-secular messages in mainstream secular games. Burton seemed unfazed by the times he was caught. In my line of work, there’s a strict firewall between evangelizing and professionalism and I often came across people who just could never wrap their mind around it.

I’ve always been a fan of Matthew 6:6. “But when you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father, who is unseen. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you.” Pride in sneaking Christian memes into secular work never made sense to me.

https://youtu.be/qvUPOtz4v7A
posted by Skwirl at 7:39 AM on November 12, 2018 [3 favorites]


I’m weirdly disappointed by how my first guess for how the sega logo animation worked turned out to be how it actually worked.

but now I want to read (or I guess write) a history of pallete swap tricks in video games. I’m guessing that’s how (for example) they pulled off a bunch of the fancy un-Atari-esque visuals in the Atari 2600 game “Solaris”...
posted by Reclusive Novelist Thomas Pynchon at 10:31 AM on November 12, 2018 [1 favorite]


> But when you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father, who is unseen. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you.”

“but when you pray, first carry an object into the central room that causes the screen to flicker. then use the bridge to enter the secret passage in the center of that room. inside that room you will find a microdot. Carry this dot before you to the hallway below the golden castle, where it will cause one of the barriers to disappear. Enter into the chamber and your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you with a credits screen.”
posted by Reclusive Novelist Thomas Pynchon at 10:37 AM on November 12, 2018 [3 favorites]


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