"Removing the code for bunkers and accidentally damaging allies frees up a lot of storage space in the game, and we can add something. ”

"First of all, after the 'Space Octopus Man' as an enemy is killed, I'm going to add the buzzer's explosion sound effect. Then, do a two-frame gradient explosion animation. This piece shouldn't use up much storage and won't affect the smoothness of the game. ”

"Then, the enemy's movement is currently directly mapped sideways, without any movement changes. This one is too ugly for the player to animate, so I ask you to make all of these octopus monster textures ......"

Gu Biao said three biggest improvement suggestions in a free manner.

Hearing this, Yang Hao took the lead in refuting: "Boss Gu, this is impossible, the explosion animation is okay, just add two frames of unified graphics, anyway, all monsters are the same death when they explode."

But if you want to animate the monster movement, there will be a lot of frames, and if you want to do at least one or a few frames of each kind of monster, the memory will be clogged!"

The truth that Yang Hao said is very common. For example, when the 3G mobile phone of the BRE system first appeared in the later generations, click on an application icon, such as a music player, to display the effect of "the music player is activating and the record icon on the player is rotating", then at least 4 to 6 frames of the picture should be played in a loop.

In the era of NetEase cloud music, it is said that Ding Sanshi proposed to "draw at least 15 frames to make users feel absolutely realistic" for "reflecting the rotation effect of vinyl record icons".

From the perspective of code farmers, this way of dealing with the problem is equivalent to increasing the pressure on image storage capacity by more than ten times.

In the future, hard disk space is not valuable, so it can be squandered casually.

But now is the age of every inch and every inch of money.

Programmers in the 80s had one more important skill than later programmers, and that was "how to save storage space".

However, Gu Biao already has a way to deal with this: "Don't be so troublesome, you don't need to do more than one frame, just make one side of the original monster image with tentacles, legs and feet shorter, and the other side bigger, longer, and asymmetrical."

When the first frame is played, and the second frame is horizontally reversed by 180 degrees, it looks like a monster is moving. ”

Yang Hao didn't understand Gu Hao's statement at first, after all, he is a pure technical nerd, with no art foundation, and he lacks the imagination of space and images.

Gu Biao took a piece of paper and gestured with his ugly technique of a "soul painter", and the other party understood.

To put it simply, Gu Biao's trick is what he saw from some archaeological articles when he learned the skills of code farmers in later generations - in 1985, when Nintendo developed "Super Mario", Shigeru Miyamoto encountered the problem of "making monsters move will consume too much texture capacity".

Then Shigeru Miyamoto was opportunistic.

If later players really stare at the enemy "Mushroom Monster" in Super Mario carefully, down to the pixel level, it is not difficult to see that in fact, the Mushroom Monster did not "walk" in the process of walking towards Mario, but used the method of "repeatedly reversing left and right" to deceive the visual illusion of "walking".

As for the "turtle monster" in Super Mario, it is a little more troublesome, because it has an extra head on one side, which is not completely symmetrical, so it cannot be "repeatedly reversed from side to side", and it will be a goof.

However, that did not stump Miyamoto Shigeru, he chose to preserve the turtle's body and limbs into a picture, and continued to repeatedly cross to create the illusion of "crawling". And save ** separately as a picture of the turtle body and let it stand still.

A dot map that would have taken hundreds of bytes to make was completed in just a few bytes, which is the charm of the early programmers' efforts to save capacity.

As soon as Gu Biao told Yang Hao about these ideas, Yang Hao was immediately shocked, and felt that the biggest gain today was nothing more than this.

"I didn't expect that although Boss Gu didn't write his own programs, his understanding of programming ideas was simply the essence. In contrast, we're just 'doing manual work.'"

Ashamed, ashamed. Being able to follow Boss Gu, even if you don't take any money, just the valuable experience and design ideas you have learned are a great wealth. ”

Thinking like this, he had completely forgotten that Gu Biao was actually a "liberal arts student".

……

After completing Yang Hao's schedule planning, Lu Yunda's work here is actually much more convenient, and there is nothing worth explaining.

It is estimated that it is only according to the interface standard of Z80, fine-tuning the layout of several components, and adding buzzer sound control circuits.

But what he saw with his own eyes on this trip gave Gu Biao a lot of inspiration and gave him a new brainstorm.

He no longer wants to be completely stuck in the answers given to him by the "general trend of history", but wants to do more.

Because in Yueben, he saw that the "traditional electric game console" was not outdated, but the business was still booming.

He believes that even after the appearance of electronic arcade machines represented by "space invaders", the electric arcade machines will not cool down instantly, and it is estimated that there will be a struggle period of one or two years.

After all, the performance of revolutionary new things is not perfect at the beginning.

Just like how many technical problems the German army encountered in one or two years after the German army came up with the Me-262 jet fighter in World War II, it is not necessarily the opponent of the Yankee P-51 Mustang Ultimate Magic Modification.

The pioneer monster of the jet machine is not as good as the peak monster of the piston machine, and the same is naturally true in the game field.

After all, players are not fighting for novelty, but for user experience. The kind of drama that kills old opponents in an instant after the birth of a new thing only exists.

So Gu Biao planned to design a new motor-driven arcade machine without a screen from scratch.

First, with his decades of experience, it is not difficult to combine electric with the excellent design of future generations, and learn from the current mature experience.

Secondly, having an electric arcade machine can not only make a little profit, but also help him launder money: the 200,000 start-up capital he got from President Hussein has not been fully invested in his Hong Kong-owned company.

If there is a new electric arcade machine, get a batch and put it on the streets of Yuben, he can exchange the money for coins, and throw it into the machine every day to find a nursery to hype. Laundering hidden money into arcade profits.

Although the profit of the game hall is not glamorous, it can see the light after all.

Decades later, people who have seen all kinds of traffic injection fraud in the Internet era are certainly no strangers to this - at that time, even movies were used to fake the box office, launder the money, and then drive up the stock price.

But for those who have not seen venture capital and traffic fraud in 79 years, this kind of thing is absolutely impossible to see.

Gu Biao can even imagine that once the electric arcade machine he made is "found to be very popular" in the market research of his peers, it can even interfere with the decision-making judgment of his peers, making them mistakenly think that "electric arcade machines are still very marketable and will not be eliminated immediately by electronic arcade machines".

In this way, the entire game industry has been fooled.

Maybe Gu Biao can also take the opportunity to produce a large number of electric goods and pit arcade hall owners all over the country. After they brought the goods in, they found that the real revenue was far less than the machine that Gu Biao piloted at the beginning, and Gu Biao could also explain:

Because you're all following the trend! There are so many of these machines on the market, so no one plays them anymore! And the popularity of video game consoles is getting wider and wider, diverting customers! So if you don't make money, it doesn't mean that I made money in the first place!

Don't you like to look at big data and do market research? Then waste an extra year or two on the crooked road of electric vehicles.

……

The ideal is very good, but when it comes to implementation, it is a test of design.

What kind of electric arcade machine should be made? It must be played by people, but also conform to the current technical characteristics.

Gu Biao called Lu Yunda aside and showed him a bunch of photos of the electric arcade machine taken during the book.

"This is the electric arcade machine with the best response in the market at the moment, called 'Extreme Racing'. Essentially, there are five rows of red LEDs on five tracks, and then each indicator represents a car that will alternately flash at the player from far and near.

As long as the player can control the left and right buttons to dodge, as long as the LED indicator lights up to the bottom line, the point representing your car does not coincide with it, which means that you have avoided the other party and successfully overtaken. If it coincides, it means that the car has crashed, the car is destroyed and people are killed, and GAME-OVER......

The car pattern is still painted on the background screen below, but the background screen will be rotated by a motor, and you can see the image of the car flying towards you and being overtaken. Every 30 seconds of the game, the motor rolls and the LED lights move one level faster until the player doesn't have time to react. ”

The game described by Gu Biao will definitely make people feel too rubbish in the future, but in 1979, I was really having a good time, and I was willing to throw 50 yen coins to get a handful (2~3 yuan).

Lu Yunda had never played the game, so it naturally took him a long time to understand how it works.

And he felt that this seemed to be fun enough, and he couldn't imagine how Gu Biao could change it.

But in fact, when Gu Biao saw this machine for the first time, what came to mind was some kind of retro funny toy that he had seen on Douyin decades later.

"I'm going to develop a game called 'Plants vs. Zombies' based on this motor-driven screenless game console. Change the cars on the conveyor belt into zombies that can stand/fall. There are five tracks in total, and each track has a sunflower at the end. For every 10 seconds that Sunflower survives, it can provide the player with 1 pea bullet formed by 'photosynthesis'.

In the player's hand, they will hold an electric ray gun developed by Nintendo in '74, which is shaped like a pea pod. Move around the five columns of tracks with the ray gun and tap to shoot the zombies and the zombies will fall. Zombies of different avatars can also have different amounts of health.

If the zombie reaches the bottom line for the first time, he will eat this column of sunflowers. The speed at which the player gains bullets is slowed down, so it is not possible to empty the gun. The second time the zombie walks to the bottom line of the same column, the horror music will play and the game will end. A coloured sign is flipped up, showing that the player's brain has been eaten by zombies......"

Lu Yunda thought about it, although he didn't understand what was so popular about the zombie theme, but technically it seemed to be easy to implement: to put it bluntly, the logic control circuit didn't need to be changed, basically the same as an electric racing arcade.

It was to add the material of the Nintendo Ray Gun and change the dodge game into a shooting game.

At the same time, it is also a shooting game with a slight "management and cultivation element". (It was impossible to buy plants with daylight, which was impossible in the electric era, so you could only turn "daylight" into bullets.) If you run it well, you can save more savings in the early stage)

As for increasing the difficulty and ensuring that the player dies as soon as possible and continues to invest coins, it is also by speeding up the speed of the motor, as long as the zombies rush faster and faster, the players who run out of ammunition will be drowned in the zombie sea sooner or later.

Gu Biao was afraid that the other party would make the problem simple, so he instructed him: "Also, sunflowers, pea guns, and even zombies must be drawn cutely." Nowadays, games are still made with electric motors, and the biggest advantage is that the textures can be much more beautiful than on-screen games.

The enemies on Space Invaders are pixel patches, and that's a shooter that only men can play. If you want to attract women to spend money on guns, plants must be beautiful! Zombies must be cute!

It can be said that if this game is to be successful, the circuit design technician is still secondary, and we have to find a way to find a reliable artist! After the game is made, I can not apply for protection for the software copyright and the industrial property rights of the circuit diagram design, but the art drawing of the design must go to this country to apply for copyright!"