That footage of the disk-writing party is the best thing. Like an 80s independent software publisher came right back to life.

A kickstarter that actual follows through, doesnt over promise, and keeps steady information filled updates coming? What parallel world is this?

So happy to see how well things are progressing for you with this project.

Hi. Anders here. Just a quick FYI on the MT-32 question that is popping up in the comments here and on the Kickstarter page. There is no viable option for David to implement MT-32 into these versions of the game. The old XTs can't handle MIDI-data like you'd expect from similar games (Dune2, MI1/2, Warcraft etc). So the only sound systems available are PC speaker, Tandy 3-voice and AdLib (and this one is stripped to only three channels to keep the workload to a minimum with both composing and coding for it). However, we do compose for the MT-32 and full AdLib in mind, so the downloadable sound track and cassettes will have proper music featured. You just have to play those on the side while playing, sorry for that - but those are the limitations of the hardware and this project. Best regards Anders

I can't believe that you have already made so much progress on this game, especially writing it in actual assembly, with a featureless text editor, and no version control, and even no bug tracking. It's blowing my mind how hardcore true retro this is.

Why does my Planet X2 smell like pepperoni? lol.

Planet X2, now with authentic pizza smell packaging

"Of course the [todo list] keeps getting..." I legitimately thought you were going to say "longer". That's what happens to me lol.

I'm really impressed with the scrolling routine you're using. Smooth scrolling on an IBM PC (5150) is very impressive.

Awesome stuff bro!

Also that 'disk copy party' is so nostalgic! Apply a VHS filter and it may as well be 1985!

I know many younger devs may not understand the point of Assembler, but back in the day of these machines, many games were written in ASM because you needed to have tight access to the hardware for optimization and polish-- there just wasn't a better way. Even with a C (not C++) compiler, devs wanted to manage every byte, where it went when assembled, and bare-metal CPU efficiency. I'm glad to see you made this choice. This will certainly keep the game "period authentic" not just in how it was made, but how it will feel because of how it was written. I appreciate your efforts. I've always wanted to write a game in ASM but never managed to find the time. This is quite an inspiration.

Congratulations on the awesome kickstarter! That is an incredible amount of work done.

"Hi, so i ordered my copy of Planet X2....and it had what looked like Pizza sauce and a smudge of grease on the sleeve, can i get a new copy shipped out!?" ------hehehehe!

Pizza and disk - copying! Now THAT'S THE 8 BIT SPIRIT.

That PC speaker demo track gave me goosebumps. Bzzzt! It sounds like you have hired the pefect guy for the job. Pun intended!

Good grief. You really are coding like it’s 1986. Notepad? Snapshot folders? If you drink Mountain Dew, there is a good chance we would have been great friends in high school LOL

You could also sell the game on Steam, executing it via DOSBox, just like Wolfenstein and Doom are played

Dave, you rock. The classic example of a garage project. Inspired!!!

Limitations breed creativity.

Damn man. I used to write games in Borland Turbo C++ 3.0 for DOS in mode 13h and that was hard enough with no APIs aside from what you could create yourself. Doing this in ASM is crazy. Props.

Techmoan AND 8-bit Guy in the same day

The work you are doing is astonishing. Truly amazing, David! I get so excited when I see a new video from you!

Amazing! I really enjoy these update videos with such a detailed walk through the process. Just amazing. Great work!

Somehow that disk-copying party seemed like the happiest thing ever.

Holy crap that pc speaker music!! It's incredible

This is really looking awesome David.I really appreciate all the hard, detail-oriented work you guys are putting into this. :D

Depending on how much memory or compute you have available, we used to solve those path finding issues with either waypoints (baked into the map), or A* (or automatically generated waypoints using A*, e.g. they're compiled into the maps ahead of time, automatically).

David, you've worked really hard for this stuff. I just want to congratulate you on even getting this far--a lot of indie game devs don't get the chance to see their game kickstarted, let alone released on a "dead" platform. You've earned every bit of praise.

So impressed man. It looks wonderful. Can't wait to play it! Assembly is hardcore!

The music and VGA mode look/sound awesome!:D Keep up the good work, love what I'm seeing so far.

You are one of the smartest if not smartest person I've found on KZfaq. Keep doing what you doing You are the best! Greetings from Norway

WOW!!! The VGA one looks fabulous...VERY easy on the eyes - literally.

That demo tune sounded great on PC Speaker, Tandy 3-voice, and AdLib sounds! A little strange for me to hear FM synth doing arpeggios, but still not bad 👌🏽

This is amazing. Thanks for taking us “behind the scenes” with all this detail into how the game is made!

Bless you for keeping the Old Ways alive. Watching your channel is like taking a tour of my childhood and gives me appreciation for those who did this stuff for a living back in the 80s.

Even 90's RTS games struggled with pathfinding, it's a bit tricky to get it right. Do you use A* search for pathfinding or something similar?

In Planet X2 you can build a wall around your factory so that the enemy cant reach you but your sentries do. Same issue here. Maybe you can code enemies that way that they actually shoot things that are blocking the path. To realise that, you could make walls stronger than bushes for example. Also i like to mention that lefties like me could have some problems with the key bindings. (in Planet X2 e.g. the unit selection starts at 0 on the keyboard, annoying af). A cutomizable option is on my wishlist. And additional, i would like to see a confirm button when you blow up your tank. Because i blew my factory so many times by hitting the wrong button. All in all, i love to see your effort to make this game something great. Keep up the good work!

Amazing work you put in here. Really cool to hear about all the difficulties and how you attack them.

19:23 Yay! Every so often, I binge-watch a bunch of your videos, kind of at random, based on what is suggested on the side. So only today did I learn about your Planet X2 game (which looked pretty cool), and then immediately after learned you were working on Planet X3 (which looked even cooler), aaaand then also that I missed it's Kickstarter... :P

WOW! Earlier today I was thinking about asking you about what kind of tools you were using (or used) to build these games. So this is an amazing coincidence!!. Thanks for the video i enjoyed it a lot. As for the tools I just wanted to make a suggestion, I don't want to mess with your workflow but I'd like to advice you to use git, even if you don't push your code to GitHub or something like that (albeit you probably should), you can just have a local repository. The reason is that is a lot easier to follow changes in git, because you add a commit message to each commit, and each commit shows what was added, removed or changed. You can checkout files from any commit at any time, you can checkout any revision at any time without risking loosing work. If you mess up, git reset and git stash are there to make your life easier. Also since you have the CGA and VGA versions sharing code you can actually use branches to easily handle this. Even if you aren't planning on sharing the source code or working with anyone else, using a version control system is a good practice, and may actually save you a lot of aggravation.

Wow. That music sounds so great on the Tandy. Any way I can get source for the tracker? Also, are you using compiled sprites on the vga mode? It makes transparency super fast.

Great as always David! Keep up the good work, love that music demo btw!

I love these videos! - The higher resolution graphics for the VGA version looks incredible. I really am looking forward to playing this :)

This game looks glorious the VGA mode looks awesome but so does CGA also. Man brings a tear to the eyes of this RTS fan.

Dallas Quest on the Tandy CoCo had a color check screen that showed the colors used in the game and said to press the reset button repeatedly until the colors matched the description. Maybe you could add an option like "16 Color Composite with colorbar screen" and before the game starts it will let them shift the colors until it matches correctly so you know they are on the right set of colors. Or maybe ask the question a few times at start up and if the user says the colors are correct several times in a row, stop asking but leave the palette shift option in the menu just in case.

I'm really impressed by the progress you've made on this. It makes me want to work harder on my own game projects!

Your videos make me feel so good, I don't know why. Great work. :)

Gonna be amazing. Congrats on the successful kickstarter

Some tips from an old timer: 1. The PC speaker is better at tones than effects (unless you dedicate the CPU to doing 1 bit WAV output), while the Texas chip in the Tandy is really good at effects. So maybe use PCS for the third music voice and a Tandy channel for effects. 2. Hercules can be run in a mode that closely resembles CGA Mono, it just requires a 9MHz 8088 and a background routine to copy half the 16K CGA buffer to the second half of the 32K buffer at BC000h. So it can be shoehorned into the CGA version for those with a turbo button. 3. Maybe you can get LGR to test VGA on his 8MHz original AT.

Fantastic work Dave. The challenge of writing a game for the breadth of configurations is amazing. Much respect.

Wow! This project is looking great! Well done so far. Although I didn't get in on the Kickstarter, I'll be keeping an eye out for purchase after release.

How i did my path finding. 1. Detect unit is stuck (e.g. stays in same place) 2. Walk to random location on map 3. If stuck again or arrives at random loc, try again to go to original target loc. Very simple but surprisingly effective. Hope it helps

You should consider trying out palette cycling effects in VGA-mode. For the high level of detail-and it does look great-some places like the rivers look too static. On a technical note, most assemblers support conditional assembly for dealing with different feature or hardware configurations. You'll have to check your assembler's manual, but there's no way you need to maintain two separate code-bases that are almost entirely the same.

Your software development process is as true to the 8-bit era as your theme music is. In both cases: awesome. By far my favorite retro computing channel.

So stoked for this to come out! Great work so far, David!

Really that Version Control is really hard, Maybe its fancy but it really helps speed up using Git / TFS. Also you could try to improve on that bug list to make your life easier, maybe its less fancy but a shared excel at least? Also Keep it up the good work, great progress you have made so far

Notepad, 8088 assembly ... "I have two separate codebases for CGA and VGA". You just found out why people try to code in the highest level language they can get away with :)

I REALLY like your attitude and the way you’re taking further your projects. I always thought that the machines from the 80s/90s had more to say, for they really teach us to be efficient in order to achieve whatever objective has been set. Also...it’s strange, but you make me want to really learn to code! I hope you and your team succeed in the best way possible, you’ve got a new fan. :)

Congratulations! The game looks fantastic... I really enjoyed the music section.

Wow wow wow.. these Music snips were promising indeed!!

@David, thanks for update! If only all Kickstarter projects have done such elaborate updates (sigh)...

Incredible music from your videos man. Keep it up!

As always excellent work, keep up the quality content!

Do a Megadrive/Genesis later! Imagine having gaming hardware with sprites and smooth scrolling, it'd probably look and feel like all those Electronic Arts Amiga ports to the old Sega machine.

Awesome! Thanks for adding the box, I missed out on X2 (and X1). Wanting to get a copy made the deluxe set the obvious choice for me, and I guess a lot of other people too.

I must say, those update videos are really entertaining to watch. Can't wait for part 4! :D

This is all super impressive to see! Keep up the awesome work. I think the best thing is that you were willing to hire other people to help you, I've seen some indie games where the developer doesn't recognize their limitations and ends up wasting a ton time trying to do things they just can't do.

I like how most of the comments about a game update is more about the fact that he uses notepad and folder snapshots. Idk how he does it either though, I would at least need line numbers. If I was in David’s shoes I would probably use VSC, as it’s basically suped up notepad with plugins.

the PC speaker rendition reminds me of Zak MCkraken and the Alien Mind-benders, which sounded somewhat like that on the PC speaker.

Dam Dave, you having lots of hard work but the results are just impressive. All the best

There's so much passion going into this project, I love watching it all come together.

Where do the floppies come from, are they still manufactured or is there enough new old stock out there?

9:39 I can't believe the things you make your game run on XD

Excellent stuff. I really appreciate for all efforts done.

I am so impressed with this project... I loved my C64 and enjoy watching the love you give that amazing machine.

Very hi tek disk copy system there! I can see this will be an amazing game!

You mentioned that you are planning for transparency around units, but do you also plan for additional sprites for up and down movement, so that the vehicles don't "slide sideways" up an down?

Very nice! I used to love assembly programming on my C64. Never really done much of it in DOS, though I used to have some C functions with some DOS assembly embedded for graphic routines (VGA) at the time. Kind of late now, but that is one option and was quite common back in the day, using C with assembly code in some of the functions that needed the speed. It was pretty simple to do really. Path finding was an interesting topic I explored (as well as maze generation). There's many ways to do this. I can't recall what I ended up settling on. Your three voice sound seems a lot like many C64 games which used a similar number of channels, often 3 with a 4th channel used to modify one of the others. I loved the retro sound style you chose, very nice! One of the things I always enjoyed was coding my level editors. I never did make my own graphic editor, but now I want to! ;) Oh, one last thing I found handy is I always keep a programming journal. I have entries for every day I work on my game with the date and time and then comments I add on what I did and what went wrong, how I fixed it etc. It's been interesting to look back on one I have since the early part of the 2000s and it goes right up to present day!

This is absolutely amazing. I've always wanted to develop my own pixel/voxel game but have always felt discouraged at how difficult it would possibly be but this is pretty inspiring and I'll definitely give it another shot. Can't wait for the full release :D

Great work so far, the VGA version looks amazing! (to be fair, even the CGA version looks good too, even on the IBM 5155 and it's amber CRT) In fact, the amber CRT looks kinda retro-amazing, maybe we could have a amber filter on the game? (just kidding) My bet is, if you release documentation about your graphics routines, someone will make patches for the other graphics cards/modes(like EGA and Hercules) after the release.

Are there any plans for releasing a digital copy? I would love to play these games and want to support your work, but I don't currently have a C64 or an old computer. Thanks, keep up the awesome work!

man 8-bit guy you're a machine! Game looks great btw, hope people really enjoy it!

I was waiting for ages for this! Thanks!

That looks amazing on the Tandy!

2:28 You can develop anything with a ftp server if you consider the whole linux kernel is made with a mailing list

This video was so perfect...! First things first, is very nice to see Dave attention to many video modes, so no one was left out of the party...! The VGA graphics are looking very good, love pixel art...! The music, it's catchy, extremely interesting. And the copy production party, sensational, I would like to see an extended video of that day, listen to you guys talking, making jokes, etc... I'm thinking about to buy the game and play on the DOSBOX within my Windows 10 machine.

Neighbor, you really have some good stuff taking off! Congrats and keep it up!

Also, I'm kind of bummed you didn't use Git since that would have been a really nice way of traveling back in time through the source, as well as see reasons/rationale in the comments on when and why certain decisions were made. It would also make it much simpler to open source later and allow for collaborators that want to fork or fix things.

Or you could probably introduce an "I'm stuck" sub-routine where if the unit is stuck path finding, it goes back where it came from and tries to pick a different random path.

End of the year?!! Wow -- I was figuring next summer sometime... Dang! You're really working quickly!

I wasn't going to watch this but I couldn't stop. It was so interesting, I was surprised people still play games like this. I started playing games when they were like this, simple and full of adventure. Good job man! I always wanted to design my own game as well, perhaps I will.

Ejj There are Pizza Stains on my copy of Planet X2 :P

How can one have the guts to be developing games for the Commodore 64 and the early PC x86 architecture and be working in assembly language in 2018 boggles my mind. I admire you 8-bit guy. You should do a game for the Amiga or the Atari ST next...just saying! Good luck with the rest of the project!

Thank you for these videos. You motivated me to fix my 486 motherboard that was getting a keyboard error. Battery acid had corroded traces. Ran a new wired trace under the board between two points and am back in business.

So much cool stuff in one really neat video. Can't wait till my copy arrives :D

I wonder if we will see Planet X3 the movie? Maybe something kind of 80s retro feel?

I think I had a small heart attack when I got to the "2 seperate code bases for CGA and VGA" part of the video. The only thing worse I can imagine is actually coding it all twice instead of copying ;) Even in you are hell bent on using only asm you can use libraries or include files so there's really no reason to be copy/pasting stuff. I love asm as much as anyone but for something at this scale I'd have used C++ with only time critical loops in asm. Unless you spend a lot of hours profiling and optimising every single function, an oldschool compiler like Watcom will most likely generate faster code anyway. But that's me and I'm not the one writing your game, and I'm not going to try and tell you how to do your thing. It looks awesome so clearly your "insane" notepad 100% asm code duplicating no git method actually works for you so who is anyone to argue with that :) Keep up the good work!

Man, this project looks so cool, the graphics look great, and particularly that Adlib music sounds really good.

I'm so happy you are doing this!! It's inspiring me to write my own new title for my c64.. just have to get it working first :( I missed the Kickstarter but I will definitely be buying this when it comes out..