"After removing the code of the bunker and accidentally injured a friendly, the game's storage space is empty, so we can add something."

"First of all, after the enemy's 'Space Octopus Man' was beaten to death, I would add the explosion sound effect of the buzzer. Then, I would do two-frame gradient explosion animation. This part should not use much storage, and it would not affect the smoothness of the game."

"Then, the enemy's movement is currently moving directly across the map without any movement changes. This is too ugly, and the players will not be dynamic, so I ask you to make all the maps of these octopus monsters move..."

Gu Ao said three of the biggest improvement suggestions in a casual manner.

Hearing this, Yang Zihao took the lead in refuting: "Boss Gu, this is impossible. The explosion animation is easy to handle. Just add two frames of unified graphics. Anyway, all monsters will have the same dead shape when they explode.

But if the monster moves to make an animation effect, there will be many frames. If each monster looks like it, it will cause at least one or several frames, and the memory will be blocked!"

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

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

From the perspective of the coder, this problem-solving method is equivalent to increasing the pressure of image storage capacity by more than ten times.

The hard disk space in later generations is not valuable, so you can naturally squander it at will.

But now is an era of every inch of money.

Programmers in the 1980s had one more important skill than programmers in later generations, that is, "how to save storage space."

However, Gu Ao had a solution to this: "No need to be so troublesome. You don't have to do more in a frame. Just make one side of the original monster image as tentacles, shorter legs and feet, and larger, longer and asymmetrical on the other side.

At that time, the first frame is being called and the second frame is being adjusted horizontally by 180 degrees. It looks like the effect is like a monster moving."

Yang Zihao didn't understand Gu Ao's statement at first. After all, he is a purely technical mate, without a foundation in art, and lacks the imagination of space and images.

Gu Ao took a piece of paper and used his ugly technique of "soul painter" to show it, and the other party understood it.

In simple terms, Gu Ao's trick was a trick that was learned by later generations. When he read some archaeological articles, he saw that in 1985, when Nintendo developed "Super Mary", Miyamoto Shigeru encountered the problem of "making monsters move and consume too much map capacity."

Then Miyamoto Shigeru took advantage of the situation.

If later players really stare at the enemy "Mushroom Monster" in Super Mario, and look carefully to the pixel level, it is not difficult to see that the mushroom monster is not "left" when walking towards Mario, but uses the method of "repeatedly reversing left and right" to deceive the visual illusion of "left".

As for the "turtle monster" in Super Marie, it is a little more troublesome, because there is an extra head on one side, which is not completely symmetrical, so it cannot be "repeatedly reversed left and right", which will make mistakes.

However, that did not stump Miyamoto Shigeru. He chose to save the turtle body and limbs as a picture, and continued to repeatedly create the illusion of "crawling". He saved the ** separately as a picture that was separated from the turtle body, leaving it still.

It was originally necessary to make a dot map for hundreds of bytes, but it only took a few bytes to complete. This is the charm of early program masters who worked hard to save capacity.

When Gu Ao talked about these ideas to Yang Zihao, Yang Zihao was shocked and felt that the biggest gain today was this.

"I didn't expect that although Boss Gu didn't write programs by himself, his understanding of programming ideas was simply the essence. In comparison, we were just a 'physical work'.

I am ashamed, too ashamed. Being able to work with Boss Gu, even if you don’t get any money, just these valuable experiences and design ideas I have learned are an amazing asset.”

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

...

After completing Yang Zihao's progress plan, the work that Lu Yunda cooperated with was actually much more convenient and there was nothing worth explaining.

It is estimated that it is just based on the z80 interface standard, fine-tuning the layout of several components, and adding buzzer sound control circuits.

But what I saw in this trip to Japan gave Gu Ao a lot of inspiration and gave him new ideas.

He no longer wants to completely stick to the answers reported to him by the "heritage trends", but wants to do more.

Because in Japan, he saw that the "traditional electric game console" was not out of date, but that the business was still booming.

He believes that even after the electronic arcade represented by the "Space Invaders" appears, the electric arcade will not cool down instantly, and there is probably another one or two years of struggle.

After all, revolutionary new things have imperfect performance at the beginning.

Just like how many technical problems did the German army encounter in one or two years after they launched the Me-262 jet fighter during World War II? If they really compete for combat effectiveness, they may not be the opponent of the American P-51 Mustang Ultimate Magic Revision.

The Jet's mountain-opening monster is not as good as the peak monster of the Piston Machine, and the game field is naturally the same.

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

So Gu Ao plans to design a new motor-driven arcade machine from scratch.

First of all, with his decades of experience, it is not difficult to combine electric power with excellent designs in later generations and learn from current mature experience.

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

If there is a new electric arcade, and a batch is put on the streets of Japan, he can exchange the money for coins, and invest it in the machine every day to find child care to hype it up. He will wash the hidden money into the game hall profit.

Although the profits of the game hall are not glorious, they can be seen after all.

If it were decades later, people who had seen various traffic-filled fraudulent in the Internet era would definitely be familiar with this. At that time, even movies were used to fake the box office, and they would wash out the money and then raise the stock price.

But for those who have not seen venture capital and traffic fraud in 1979, this kind of thing is absolutely impossible to be seen through.

Gu Ao could even imagine that once the electric arcade he made was "found to be very popular" during market research of his peers, it could even interfere with the decision-making and judgment of his peers, making them mistakenly believe that "electric arcades are still very marketable and will not be eliminated by electronic arcades immediately."

In this way, the entire Japanese game industry was deceived.

Maybe Gu Ao can take the opportunity to produce a large number of electric goods and trick the owners of arcade halls across Japan. After they put the goods in, they found that the real revenue is far less than that of the machines Gu Ao piloted at the beginning. Gu Ao can also explain:

Because you all follow the trend! There are more and more machines on the market, so no one plays them! Moreover, the popularity of electronic game consoles is becoming more and more widespread, diverting customers! So whether you make money or not does not mean that I made money at the beginning was fake!

Don’t you like to read big data and conduct market research? Then waste one or two more years on the wrong path of electric power.

...

The ideal is very good, but when it comes to implementation, it will test the design.

What kind of electric arcade is better to make? It requires people to play, but also to meet the current technical characteristics.

Gu Ao called Lu Yunda aside and first showed him a bunch of electric arcade photos taken when he was in Japan.

"This is the most popular electric arcade in the Japanese market, called "Extreme Racing". In essence, there are five rows of red LED indicators on five tracks, and then each indicator represents a car, which will alternately shine from far to near, rushing towards the player.

Players can control the dodging of the left and right buttons. As long as you make sure that the LED indicator light is on to the bottom line, it means that the point of your car does not overlap with it, it means that you have avoided the other party and overtaken successfully. If it overlaps, it means that the car has crashed, the car has been destroyed, and the people have died, game-over...

The car pattern is still drawn on the background screen below, but the background screen will rotate with a motor, and you can see the images of the racing car flying towards you, one by one. Every 30 seconds of the game, the motor rolling and LED lights will move faster, until the player has no time to react.”

The game described by Gu Ao will definitely feel too trash in future generations, but in 1979, the Japanese were really having a lot of fun, and they were willing to throw 50 yen coins to make one (2 to 3 yuan).

Lu Yunda had never played games, so it took him a long time to understand the operating principle.

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

But in fact, when Gu Ao was in Japan, when he first saw this machine, what he thought of was some kind of retro and funny toy he had seen on Douyin decades later.

"I plan to develop a game called "Plant vs. Zombies" based on this motor-driven screenless game console. I change the racing cars on the conveyor belt into zombies that can stand/fall. There are five tracks in total, and there is a sunflower at the end of each track. Every 10 seconds of sunflower survival, the sunflower can provide players with 1 pea bullet formed by "photosynthesis".

Players will hold an electric light gun developed by Nintendo in 1974, and shape the appearance into a pea pod. Use the light gun to move on the five-row track and click to open fire to shoot the zombies, and the zombies will fall down. Zombies of different images can also have different health levels.

If the zombie reaches the bottom line for the first time, he will eat the sunflower in this column. The player's speed of obtaining bullets will slow down, so he cannot empty the gun. The zombie will play horror music for the second time, and the game will end. A colored sign will pop up to show that the player's brain has been eaten by the zombie..."

Lu Yunda thought about it and found that although he didn't understand what zombie themes were popular, it seemed easy to implement technically: to put it bluntly, there is no need to change the logic control circuit, which is basically the same as an electric racing arcade.

It is necessary to add the Nintendo Light Gun material to change the dodge game into a shooting game.

At the same time, it is also a shooting game with a little "management and cultivation elements". (Buying plants with sunlight is impossible in the electric era, so you can only directly turn "sunlight" into bullets. If you operate well, you can save more surplus bullets in the early stage)

As for increasing the difficulty and ensuring that the player dies as soon as possible, it is enough to increase the speed of the motor. As long as the zombies rush over, players who are out of ammunition and food will sooner or later be submerged by the sea of ​​zombies.

Gu Ao was afraid that the other party would think the problem was simple, so he repeatedly told him: "Also, sunflowers, pea guns, and even zombies, you must draw them cutely. Nowadays, he still uses electric motors to make games. The biggest advantage is that the stickers can be much more exquisite than screen display games.

To put it bluntly, the enemy on the "Space Invader" is pixel patches, which are shooting games that only men can play. To attract women to spend money to shoot guns, plants must be beautiful! Zombies must be cute!

It can be said that if this game is successful, the circuit design technician is still secondary. We have to find a reliable artist! After the game is made, I can not apply for protection of the software copyright and the industrial property rights of the circuit diagram design, but the art drawings for the appearance design must be applied for copyright in Japan and other countries!"
Chapter completed!