The third image showing the arrows for traffic direction gave me a tiny eureka moment. You don't need complex rules for what cars can do at an intersection. You don't reason about the intersection at all. You reason about the lanes!
At each choice cell, you just weigh the turn lower than going straight when randomly deciding. And if you don't want U-turns, you set a rule like it describes, or any sort of "cooldown" on turning.
My high school girlfriend and I played this game all the time; trying to build the pizzas to get the best score was always super frustrating. It always felt like I could be a single pixel off and get a really low score, but I loved building my "empire"
> My high school girlfriend and I played this game all the time; trying to build the pizzas to get the best score was always super frustrating. It always felt like I could be a single pixel off
Pizza Tycoon was one of those games we got years later for £5 in some repackaged "Classic Games" collection but it came without a booklet or anything.
Supposedly the booklet was the key to getting the pizzas right as it had all the instructions on which elements were needed & where. (I heard someone say they used this as an antipiracy thing as without the booklet, it'd be playable but impossible, not sure if that's true lol)
We used to just cargo cult our way to good pizzas.
The thing about the anti-piracy is true, at least in the original version (I don't know about re-releases).
The way it worked was you had to offer at least a few pizzas that were reasonably close to recipes from the booklet in order to get any customers. Once you had that, you could get creative with custom recipes but if you only did custom recipes, you were bound to fail.
That's true! In the original if you don't have at least 3 of the pizza recipes from the "cook book" that shipped with the game your restaurant popularity stat gets divided by 8, which makes it really difficult to make any profit :)
> cars don't need to know where they're going. Each road tile type carries its own direction. Road tile 0x16 is the bottom part of a horizontal road, meaning that cars can only drive from left to right on these roads.
There's always a simple explanation for anything that looks too complicated for an old game to do.
Anyone know of any communities/game jams with the theme of "has no business running on such low hardware requirements"? Kind of like the demoscene but for games.
There were many games growing up that gave me such a warped view of what was to be expected from the hardware. Battletoads, Crash Bandicoot, Marathon Trilogy (Macintosh), Age of Empires (Multiplayer), Roller Coaster Tycoon (of course).
Maybe an issue would be people not all having the same type of hardware though? Maybe you target an emulator. (Some Fantasy Consoles sort of count here?)
I haven't looked expensively but some of the retro themed jams were missing the "spirit" I was expecting.
I did a Nokia jam a while back — monochrome, beeps — and I remember being kind of annoyed that the rules technically allowed 3D Unity games as long as they followed resolution and color palette.
(A 3D cube spinning on a TI calculator is a different matter ;)
They definitely do. I recommend GP check out PICO-8 which has some VERY real games on it like the original Celeste (by its original creators), Cattle Crisis, POOM, Combo Pool, Into Ruins, Dank Tomb, UFO Swamp Odyssey, Porklike, and much more. Most of which you can play on Itch.io for free in your browser.
I’ve been having a blast making a “real” and very full-featured PICO-8 game to serve as a “market fit” prototype — if a PICO-8 game on Itch gets meaningful attention, I’ve “found the fun” and therefore I should make “the full version” (non-PICO-8) for Steam, etc.
Yeah, I imagine a target emulator is the way to go for this kind of thing.
Speaking of your last comment: while very impressive, I feel a bit disappointed when someone's done something amazing with a Game Boy or SNES or whatnot, but the solution involves shoving an entire computer in the cartridge. This is still very cool but your console just becomes a head unit for your GTX 4080 or whatnot.
Not entirely sure if it's fit the critera but there is usually pops up retro-themed compos for most retro platforms meaning there's natural hardware restrictions (like demos for retro platforms).
8bit like Nes (Nesjam late may/june), Gameboy(GBJam was last year, bi-annual), Atari,etc, but also for MSDOS, Amiga and more "mid-school" platforms together with semimodern like PS1.
Now, even with modern tools it's plenty of work to get impressive things working on older platforms (I had a Gameboy techdemo last time there was a compo that's due to grow ridiculously much).
I couldn't understand why someone would want to reimplement Pizza Tycoon, until I realized I played it's sequel as a child, which is much maligned compared to the original.
I tried the sequels and they never clicked for me either. Probably also due to the missing nostalgia factor :)
As to why I did this; when I had some time between university and starting a job many years ago I was looking for a hobby coding project and was inspired by TTDPatch and OpenTTD so I figured I'd do the same but for Pizza Tycoon. No specific reason other than that I played the game a lot as a teenager and there were some small things that I found annoying, so I saw some room for quality of life improvements. Fully aware that not many people care about this game (also didn't really expect to really get very far tbh), but still I had (and have) a lot of fun and learned a lot in the process of writing a modern engine for this.
The third image showing the arrows for traffic direction gave me a tiny eureka moment. You don't need complex rules for what cars can do at an intersection. You don't reason about the intersection at all. You reason about the lanes!
At each choice cell, you just weigh the turn lower than going straight when randomly deciding. And if you don't want U-turns, you set a rule like it describes, or any sort of "cooldown" on turning.
Someone hasn't been watching their Biffa!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pGCoLh3NL7g
It's all about the lanes and the flow.
Had no idea about this channel. 100% down my alley. Thanks for sharing!
My high school girlfriend and I played this game all the time; trying to build the pizzas to get the best score was always super frustrating. It always felt like I could be a single pixel off and get a really low score, but I loved building my "empire"
> My high school girlfriend and I played this game all the time; trying to build the pizzas to get the best score was always super frustrating. It always felt like I could be a single pixel off
Pizza Tycoon was one of those games we got years later for £5 in some repackaged "Classic Games" collection but it came without a booklet or anything.
Supposedly the booklet was the key to getting the pizzas right as it had all the instructions on which elements were needed & where. (I heard someone say they used this as an antipiracy thing as without the booklet, it'd be playable but impossible, not sure if that's true lol)
We used to just cargo cult our way to good pizzas.
The thing about the anti-piracy is true, at least in the original version (I don't know about re-releases).
The way it worked was you had to offer at least a few pizzas that were reasonably close to recipes from the booklet in order to get any customers. Once you had that, you could get creative with custom recipes but if you only did custom recipes, you were bound to fail.
That's true! In the original if you don't have at least 3 of the pizza recipes from the "cook book" that shipped with the game your restaurant popularity stat gets divided by 8, which makes it really difficult to make any profit :)
> cars don't need to know where they're going. Each road tile type carries its own direction. Road tile 0x16 is the bottom part of a horizontal road, meaning that cars can only drive from left to right on these roads.
There's always a simple explanation for anything that looks too complicated for an old game to do.
Anyone know of any communities/game jams with the theme of "has no business running on such low hardware requirements"? Kind of like the demoscene but for games.
There were many games growing up that gave me such a warped view of what was to be expected from the hardware. Battletoads, Crash Bandicoot, Marathon Trilogy (Macintosh), Age of Empires (Multiplayer), Roller Coaster Tycoon (of course).
+1 This needs to exist if it doesn't yet!
Maybe an issue would be people not all having the same type of hardware though? Maybe you target an emulator. (Some Fantasy Consoles sort of count here?)
I haven't looked expensively but some of the retro themed jams were missing the "spirit" I was expecting.
I did a Nokia jam a while back — monochrome, beeps — and I remember being kind of annoyed that the rules technically allowed 3D Unity games as long as they followed resolution and color palette.
(A 3D cube spinning on a TI calculator is a different matter ;)
>Some Fantasy Consoles sort of count here?
They definitely do. I recommend GP check out PICO-8 which has some VERY real games on it like the original Celeste (by its original creators), Cattle Crisis, POOM, Combo Pool, Into Ruins, Dank Tomb, UFO Swamp Odyssey, Porklike, and much more. Most of which you can play on Itch.io for free in your browser.
I’ve been having a blast making a “real” and very full-featured PICO-8 game to serve as a “market fit” prototype — if a PICO-8 game on Itch gets meaningful attention, I’ve “found the fun” and therefore I should make “the full version” (non-PICO-8) for Steam, etc.
Yeah, I imagine a target emulator is the way to go for this kind of thing.
Speaking of your last comment: while very impressive, I feel a bit disappointed when someone's done something amazing with a Game Boy or SNES or whatnot, but the solution involves shoving an entire computer in the cartridge. This is still very cool but your console just becomes a head unit for your GTX 4080 or whatnot.
That made me somewhat disappointed back in the day too, when I realized that some games had extra sound circuitry or even an extra CPU in them.
Not entirely sure if it's fit the critera but there is usually pops up retro-themed compos for most retro platforms meaning there's natural hardware restrictions (like demos for retro platforms).
8bit like Nes (Nesjam late may/june), Gameboy(GBJam was last year, bi-annual), Atari,etc, but also for MSDOS, Amiga and more "mid-school" platforms together with semimodern like PS1.
Now, even with modern tools it's plenty of work to get impressive things working on older platforms (I had a Gameboy techdemo last time there was a compo that's due to grow ridiculously much).
Demo parties usually have a category for games.
I was looking for this game on GOG only an hour ago having regaled a teenager with how great it was! It’s not on GOG unfortunately.
It’s on GOG and Steam.
Pizza Tycoon was the US market name, internationally it was released as Pizza Connection
https://www.gog.com/en/game/pizza_connection
https://store.steampowered.com/app/598990/Pizza_Connection/
I couldn't understand why someone would want to reimplement Pizza Tycoon, until I realized I played it's sequel as a child, which is much maligned compared to the original.
I tried the sequels and they never clicked for me either. Probably also due to the missing nostalgia factor :)
As to why I did this; when I had some time between university and starting a job many years ago I was looking for a hobby coding project and was inspired by TTDPatch and OpenTTD so I figured I'd do the same but for Pizza Tycoon. No specific reason other than that I played the game a lot as a teenager and there were some small things that I found annoying, so I saw some room for quality of life improvements. Fully aware that not many people care about this game (also didn't really expect to really get very far tbh), but still I had (and have) a lot of fun and learned a lot in the process of writing a modern engine for this.