Ristar (Game Gear)/Development

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Ristar (Game Gear) development
Missed release date(s):

Development process

The decision to create a Game Gear port of Ristar came to be when the project was still known as Feel, and the Mega Drive version was still only about one third completed. Sega of America wanted to release both the Mega Drive and Game Gear versions simultaneously, which meant the developers could not wait for the Mega Drive version to be completed before starting work on the Game Gear version, so the developers worked off what had already been completed for the project and were asked to expand on it as they saw fit.

Throughout the porting process, the developers would receive additional prototype builds of the Mega Drive version for them to copy by eye and ear from scratch without using any pre-existing source code or resource files. Seeing new builds often, the developers watched the Mega Drive version gradually improve and see first-hand the effort its developers were putting into the game. The developers of the Game Gear version regularly sent their builds to the Mega Drive version's team for feedback, and were given a good amount of freedom to design the game as they see fit. This led to the Game Gear version being able to make half of its content original, and to shift its focus on exploring levels to collect Big Stars.

The developers faced a number of challenges in downscaling Ristar to the Game Gear - the Mega Drive version was developed for a 16-megabit cartridge, whereas the Game Gear version only had 4 megabits to work with. The team compressed the background and character data, reducing the characters to about 30-40% of their original size but allowing the team to get away with only having one less Round than the Mega Drive version. Ristar himself has more than 300 frames of animation, which was more than could be tracked with a single byte, so pattern FF was used as a special flag that checked another byte for an additional 256 patterns, as the developers wanted to replicate as much as they could from the Mega Drive game. Over 200 collection flags had to be checked when drawing the backgrounds so that collected Big Stars cannot respawn when scrolled off the screen, which was difficult to do on the Z80 CPU.

Being the one who initiated the project, Sega of America supervised the project closely, and made various requests and requirements during its development. The most notable of these according to programmer Alice Kagamino was the request to remove the first area of Round 2 (Fanturn/Terra) for the Western release, as SOA had stated that "American kids won't understand walking across clouds and rainbows". When playtesting the Awaueck boss fight, SOA filed a bug report saying "the background looks like 666" even though it is supposed to look like there is an audience. The developers adjusted this for the final game, but it is still possible to see this in some ways.

For the game's password system, Kagamino picked the passwords themselves, and they were based on their own tastes at the time.

Timeline

Timeline (Game Gear)
10 11 12 1995 01 02 1994-09-09: Prototype; 1994-09-09 1994-10-19: Prototype; 1994-10-19 1994-10-24: Prototype; 1994-10-24 1994-11-01: Prototype; 1994-11-01 1994-11-02: Prototype; 1994-11-02 1995-02-17: JP release