Trailer:



In 2004 I was a young programmer, and I cut my teeth with TI-basic and C on graphing calculators. I started programming a Worms clone, inspired by another game by Jean-Christophe Budin.

I got many features built, but I hit the 65k limit and ran out of space. Nevertheless, I published what I had anyway on my personal site.

In 2017, Lionel Debroux found my post and reached out to me with some optimizations he found in my code, saving up to 6k bytes, and suggested I might be able to finish. I looked at my atrocious code from 2004, and with an extra 13 years of experience, I decided I could just do a scratch rewrite in a few weeks.

I ended up building a rock-solid foundation, but it had 1 bug that stumped me: moving the camera would cause a crash. At the same time, my renewed interest in low-level C programming led me to learn how to write GameBoy/Color, GameGear/SMS, and SegaGenesis roms. I ultimately got distracted, burned out, and demoralized from the camera bug.

Recently I've been using AI a lot as a coding utility, specifically Gemini, and it's been great. Something reminded me of the 2017 remake, and I decided to see if AI could find the bug. It did. In like 30 seconds, lol.

I decided to read my 2017 code base, and it was perfect. After I wrapped up my holiday projects this past December, I decided to put some time in on this project, to see how much further I could take it.

I added tons of stuff and promptly ran out of space again, so I dusted off my 9-year-old email thread with Lionel, and he replied! He then found me like 10k more bytes to work with.

I sprinted towards the end and managed to not only finish, but add even more features than I had originally intended.

Then I decided to randomly go hard and make a ridiculously overproduced trailer for a calculator game, lol. I used Blender for the animations, VTI/OBS for the screen capture, and DaVinci Resolve for editing.

The end of the trailer says "Q1 2026". I am not ready to release it yet, though if you google it, I'm sure you can find the source. The game still has a few bugs and details to polish, but in the immediate near term I need to take a break, and I need to work on other things (Like finding a job, for starters).

I decided Q1 would give me almost 3 months lead time to get back to this & ship, so stay tuned for the official release someday. Or maybe I'll forget and update this post in 10 years. Who knows?

Hi Greg. Looking forward to your release, obviously 😉

Wow that looks great, and the trailer does as well! Congratulations 🙂

Lionel the GOAT is in the house!



tyty

Alright so I said I would release Worms68k Party 1st quarter this year, and here we are, with only a few days to go. It's been a rough few months (My computer died due to 14th gen Intel silicon degradation bug, and I've been job hunting like crazy, and busy in general.).

But the good news! I am officially releasing the game!

The project homepage is here:
https://orokro.github.io/Worms68k-Party/#/


And the Cemetech archive here:
https://www.cemetech.net/downloads/files/2887/x3844

The website has a history and post-mortem write of of the project, as well as a link to the github for the source.

Unfortunately, I didn't have time to work more on the game executables all, but future work isn't off the table if need be. So the build the same one I used to make the trailer. I wanted to add some polish and stuff, but I just don't have the time and I can't put off release forever. I am glad I was able to make a site for it!

I hope anyone with a TI-89 has a chance to enjoy!

- Greg / Orokro

Nice work as before, and good to see this released 🙂
Good writing on the history and post-mortem as well.

Ah, also, the TILP site on LPG is very outdated, since it can't be modified anymore...
On the install page, you should link https://github.com/debrouxl/tilibs + https://github.com/debrouxl/tilp_and_gfm ... as well as https://web.tilp.info , which is, increasingly, the easiest way to consume the libti* + TILP functionality, through WebUSB-compatible Web browsers, on Windows (except for the CX II since WinUSB sucks and libticalcs doesn't yet implement NNSE), Linux, macOS and elsewhere.

That trailer looks very impressive! How long did it take for you to make it?

Thanks! Feels good to complete an ancient project, even for a small audience.

Also, the site has been updated with your feedback!

Thanks.

IIRC it took about 2 solid days of doing nothing but working on the trailer. Started with the plan in mind, so I gathered most of the assets free online - only the actual TI-89 I modeled myself. I did have to rig the worms and learn about Blender physics simulations for the tossing part at the start.

After animating the cutscenes, which was the hardest, I recorded an hour or 2 of gameplay footage methodically testing out and showing each weapon.

To get good footage, I actually ran VTI with frame-limiter off, so it was at like 1000FPS. But the game ran too fast, so I deliberately introduced a cycle-wasting loop to the main game loop to slow it back down to normal speed. This gave me better than normal grayscale stability and the game ran at the same framerate as on a real calc.

Afterword I collected a bunch of sounds from freesound.org & assembled everything in DaVinci Resolve.

I used to use Adobe Premiere, but I decided to abandoned Adobe and make the switch to Resolve, it's been painful, but this project helped me get the hang of Resolve finally. This was my most complex resolve project so far.