Developer Interview: PONUT talks Games & Ponies…

In the rough and tough online world of homebrew development, there needs to be some bold individual who will stand up and speak for the ponies! Err… that is to say, someone who has an obvious and somewhat concerning obsession with ponies needs to stand up and make a game about them!

I mean, if you think about it, isn’t that what the SEGA Saturn was really missing back in the day..? We had games with bugs, geckos & crocs.., but ponies were severely underrepresented! Well today, we have PONUT to change all of that and to right the wrongs of our Saturn game developing forefathers…

We had the opportunity to catch up with Ponut and talk a little about homebrew development on Saturn and fair representation of ponies. We hope you enjoy this little inside scoop… 😉

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SHIRO! INTERVIEW:

SHIRO!: “Wasn’t it ‘Smokeydops’ for a while? What’s the story there, and how did the name change to Ponut..?”

PONUT: Eh… In my youth, my online names were pretty random… Things like EZ2Target and other cringey names with xX_name_Xx. After awhile I settled on ‘Donut’…

Post-2010 (if you know what I mean) I put ‘smokeydops’ in a few places as a prospective ‘sona name’.
Ditched that idea real fast and then settled on Donut64 a few years later, after the “great exodus of 2012“. It took me awhile to change my YouTube account name. My name has been what it is on Steam since 2012 (Ponut). (By the way, definitely do not Google that, though, if you speak a foreign language and want to learn a new word…)

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SHIRO!: When and how did you become interested in game design?

PONUT: Various things to do on this Earth have caught my attention.., and I’ve flipped and flopped between this and that. However, pretty early on (think third grade) I was re-writing board game rules. I even scribbled a Talisman board and tried to play with 3-sided paper dice at school. I’m still in awe at how those kids tolerated that. To be fair, I was the class bully.

After that, I chased any game with an easy-to-use level editor. Surprisingly, I never got into Doom’s or Duke’s… It was mostly Unreal Engine and RTS games. I didn’t keep up with that for too long, but it was always a thought. Partly because my friends pestered me about it, but I was stubbornly confused about what to do and how to do it.

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SHIRO!: Why Saturn? What led you to develop for this particular console?

PONUT: In 2018, I was pretty flippin’ bored overall, when John over at Digital Foundry posted a video about PowerSlave, including this mysterious “Saturn” version of the retro FPS. I was very interested in retro FPS games at the time. But he kept talking about this “Saturn”, and it looked like the best version. I’m like.., ‘the f*** is a Saturn..?!’ A few Google searches later, I figure out what it is…

So I requisition a Saturn copy from the internet, and play the game via the Bizhawk emulator. It emulates well, but some things seem off (like sounds cutting out). In any case, I like the game a lot. I like the game so much, that I go out and buy a Saturn and a Pseudo Saturn cart off of eBay to play the real deal. The Saturn came with a copy of Tomb Raider, so I played that on a real disc. After that, it was all CD-Rs.

After playing a varied smattering of smashing 3D action games on Saturn, I feel like this console just about perfectly matches what I can and want to do with graphics. I think to myself, naaah… this thing is so hard to develop for, surely there’s no SDK… but there was! Jo Engine. I download it. To my pleasant surprise, it’s just a zip file that has everything I need. The rest is history.

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SHIRO!: What games have had the greatest impact on you? Are there any games you draw inspiration from for your work?

PONUT: Plain’n simple.., the most relevant game for my work on Saturn so far is Tribes. And yes, I know Tribes is a multi player first-person shooter, and I am not making anything like that. I just kinda floundered around in the code and found my way towards mimicking the inertial movement in Tribes. Combined with a heightmap-based game engine, it’d be relatively easy to recreate the pleasant, fast movement of that franchise. Perhaps in the next decade or two, I’ll get around to my inspiration from BattleZone (1998) in a different game.

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SHIRO!: What elements of game design are most important to you and most prevalent in your work?

PONUT: It’s a little early to answer this, as I haven’t really finished anything… However, I pretty much have four priorities…

 1. Safe Ponies
2. Cute Ponies
3. Happy Ponies
4. Unshakable Frame-Rate (and ponies)

Is that enough..?

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SHIRO!: Can you tell us about “Pony Game”? How did the project come about, and how has it changed since its original conception?

PONUT: “‘Pony Game‘ is the result of me floundering about in the code, trying to make a game out of working on this or that idea. Every demo released so far has been done without a design document or a goal that isn’t technical.

However, since then I’ve surmised that a design document and an official title are in order, since I do find the game to be fun. Yet, as no work towards these goals has materialized, no title or goal is stated for the game. It’s a tech demo that I tried to make fun.”

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SHIRO!: “What types of features and game play mechanics do you plan to incorporate?”

PONUT: “It’d be simple and fun to make a game where you explore around and collect memes. Yep, a shitpost where you collect shitposts. I guess I lied a little above. I developed ADX support so you could play back the memes’ sound as streamed compressed audio, without interrupting the streaming music. This lead me to realize I’d have to rewrite the entire CD streaming system of the game. Which is my oldest and I have now found out, my shittiest code. I only have the replacement in an isolated test environment right now, but it is much shorter, cleaner, and faster.”

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SHIRO!: From your personal perspective, what can you tell us about Saturn development?

PONUT: “You need to know C. You need to read the manual. You need to have patience. You need to be a doer.”

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SHIRO!: What have been your greatest challenges working on this game on this hardware?

PONUT: “I think the biggest hurdle was learning that floating points are evil. Thus I had to learn the bitwise layout of a fixed-point number. This rolls into the real big deal, which is optimization. Writing up a method to do something is in itself research & development. When you do optimization, you do that process all over again. A lot of code has been re-written multiple times over when it doesn’t meet my strict performance standards.”

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SHIRO!: If you could change anything about the Saturn’s hardware, what would you change?

PONUT: I want to say combine VDP1 and VDP2 into one chip. However, if you know how those processors work, you also know it kinda doesn’t work like that. My second option is to replace the 1MB slow and 1MB fast work RAM with simply 2MB of fast RAM. This is a practical thing that could have been done. It’s an easy way to improve performance, if only a bit. My third option is to unlock the SH1, and add its memory to the map for the other SH2s/SCU as well as DMA access. It’s close in clock-speed and functionality to the SH2s. However, this isn’t going to easily improve performance.

My meme option: Ditch every chip except the SCSP, add a 100MHz MMX Pentium, and attach it to a uniform customizable memory pool. This is also absurdly expensive and is not at all practical. Hence joke. Clearly the Saturn as it is can almost match that.

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SHIRO!: What are your thoughts regarding the current Saturn homebrew scene and the future of homebrew development on Saturn?

PONUT: You have a lot of cool people around. Loose rules. No shortage of technical expertise. A lot of tools. There are a fair amount of on-going projects, and you don’t need to be a perfect English reader to participate. Really though, vbt is here. That should cover it.