The current incarnation of this Atari Jaguar game is not my first attempt at developing an X-game for this console. Last year, I finally gave into the temptation of trying to make a demake of X4: Foundations. The intention was to develop the map gameplay, with some empire-management, and then later on add some first-person flight controls, ideally even in 3D.

So I created a map view. I did more boilerplate stuff than I really should have, I created a localisation system, a way to create different SKUs, to match the game, with its DLCs. I added a basic setup for every ship in the base game, and a number of them in the DLCs.

But it still had no gameplay.

The goal for me, for this project, was never to remake X4 for the Atari Jaguar. That would never work. The game does so many calculations to maintain a live universe that a modern CPU struggles with it, let along a Motorolla 68000 from the mid-90s (and underpowered even then)

The goal was to make a game which, superficially, felt like X4. One that would give the feeling of playing X4, as if it were made in the mid-90s.

For this reason, there would be no live economy, and supply and demand would be pre-set, NPC ships would fly on pre-decided flight paths, The depth of the game would be faked. If it felt like X4 for an hour of gameplay, then that would have been considered a success.

That's where it fell apart however. X4 is a VAST game, not just in terms of the size of the universe, but in terms of scope. There are so many features to the game, and most of them you could not remove without sacrificing something that makes X4 itself. The project got into a spiral, in large part because I couldn't reconcile the fact that it would just end up being a joke (by design) with the amount of effort it was going to take. This, ultimately, was what caused me to drop it for a few months, and come back with the new design.

Before I abandonned this version of the game though, one more burst of inspiration came. It also ended up being the final nail in this iteration's coffin.

One of the X4 community members, Devil_D, posted images of some low-poly versions of X4 spaceships they'd made, using PicoCAD. One of the things I really wanted to do with the Jaguar, was experiment with Tom, one of the Jaguar's custom chips, which for simplicity's sake, we'll just call a programmable GPU (it's not, so nobody hate me for that…) The only problem was, the game up to that point had been writing in JagStudio, a slightly more modern, user-friendlier toolchain to develop for the Jaguar. It provided a lot of features, but it didn't give any access to Tom. The other alternative was to use Jaguar SDK, which I believe is based on the originally released Atari toolchain. This doesn't provide anywhere near as many QoL features, but gives pretty much full access to do whatever you want. So I started working on a 3D prototype.

The 3D work both re-motivated me, but at the same time was the thing that finally put this iteration to rest.

I reused a previous model-converter utility I had written as the basis of one to convert the model into something the Jaguar could understand, and used the Jaguar SDK 3D demo to get it rendering. It was great… and was running at 12fps, rendering 200ish polugons. There are certainly optimisations that could be done to this, so this wasn't me despairing that it wouldn't be possible. I had, however, hoped that I could get something running quickly, throw some UI on it, and be inspired to create something. Instead, I just felt overwhelmed by how much I had to do to get anything working there, and, like I said, was not sure that the work would be worth it.

I have learned a lot from this though, and am taking it forward to the new incarnation. I do definitely still intend to attempt to try some Tom coding, and even sprinkle in a bit of 3D, but I just want to spend time making a game first.

So, the story of the demake ends here. But the Jaguar development continues.