May 10, 2023

Mostly Bits Newsletter - Issue #57

Tony's Pick

SineRider is a free, web-based, open source game made by a group of teens. In it you modify math equations direct the path of the characters. Doing math in a game probably doesn't sound fun (unless you're Kyle), but it's really quite good!

Kyle's Pick

I found this interesting analysis of the Street Fighter II sprite system. Apparently the character poses and movements were broken down into a series of smaller tiles that were composed on the fly. But they were incredibly memory constrained, so they represented the available memory as a series of spreadsheets.

There's some fun esoterica in here for Street Fighter fans as well, like why Ryu and Ken have slightly different colored teeth and which moves might have been added later in development.