4 posts tagged with "Workflow"

I started Polygon Engine because I wanted to make PlayStation games with a workflow that felt familiar to me as a Unity developer. The Windows 95 aesthetic was part of that idea from the beginning: I wanted to recapture something of working with tools from that period, while keeping the convenience of a scene- and component-based editor.

After several months of development, that idea has become a set of tools for creating a project, building levels, programming interactions, and exporting a PS1 game. The previous articles covered individual parts of that process. To close this series, I wanted to bring together what I learned by connecting them and explain how that has changed my approach to developing the engine.

While working on scene loading in Polygon Engine, CD-ROM access was one of the clearest differences from development for a current desktop computer. The disc provides much more storage than PS1 RAM, but data must be read and prepared before the game can use it. Drive speed and file placement both affect that time.

This also affects game transitions. Before entering another area, I need to decide which assets will be loaded, what appears during the wait, and what happens to the music. Implementing that flow meant considering data loading and disc playback together.

To export a game from Polygon Engine, I first needed to turn the editor project into data the console could use. Scenes, images, and sounds are stored in formats convenient for development, but PS1 needs versions suited to its memory, rendering, and audio systems.

That conversion became an important part of development. Whenever I added an asset type or component, I also had to consider how to save it, check its references, and load it in the game. Creating the disc image is the final step in that process.

I have wanted to make games for the original PlayStation for a long time. As a Unity developer, I imagined doing it through a workflow similar to the one I already used: create a scene, place objects, add components, and write their behavior. That was the starting point for Polygon Engine.

I wanted to combine that workflow with a Windows 95-inspired interface. I liked the idea of opening the editor and feeling as though I were developing a game in that period, with the conveniences of a current tool. To make it work, I first needed to understand how a scene built on a desktop could become a game running on PS1.