My story with the arcade games is quite weird. Where I live, I didn't met any arcade machines until very late. My cousins had a Sega MD pack, and I had a particular taste for the "fast" games, such as Contra Hard Corps, Sonic the Hedgehog, Shmups and the like. Then someone gifted me a MAME pack for a birthday, and I played what I found to be the best games at the time. With the time though, I learnt on how to work for the MD from the Sonic hacking forums, and by 2015 our team and I released our first "complete" game (sonic romhack) called Mobius Evolution. Time later I'd participate in a hacking contest with a small minihack in another team, and we awarded the 3rd place!. I don't "play" too much anymore though, I'd rather watch longplays from other games now, to analyze them: Design choices, visual programming, gameplay flaws, that kind of stuff. Lately, I'd only run a game by myself if I had to do frame-by-frame analysis or debugging. Nor I could afford buying any "real hardware" to test on, I rely on emulators and sending ROMs to a friend (with the HW) from time to time. In other words, I'm a fan from the "outside"
Since Mobius' original creator had to leave, he left me in charge of the sequel, with permission to recycle any scrapped artwork from previous game(s). There's not much time to develop it, and final version wouldn't last more than 20 minutes of first-time play, so I'm treating it like a spin-off, with a higher emphasis on visual effects and Experimental gameplay. I rewrote most of the Sonic engine's libraries (sprite mapper, scroll engine, etc) in the previous years, with a couple physics tweaks here and there. I want to try my first "arcade" game, and if there's some bare time left, I'd even try to port it to Sega MegaPlay or System C2, unless that doesn't sounds like a good idea.
My main concern though is whether or not do I understand the "arcade" style correctly! And this is why, in all honesty, I'd like to ask as many things as possible here. For example, if should coins should really equal continues, or why everything "must" have a time counter. I'm trying to look for as much information as I can, but I still have my doubts. Am I allowed to ask about that?
Btw wanted to post my MD sequence/vfx reel, but looks like I don't have permission to use the media tag
