935: CJ Made A Sega Game In 2025
Sep 08, 2025•52 min
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Episode description
CJ takes us behind the scenes of Hackweek to share how he built a custom Sega Genesis game from scratch, complete with assembly code, level loading, and retro hardware tricks. From SGDK to parallax faking, this episode is a deep dive into old-school game dev with a modern twist.
Show Notes- 00:00 Welcome to Syntax!
- 00:44 Why a Sega game?
- 06:55 What is it running on?
- 07:49 Working with assembly code.
- 10:11 Sega Genesis Development Kit.
- 10:54 Awesome Megadrive.
- 12:02 Booting on an emulator.
- 13:07 Gens and KMod.
- 15:54 Compiling stage.
- 17:44 Genesis Code VS Code Extension.
- 18:22 Images and Assets.
- 19:46 Loading images with bitmap.
- 23:50 Megacat Studios.
- 25:21 Z index?
- 27:34 Specific code examples.
- 27:51 Platformer Engine.
- 30:01 Platformer Sample Game.
- 30:44 LDTK (Level Designer Toolkit).
- 33:13 Tiled Collision mapping.
- 37:42 What about debugging?
- 39:37 Loading in levels.
- 43:56 Challenges with graphics.
- 49:56 Adding music.
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