16 replies to this topic

[goatdan]

Feet of Fury to be relased by GOAT Store Publishing
May 26, 2003

The GOAT Store, LLC has worked out a deal to publish Cryptic Allusion, LLC's first game, Feet of Fury for the Dreamcast. Feet of Fury combines dance, battle and puzzle genres to create a unique new game that every Dreamcast owner will love!

"We are excited to team up with The GOAT Store," says Dan Potter, co-owner and principle developer for Cryptic Allusion. "It's great to see that someone is interested in stepping up to the plate to help keep these discontinued consoles alive."

Feet of Fury is Cryptic Allusion's first commercial project, and the first project to be published under the new GOAT Store Publishing label. Preorders for the game will be accepted on May 26 through the GOAT Store, LLC Web site (http://www.goatstore.com/). The game is scheduled to be released on June 7, 2003 at the Midwest Classic. Feet of Fury will retail for $19.90.

Feet of Fury will feature player versus player dance battles, a special "Typing of Fury" mode for keyboard play, unlockable content, and more. Additionally, users may play the game with their own songs and steps using the Swap CD feature of the game.

Dreamcast is a trademark of Sega Enterprises, Ltd. Feet of Fury is not sponsored, endorsed or affiliated with Sega. For more information, please contact Dan Loosen at loosen@goatstore.com, or visit the Feet of Fury website at http://www.feetoffury.com/

To check out the game directly, you can go to http://www.goatstore.com/372001.php

[Happy_Dude]

Will this be released on GD-ROM or CD ?

[goatdan]

Professionally pressed and packaged CD. Basically, it is being produced in the exact same manner as any other Dreamcast game. While I can't guarantee it, I can't imagine it burning out your CD lens or I would've killed my DC a long time ago

[goatdan]

Just a clarification to the above, the game was published using lots of tricks so that it doesn't burn out Dreamcast CD lenses. The only reason I won't guarantee that they won't burn out a CD lens is because there would be no way to track which game caused the lens to burn out.

[Happy_Dude]

goatdan said:

Just a clarification to the above, the game was published using lots of tricks so that it doesn't burn out Dreamcast CD lenses.  The only reason I won't guarantee that they won't burn out a CD lens is because there would be no way to track which game caused the lens to burn out.

Actually if you only ever play GD's it would be easy to trace

Have you approched Sega about pressing this game to GD. They are still
releasing DC games so I assume you could get a Homebrew published on
the original media. That would be really cool

[goatdan]

Happy_Dude said:

Actually if you only ever play GD's it would be easy to trace  

That's not true. Playing a GD-ROM disc wouldn't guarantee that a game would not burn out your CD lens. At the same time, it has never been proven that CD-ROMs actually burn out Dreamcasts as quickly as many people claim.

If CD-ROMs burnt out the drives quickly, Sega would have never built a CD player into it's BIOS for the Dreamcast. The excuse of the lens burning out was a reason to deter people from pirating games, instead of actually trying to pursue the pirates in the first place. Remember, Sega
built the MIL-CD support into the bios for a reason. They wanted a way to cheaply produce promotional things for magazines and such, since GDs are expensive to produce (compared to CDs anyway). I doubt they would have built in a feature that breaks the console when used.

Quote

Have you approched Sega about pressing this game to GD. They are still releasing DC games so I assume you could get a Homebrew published on the original media. That would be really cool

We approached Sega about it and we were told that they wanted absolutely nothing to do with us. Because the game was created using the KalistiOS development system, which is a completely legal development set developed by the Dreamcast community, we decided to go ahead and produce the game.

The CDs that we are getting are professional printed and I personally can barely tell the difference between one of them and a regular Dreamcast game.

On top of that, finding a GD-ROM source and burner would be extremely difficult and would cause the production costs to soar to a point where the production of this game would've been impossible. After studying the options and seeing absolutely no difference in the mediums other than cost, we went with teh CD production. Besides, during the lifespan of the Dreamcast many professional third party releases were made on professionally released CD ROMs. Specifically, Bleem, DC-X, and DCMP3.

The game is already in production, and I honestly can barely manage calling it a homebrew game. The game has been in production for a long time, and includes more options, songs and features than the other two dancing games that were released for the Dreamcast in Japan only.

[Happy_Dude]

goatdan said:

If CD-ROMs burnt out the drives quickly, Sega would have never built a CD player into it's BIOS for the Dreamcast.  The excuse of the lens burning out was a reason to deter people from pirating games, instead of actually trying to pursue the pirates in the first place.

Audio CD's are fine because the lense doesn't have to jump from track to
track. Audio is read in a linier(sp?) manner.
Pirated games DO burn out the lense motor because the lense has to move
around twice as much to read game data on the inside tracks.

I'm sure this game has a dummy file preventing this from happening anyway

[Artlover]

Happy_Dude said:

goatdan said:

If CD-ROMs burnt out the drives quickly, Sega would have never built a CD player into it's BIOS for the Dreamcast.  The excuse of the lens burning out was a reason to deter people from pirating games, instead of actually trying to pursue the pirates in the first place.

Audio CD's are fine because the lense doesn't have to jump from track to
track. Audio is read in a linier(sp?) manner.
Pirated games DO burn out the lense motor because the lense has to move
around twice as much to read game data on the inside tracks.

Not to be a simple "ditto"man, but I did want to jump in any say ditto, share my own experience.

The laser/transport assembly/logic are fully CD compatable, as was already mentioned. The damage a burned CD's causes comes from the excessive and wild tracking many of those games have, as was also already said. There is also another problem, that more has to do with the quality of the rip/packing. I've encounted a few games where the image just will not burn correctly and I'll hear my DC constantly changing the speed of the CD as it trys to track. While it's normal to change the speed while tracking at different spots, I doubt the motor was designed to be constantly doing it by extreme degrees it all the time.

I've had my Dreamcast for a few years. Have bought around 60 games for it. Burned around 185. Mostly, because you can hardly find games for sale anymore anywhere. Even my favorite place, GameXchange, only has about 25-30 used titles to pick from, all of which I had already bought (cheaper no less) at CompUSA & BestBuy bargin bins.

My unit is still working fine. I simply try to shy away from any burned image that has very excessive tracking, or spin speed issues. I also have another Dreamcast unit shrinkwraped and sitting in storage, just in case.

I'm not too worried thou. My experience with CD players of all sorts is that the controlling logic typical fails before any of the mechanical bits do, and I have no reason to suspect the Dreamcast is any different.

[Happy_Dude]

Artlover said:

I'm not too worried thou. My experience with CD players of all sorts is that the controlling logic typical fails before any of the mechanical bits do, and I have no reason to suspect the Dreamcast is any different.

Actually the lens gears are made of plastic and are the main reason so many
Dreamcasts end up needing a replacement lens assembly.

O.k Back on topic, this game looks sweet
is there any 'incentive' to preorder a copy ?

[sdstuff64]

So would you need a swap disc to play this game?

[goatdan]

sdstuff64 said:

So would you need a swap disc to play this game?

Nope. All you need is your Dreamcast and a controller. Well, you could use a keyboard instead

Incidentally, this story got Slashdotted! Check it out: http://www.slashdot.org/

[MegaManFan]

Reading the slashdot forum confused me. I know a "dancing game" is not an original concept, but it seemes to me like they coded the playability, options, and compatible songs from scratch all the same.. or did they? Some in that forum are saying the code was ripped off from other developers. I can't make heads or tails of it.

[Dan Potter]

Hey guys, this is Dan Potter, I wrote the code for Feet of Fury among other things

Just a couple of quick answers here to a few nagging questions:

- Yes, there is a "dummy file" of sorts. All of the data that is used during gameplay is pushed towards the outer track of the CD. Also the vast majority of the CD access the game does is long linear reads of big files, so it does very little seeking in the course of playing the game. The intent there was to speed things up though, more than deal with CD seeking.

About this rumor of CD lens/motor wearing, though, I have to say that I don't really believe it. While it sorta makes sense logically, it doesn't jive with my personal experiences. I have a Dreamcast here dated around April 2000, and I used it very extensively for many months for development work. Rebooting it constantly (which makes the CD spin up and down each time), turning it on and off, booting CDRs almost exclusively, trying out various homebrew software... it is still my most functional and usable Dreamcast and has zero GD-Rom issues. I have another one, on the contrary, that I bought brand new in a box from a Best Buy and it was making noises on official GD-Roms on the first try. *shrug* I think it's just the luck of the draw.

I've also got some GD-Rom games that seek like mad every time you load up a new part of the game, so it's not just the CD based games that do it.

And anyway, the GD-Rom drives are basically just Yamaha-derivative CD-Roms with some slightly different board logic and maybe a slightly better laser (or that is my understanding anyway). So if they work in PCs I can't see how it'd be any different in a DC. Perhaps just because the GD-Rom drive gets used a whole lot more than in a PC's CD-Rom?

- The game was developed entirely from scratch. The code we used from other sources was free software libraries which are BSD-licensed or even more liberally licensed (all of which allow proprietary and commercial usage). You can ask anyone who knows me, I'm extremely anal about checking on licensing issues before accepting any code at all. Also, the base OS that we use for the game (KallistiOS) was written primarily by me and contributed to by others on SourceForge (under the same license). Excluding add-on libraries, probably 70% of the code there is mine anyway. So I don't see how any of those claims could be taken seriously.

I'm also very studious about contributing code back from Feet of Fury to the free codebase for everyone to use. I like to share that sort of stuff so that others can make great DC games. For example, I contributed the whole C++ scene graph lib back to KOS that we use to do the complex-looking menus in Feet of Fury. Tons of bugfixes have flowed back from me into the main tree as well. All of that under the same terms -- free for proprietary and commercial usage.

The more likely explanation is that Slashdot has many, many armchair lawyers and pundits and no matter how hard you work, you will find a group of them that dislike what you're posting about.

Sorry for the long-winded post, I hope that clears up those couple of issues!

[MegaManFan]

Thanks Dan. That actually clears it up well enough for me. I don't have a dancepad, but I think as a Dreamcast owner I'll be buying a copy of this game anyway!

[sdstuff64]

Sam here.


And no swap disc,looks like fun!I am so getting one.

[video game addict]

I already have a set of those PSX dance pads, what would I need to be able to use them with my DC and this game? Is this something that goatstore sells?

[goatdan]

You do not need a dancepad to play. It has a Samba de Amigo-ish way of playing if you don't have one.

If you have a PSX dance pad, you can get PSX -> DC converters from Japan. I bought two so I could get nice dance pads for the Midwest Classic, and they work great! I paid about $10.00 apiece for my converters through eBay.