I was twisting my brain into a knot trying to program without atate machines, and then i finally bit the bullet and learned how to implement them. Completely changed my world and actually made me love programming

Man, I have just done an exam at uni about state machines. I did not fin any “useful” application outside of theory, but after this video I understood a lot more of what I have done. Thansk

Glad to hear and see that the channel is growing at such a rate. The quality of the videos and the scripts are incredible! Thank you for all the content.

I just came across your content, and wow! What an incredible channel! Not only is the content extremely interesting, but the presentation, depth, and delivery are all perfect. As a bonus, the audience has the opportunity to learn a few things. Thank you very much for the effort you invest in this. Keep up the outstanding work. Subbed!

I'm a CS student in my third year right now, and games are my passion, and someday maybe even my career. As someone who's always thought of the NES hardware as brilliantly concise and who's limits allowed for excellent lessons in video-game design, I've always wanted to show off to friends, family, and employers "hey, look at this thing I made! it's a full-fledged game and it costs less computer storage than a screenshot!" NES games (and all video-games in general) always inspire me to continue learning, and now that I have the resources to actually start making the games that continue to inspire me... I feel more determined than ever Thank you so much for these absolutley amazing videos! They've given me excellent motivation and passion to continue working on games. Even if this channel doesn't survive for the next decade, just know that your work has inspired people like me to continue their second quest. For that, I thank you!

The first concept I learned in computer science. We had to describe a finite state machine for the behavior of an elevator.

It was very interesting. It's always amazing when you discover the mechanics inside the code of a game. Thank you!

Hey man, I saw your message about being burned out. Really appreciate the videos you made. They helped me get my basic of NES coding in ASM down. Thank you.

The quality of your content is astounding! Thank you very much ♥

Holy cow, this is EXACTLY the information I've been looking for.

Oh my! This is pretty great! From the content to the editing. Nice job!

The waterfall on Zelda 1's title screen is animated using a group of 16 8x16 sprites. Related fun fact: The middle part of the sword's blade is made out of sprites in order to work around the 4 color limit for BG tiles. Same for some of the leaves on the title screen.

Yep. Just ordered that hoodie. 🔥

Love these videos! From a design perspective, my guess on elimnating state from the 8th row rather than the 9th is that most ui (points, health, time, etc) will need to display in that top row and that needs to account for state to update the values. Again, this channel is awesome, can't wait for more art and design related breakdowns.

Thanks for this episode. Im learning programming now and like watching videos on programming for retro hardware. Seeing how the programming language is translated into bits/bytes makes a lot of the basic concepts more understandable.

Love this channel.

Wow, what a cool channel! Dude, I’m the guitar player in that band you saw last night in Vegas at the MGM…great to meet you yesterday!

1:42 The waterfall is animated using sprites. Some of the leaves and part of the sword in the title itself are also sprites.

Thank you for making this video. It was really interesting. I'm glad to see your channel is becoming so successful. Have a wonderful day!😊

Cool! It's always the creativity and usage of simple and not-so-simple concepts in video games! The compressed images in many rpgs for example. The animated backgrounds of course. Getting to create "impossible graphics" by mixing sprites and background tiles or precise timing while editing the graphics memory :D

Very good video as a playful yet technically sound introduction to general game design by showing the central primitive algorithm behind a game's logic. Well done.

I only use an actual state machine class for stuff if the logic has branching paths. for stuff like animations or level completion i just use a number or boolean.

damn I need to revisite my computer math book there where talking about "automate" when it's in fact state machine

Such an underrated channel.

1:39 - Sprites, sprites all the way down!

As someone learning assembly language as a hobby (z80 for Master System, but same concepts) and living in Japan, I have to say I love your videos, especially the little Japanese messages thrown in. あなたも日本語を勉強している？

State machines are what I use instead of coroutines and/or events in .NET, C# and Unity. They're also more translatable to other languages, say you wanted to translate your C# codebase into C. You would want to use a procedural programming approach, making all public static classes and public static 'methods' first.

The waterfall is done through bank switching the tilemap? At least that's what I recall.

I doubt very much that the doors in Metroid which take 5 missiles are "5 states". Likewise enemies don't have as many states as they have health, states are about behavior. It's more likely that the state only changes once 5 missile hits have been registered.

Thanks you sooo much for your videos!!!! I can`t wait for the next one, i am curious on how to code the graphics. I wanna make my own game, but it looks so difficult. I am not sure if i will succeed, but it never hurts trying!

The waterfall is palette cycling. Essentially periodically switching the assigned colors of a "paint-by-number" drawing to simulate animation.

Super Mario 3 stated right on the box ~ THE FIRST 4 MEGABIT GAME EVER ~!

the mapper maps alternate tile data, to a single referenced memory location.

The water looks like a set of pixels that move based on a lookup table of sines? maybe? differing speeds? doesnt sound very fast.... maybe alookup into already genned lumps of water? sounds faster

SOOO COOLL!!!!

Great!

What is the difference between a state machine and a state variable?

State machines are amazing, but one of the most annoying things about trying to learn about them is that the overwhelming majority of material about them is only about software implementations. Hardware only gets mentioned in passing, and rarely mentions anything that would be useful if you wanted to actually try building one.

Hey man. Why did you take down the "The code that makes Mario move" video?

Hi, wow, your videos are pure quality!! Thanks about that... but, (allways apears a but haa) can you expose an example of “how to code” a simple state machine in asm, I think I’ve an idea, but... thanks anyway

Did you remove a video? I'm trying to find this video you did on Movement in Super Mario Bros 3, but I can't seem to find it anymore. Was it taken down by youtube? Did it even exist in the first place? Or am I having a false memory? Please help! I've been looking for at least an hour now.

Having actually done game development, the importance of this concept cannot be overstated. The overall structure even on a modern PC of how we *do* games is init, repeat game loop until done, shutdown. Game loop is draw, get input, think. Draw before think is a side-effect of modern GPU hardware and the driver stacks that feed geometry and shaders to them. From there everything is, as you say, either updating a state or making a decision based on a state. Even enemy AI is comprised of of states. Am I where I want to be? If not, move there. Is it time to update where I want to be? If so, choose a new destination. Can I attack? If so am I close enough to attack any heroes? If so choose the best target and attack them. A lot of programming works this way too, but _all_ games do it.

I wish the like-button state machine let me like more than once.

I feel like i have to fundamentally disagree on your perspective of what a state machine is. in my experience and terminology, you'd use a state machine for a single object (you can have multiple objects with different state machines, or one object with many state machines, or any mix). for instance, a player character idle, running, jumping (up and falling down, or even just "in air" and allow variables just as the vertical speed to dictate which part of that state you're in. And to me that's the big difference. and idle waterfall doesn't have a state, it's an object or series of objects stitched together and alternates color pallette with a variable that changes over time. the variable is not in itself a state machine, but the variable can tell the object(s) when to change states. Edit: i guess what i'm trying to say is there's no good reason to need to segment off portions of code on an animated waterfall by using a state machine. maybe a normal animation function and then a different state for the fade, but to me i don't think the video came across in that sense.

Not how I would explain it, but I do like these videos.

Whats the alternative though

But how did Nintendo code games in 1985. Did they have a programmer made? I'd like to know

I'm writing a 2D sidescroller and am quite surprised how many levels of state machines I need to encode behavioral changes in the player character, enemies, scenery objects like elevators, and the game itself. The engine contains special code constructs to manage all these states and make it easier to add or change them, because let's face it -- I'm lazy and scatterbrained and managing all this stuff on my own is hard!

If we want to be pedantic, wouldn't Super Mario Bros. 3 levels have more than 2 states because they can be cleared by either Mario or Luigi, which makes a difference in what gets uncleared by a Game Over?

4:51 I am pretty sure Luigi leaves an L, so the state is a bit more than true or false.

Any plans for a SNES Hacker channel or series?

Can you use OOP or ECS when programming retro systems (or show pseudo code that could be the implemented using OOP, ECS etc)? I know that you kind of must do the most performant code and such, and OOP is kind of in a bit of conflict but I feel that to be really usefull to game devs, the content I watch has to have some best practices to work with modern game development languajes and engines or APIs, becose, now days, the code has to be readable by other devs and manteinable. I have the same feeling for something like Pico-8, its nice and all, but such constraints I think its not good for beginners or rookie game devs like myself, trying to learn the best way to develop games. I feels this much constraints are good and exiting for experienced game developers that know the best practices and when to break them and hack away to get the best performance and save memory etc, and no so much for beginners that should learn the best practices for readability and manteinability for further expansion of the codebase and to posibly work with other devs without needing a manual for an advanced hack made for performance and such. This is only my opinion, of course you channel is about NES assembly programming, but I think you knowledge and way to explain things are great and could also be used for modern game dev too!. This video on the state machines is great, becose like you said it can be applied to any game, old and modern. More like this one! Chears!

well i think you are great anyway. theres is that.

If I recall, the waterfall uses palette cycling to get the animation.

so lets use state machine draw 3d cube xD

Why "state machines" and not object state or animation frame, or even "cases"?

What happened to the latest video?

This is why I pay the internet!

Sub 300 view crew! Love your content!

4:36 ONE PIECE????!!!

Building an 8bit operating system is not an easy task, go for it 🐿

Hi, how are ya?

Wow state machine, what a ptsd from cs computer org module

Wtf why are you a small UKpostsr I thought you were bigger

I feel like you're giving the wrong impression here. NES games aren't fundamentally programmed as state machines, state machines are just a natural way to think about games and their systems.

my dude, a state machine is a high level formalisation, they don't exist in low level code. You are just talking about state. A number being incremented is not a state machine. You say "you can think of this like a state machine" to anything. Yea any state change can be thought of state machine. You could do math with a state machine. Just have every single number ever be a state, and then create your infinite transitions to all the other numbers. Being able to imagine something as a state machine doesn't mean it is one. Again, a state machine is a code formalisation. It's existence is fickle and trying to define things as state machines is pointless.

This title was clever but ultimately a waste of my time as I know state machines well 😢 please stop doing that