[Dominic Szablewski] created something we don’t see every day: a brand new physical Nintendo 64 game for sale, complete with cartridge, manual and box art. He wrote about what it was like to make Xibalba 64, a 3D FPS game built with his own game engine. It even supports two-player couch co-op and four-player deathmatch.
The N64 was a groundbreaking console that brought analog controls and full 3D game worlds to mainstream console gaming. Architecture-wise it has its share of quirks, including a small (4 kB!) amount of texture memory to go around all that fancy 3D content.
Xibalba was originally a demo game for [Dominic]’s MIT-licensed game engine, high_impact. Turning it into a full title for the N64 meant revisiting all sorts of things from the level and game design to the sound and music. [Dominic] talks about all that, including the fact that his engine is technically for 2D content, but he makes it work for the 3D game by ensuring that levels have no height. Because the levels are flat, the engine never has to deal with a dimension beyond its understanding. Xibalba 64 even maintains a stable 60 frames per second, somewhat only in four-player split-screen.
The N64 still gets plenty of action from dedicated enthusiasts, and there’s no need to start from scratch if you find yourself with a retro gaming itch and a desire to push a vintage console in directions it never knew existed. For example, we saw an open world game engine for the N64, complete with long draw distances that didn’t seem possible on the hardware.