Discovering Toy Story’s Built-in Level Editor - CODING SECRETS

Toy Story was much easier to make using this editor I created...

[GimblyGFR]

Toy Story is one of my favorite games on the Genesis. I could have never imagined, as a teen, that I would be - one day - watching the game's creator showing and explaining the tools used to design the game. I loved the games TT produced on the 16 bit days, and I have to thank you for dedicating so much time of Coding Secrets to those amazing pieces of software. Any chance of a Director's Cut of Toy Story?

[atom_zero]

I am blown away. A full editor on a Mega Drive. And so smooth!! 🤩

[Tyletoful]

This stuff blows my mind. Programmers like you had such a perfect knowledge of the hardware and exploited every little bit. The new games are impressive visually and story wise, but the fact that in these older games you needed to design the editor for everything while limited on storage is insane to me.

[brynshannon]

That editor is utterly amazing. I'm especially intrigued by the memory mapper tool, and how it's visually represented. I almost feel a bit sad that games and the tech powering them is complex enough nowadays that this kind of precision is probably a bad idea to have, because I would feel really happy having that kind of control to fine tune things and make them efficient.

[DefinitelyReagan]

I can't begin to describe how much my childhood is thanking you for making these videos. I feel closer to these classics than ever before and it brings me a tonne of joy. Thank you, man.

[ElLevidente]

As a mere web developer your programming skills are mind-blowing to me. It would be awesome if you made a programming course, it feels like you have this cool old school programming wizard level of knowledge. The idea anyone managed to learn this much about programming pre-internet is unfathomable to me.

[micheledeconti]

The music is sooo fitting to your videos, i love it as much as the content itself.

[heidirichter]

I love how the cursor looks to be a copy of the Amiga kickstart 2/3 default mouse pointer!

[Amy_A.]

I love everything you show in this video, but I particularly love the vram editor. It's so clean and simple, and it gives you an easy, visual way to arrange data in memory. Great work on this, and great video!

[LokiScarletWasHere]

>ads play
>come back, background is white
>”I don’t know why it changed the background to white”

[ncot_tech]

How did you get that edited data out of the editor and back into the game’s code?

[lmr]

The one thing I didn't see was how you saved the data from that menu. Was there some sort of key-combo that let you store the level in it's current state? It is amazing to think that your team had an ingame level editor of that quality back then, because I still remember being blown away by the unreal editor when I was younger.

[GreatFox]

This fills a hole I've been thinking about for a good few years now. There are quite a few games out there that have left their editors in the code for fans, data miners and romhackers to find. And while they're always neat to look around in, it's usually only up to your imagination how they were used. Sure, some might be self-explanatory, but it's still a treat to see something like this be demonstrated in its use by a developer of one of these tools.

[DrButthugger]

That’s incredible, and super intuitive, loved how you could just manipulate bounding boxes and paths on the fly.

[gameboy]

I love how the creator of these classics tells us the secrets to how they were made. Nice work

[Monacomaverick]

Imagine if Jon used the background warping trick to simulate different sides of the room as you move through the level.

[MatthewBester]

What impresses me the most is all the tools and options work in real time. I would have expected that it would require a restart and test play.

[sharksandbananas]

This is amazing! Please could you show off the level editor for Mickey Mania next?

[CowboyJoseph]

Wow, this looks borderline intuitive. You'd have to still know about the video ram and dma and stuff, but still. This is really cool to see.

[alzorion]

6 months!? Wow, you guys did a great job for such a short times