My small thrust inspired game is mostly complete. Can't think of anything major to add to it at the moment, except for the horrible lack of a title. Five levels with a mostly introductory first level and a few additional enemies. It's not much on presentation or audio but I think it's reasonably playable. What do you think?
There was a randomly occurring bug (good god I hate these) where it would glitch on loading a strip of graphics in the level, but I think I've patched that up.
http://smkdan.eludevisibility.org/other/rom.zip
Thanks for reading
Hey! Very cool. I like the style of graphics a lot. For a second I was actually wondering if the "ship" was rendered dynamically, but then I remembered it was NROM with CHR ROM and that would just be stupid to do that. But very smooth spinning animation. I couldn't get past level one though, haha!
Very cool, and will be great once sound is added. You will add sound, yes? And yeah, it needs a title screen. Once you have that, you pretty much have yourself a good game! Great job!
Like you mentioned, the graphic may not be was stands out in this game but the game itself is nice. Feels like a finished product.
Good job. Quite a nice effort in a short amount of time.
Great work, a very interesting game. Looks like River Raid + Asteroids!
Too bad my control isn't good, heh! ^_^;;
Sweet! Man, that's a challenging game. At least I passed the first stage.
I really like the drop shadow you use with your font. I may "borrow" that idea for my own game.
Wow this game is just great.
The big demo with a button display is just awesome.
This is like an adventure version of Asteroids.
It's fun and creative.
Very nice indeed! It takes me some time to be able to play these kind of 'thrust' games well, but what I've played so far was awesome! Very good job, and as Celius I think said, the graphic style is pretty cool hehe Nice job man!
I like it, and I especially like the graphic style.
Al
Awesome, I just love these type of games.
This was really fun once I got the hang of it, wasn't able to beat all the levels, though.
very cool, really like the art style.
Friggin' awesome. The only problem I have is that the backgrounds flicker like mad when there's any movement (not sure if it's my monitor or what). Good thing I don't have epilepsy...
And I thought Solar Jetman was hard...
Nice take on the Asteroids style of things.
Nice game. I didn't get too far yet, but it's a nice concept. Good work.
It's pretty cool. A reverse thruster would be nice, tho'.
Thanks everyone
When I first played (c64) thrust , etting a feeling for the controls was rough and the keyboard wasn't helping out at all. I quickly learned that playing this with a pad is so much more bearable than keyboard controls, it just adds a whole layer of difficulty to it.
Development time was fairly quick, I think I started sometime last month, or the one before? I never keep track. I knew what I wanted out of the game and everything came together pretty quickly.
Flicker I suppose is from the rapidly alternating lines of light and dark when scrolling. In an emulator (wish I had h/w to test on a NES) it's more noticable when the aspect ratio isn't 4:3 and I'm not using NTSC filter.
The difficulty was kind of hard for me to guage because if you're constantly playing the game you develop it becomes hard to play it from a new player's perspective. At times I thought it was too easy but I tried to keep that issue in mind.
Nicely executed. This style of game is fun because basic control is the main challenge, but you've got to be paying attention to obstacles and shots while you fight momentum and gravity.
Occasionally I lost track of the front of the ship since the only visual sign is a slightly more acute angle. Perhaps the thruster side could have a double-thick line, to suggest the thrusters?
BMF54123 wrote:
The only problem I have is that the backgrounds flicker like mad when there's any movement
Yep, since it uses alternating horizontal lines, it's very sensitive to the vertical scroll rate. Different rates will cause them to jump up and down at various rates.
thanks.
I've had the ambigous front end pointed out before, where the guy suggested that the tip be colored differently. I passed on it, but that idea of making the base of it thicker does a great job I think. I updated the chr in my rom with that.
I've darkened the terrain since that seems to make the flicker not so apparent, but is it too dark? It's not something I paid much attention to, but the issue is there.
http://smkdan.eludevisibility.org/other/rom.zip
As far as names go, I am thinking a cheap acronym; STING:
Somewhat
Thrust
Inspried
NES
Game
I'll just call it that if I don't think of anything else.
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The difficulty was kind of hard for me to guage because if you're constantly playing the game you develop it becomes hard to play it from a new player's perspective. At times I thought it was too easy but I tried to keep that issue in mind.
That's fun, because your game is really way too hard in my opinion. It's allright if it gets insane later, but having to do more than 20 tries before passing the very first level is really discouraging. Ideally you'd start with a couple of easy levels, and get the hard stuff for later (this is what I'm planning to do for my game). The first levels should be here so that the player thinks "wow" and fall in love for your game. The latter levels are to make the player a hard time, but since he already fell in love he can't just give up so... oh yeah we all know that.
Originally the second level was going to be first, but I put a simple introductory level in there instead. Once you get a feel for the physics, the first level is a breeze but otherwise it's going to be a pain. I know the first time I got into this genre it was terrible for me but eventually I came to be pretty decent at it. I can complete all the levels without much trouble, but I know the later ones will be a challenge regardless (particularly #5 because of the gimmick thrown in there).
I was thinking broken double lines to indicate thrusters. The left one adds a solid line inside the ship, then removes some of the original outer line. The right adds them outside the ship. The main difference is in how pointy the bottom corners are. Both fit within the force field.
yes, level 2 already looks insane, but i would never have known without watching the demo
Yeah, even abusing savestates and trying hundreds of times, I can't get past this spot in level 3.
And really ... when you can't beat a game with
savestates, you know it's way beyond too fucking hard.
Don't get me wrong -- It's a very impressive, awesome little game. But with such an insane difficulty curve, it literally takes 100% of the fun out of it. It just causes frustration to play it. Even if I were to eventually beat it without savestates, the sense of accomplishment wouldn't compensate for the time and stress needed to beat it in the first place.
@blargg: right, I originally did it just to indicate the back end of the ship, but that actually fits alot better. Some of the detail is lost in rotation (using rotsprite from sonicretro) which I tried to add back. I think it looks a bit better than the last one anyway. New GFX are in the same ROM link.
@byuu: It looks as if you're trying to pass the level without shooting anything (I can see a little bit of the turret on the bottom). In my play throughs, I never try to cross a protected path, I always kill the enemies before advancing. It seems too hard otherwise.
The overall idea I'm getting is to add some easier 'buffer levels' at the beginning. Small linear stuff with little threat to make the difficulty curve a bit more reasonable. Level #1 can be pushed up to level #3 and I can stick some simple levels in there. I think it would be viewed as hard because this isn't a common type of game from what I am seeing so it would initially be quite hard?. On the NES, I only know solar jetman.
Quote:
@byuu: It looks as if you're trying to pass the level without shooting anything (I can see a little bit of the turret on the bottom). In my play throughs, I never try to cross a protected path, I always kill the enemies before advancing. It seems too hard otherwise.
... you can shoot? Oh. Well that would explain things. I take back my comment, then :/
Idea: there should be a trophy if you get through the game without shooting. and it should be possible to do, just very very difficult.
LN
Okay, beat it with savestates. Second loop last level gets crazy. It's extremely hard to hit things below you ... spinning to hit them sends you in a freefall that you can't recover from. I just had to dodge the bullets for those. And those blue things require a ton of hits to kill >_<
This is really cool for a hobbyist game, though extended play gives me mild subjective vertigo.
Might I suggest a "YOU WIN" instead of "GAME OVER" for clearing both loops, though? :P
Anyone going to do a tool-assisted speed run? I'd like to see the game played, but I totally suck at these kind of games.
when i kill enemies directly below in the second loop i descend on them with the force field on. Otherwise you have to rotate fairly quickly all you fall and crash.
I might fit in a congratualtory screen between the game over for that too.
In an extremely frustrating incident, the bug in the OP is still there. The nametables are updated per 16pixel rows, but there's a 0.05% chance or something that it will not update a given row. I have absolutely no idea what causes this and staring at the code is not going to help me out here. I tried to grab a tracelog, but I spent the last 2 hours save state whoring and hoping that the bug rears its head again so I can actually replay it as the bug occurs and view the steps leading up to the glitch.
e: scratch the complaining, I just found the FCE all in one with movie recording and debugging.
This is really nice, but an annoying bug keeps popping up: the shields come on at odd moments, like when I'm not even pressing down. I tried this again, and the shields came on when I tapped the A button... there must be some kind of joypad-reading bug.
I'm testing this in a PowerPak on my Famicom.
Crap, completely forgot to read that DMC fortified joypad read thread. I'm guessing that's where the phantom button presses are coming from.
e: updated ROM with blarg's joypad routine for reliable reading during DPCM playback.
@Lord Nightmare: I added something like that as part of the bonuses at level end. Player gets extra points if they don't shoot at all during the level.
After the thread about sound for this game, I figured it would be awesome, and it did not disappoint. I have no complaints about the gameplay.
The demo mode is pretty cool. If it's not hard to re-order, you could arrange this into a traditional arcade "attract mode". Show the title screen for a bit, cut to the instructions/credit screen, show a demo of a single level, repeat (showing another level). Having other screens to show all the enemies, objects, and obstacles would be the finishing touch, maybe beyond necessary.
I didn't quite understand the scoring system. Because I can do a bunch of stuff, die before finishing the level, and my score is still zero. I don't know how common of a system that it is, but I've never seen that before in an NES game. You could also have a way to get extra lives (first at 10k, next every 100k, or something). In a seemingly difficult game, as a player, an 'extra life' sound effect is a very encouraging thing to hear.
Thanks Memblers. I didn't consider the arcade form of doing it, I just threw in the demo play because I think it's a neat feature that's easy to pull off and it's used everywhere. I think I will split the demo into 2 portions, and they play in alternating form.
Scoring needs a screen in the info section, currently works as follows:
enemies killed * 100
fuel integer portion (what you seen on screen) * 5
(10 - lives game was started with) * 100
no shooting once in the level is a 1000 points
You get nothing if you die before the level ends, it would've been kind of wierd that way since you can trade lives for points. It seems kind of wrong imho.
I can't believe I forgot about bonus lives...that would be fairly easy to do since I can just run a seperate score counter, and mod bonus_life_points.
Also, garage cart interests me. What type of additional criteria would this have to meet to get on there? (provided there is enough room ofcourse). A title screen is obviously needed at this point.
Also, I am sure I killed that bug that was annoying me earlier, it should run just fine now.
Good point on the scoring, I never thought about it before, but that might be an influence on some games that gave a fixed amount of points for finishing any level. If you wanted to add another scoring challenge to the game, I'd go for a shot multiplier. Which is increasing the points awarded until you fire a shot that misses. You almost need an indicator for this though, to make it noticeable.
It would be really awesome to have this on Garage Cart. Actually here lately with all the interest shown I've been thinking about expanding it's size and scope (considering that I already have everything but the memory chips), a game like this could help ease the pain of some extra costs.
The only criteria for being on there I'd say is that it works on both NTSC and PAL NES (should be no problem - it would be tested plenty, and can ignore speed differences), and secondly that you feel it is ready for a release. Pretty basic.
The ultimate validation of your game is that your peers purchase a published copy. This is so exciting, and it isn't my game!
+1 on including it.
We get to vote right? Oh wait, in the USA that is tomorrow.
I also think it would be a good one to add to Garage Cart.
Al
Bregalad wrote:
It's allright if it gets insane later, but having to do more than 20 tries before passing the very first level is really discouraging.
That's about how many tries it took me to pass WORLD 1-1 in Super Mario Bros. And then it took 20 more for me to realize that the creature just past the checkpoint was a turtle and not a duck and that I could still run if I had a fire flower.
I like it. It's not easy at all, but I like it.