Lizard

Edit: The game is finished! See: http://lizardnes.com

Also, there is source code: https://forums.nesdev.com/viewtopic.php?f=22&t=17944



I've just launched a Kickstarter for the game I'm working on. It's called Lizard.



It's about half finished. I have a playable demo here:
http://lizardnes.com

If you'd like to help, please back me at:
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1101008925/lizard

Nice to see your project on there, you already seem to have 6 backers so far (7 if you count me). Kickstarter looks like it change to their own system instead of using Amazon's, so I'll back your project the next chance I get. Good luck with it!

I've made this post/thread an "Announcement" so it appears at the top of the Homebrew section, and will remove that status (bringing it back to a normal thrad) after the Kickstarter term ends. And yeah, I pledged too. :)

I'll try to do this for any other Kickstarter-based homebrew projects going on as they come up, as I think they're all worthy of that kind of attention.

Pretty neat world to explore, there. I like the sound and animations too, the 'changing lizards' one was definitely the coolest thing I've seen today.

Good idea, Koitsu!


I was pretty surprised with it... When I first saw that "dead" lizard I had no idea what it was, so I carefully approached it and WHOA, cool! New skin!

Anyway, lots of cool stuff in the demo. The animations are incredible and the music is very well done. I really liked how the interaction with the other creatures isn't the typical "touch it and you die" you find in most games, you only die from touching what's actually dangerous. I want to see how that will affect the flow of the game.

Speaking of dying, I have a little bug report: When you die near the edge of the screen, the dead sprite wraps to the other side of the screen as it flies away from whatever killed him.

Bug reports should get submit via Email if at all possible: https://twitter.com/bbbradsmith/status/ ... 3037008896

I'm already having to bust out graph paper for this thing. ;)

Thanks for all the comments!

I actually have a fully rendered map of the game, but I don't want to share it yet. It spoils all the secrets! (Plus there's big gaping holes where the rest of the game needs to go.) If you do make a map, I'd love to see how you map out the void zone, though. It's not exactly linear.

My lizard is fragile. But I got through the demo. Probably missed a lot of secrets though, so will have to revisit this later.

Good job.

Looks a lot like a Knytt game, only without the wall clinging.

Cool game, bro! I just checked the trailer the other day and it was a real head-turner, with that weird costume of yours and all.

I'll be checking out the demo in a minute, but judging by just your trailer, the graphics are OK. The character animations are reasonably smooth and the screen transitions look great, but your maps look awfully bleak. Are you planning to go back and add in more background details at any point? I mean, even some flat 1bpp walls would be just fine.

If you'd like, I could draw some graphics for you. I've been going through a bit of an NES-phase lately and can PM you some examples of my work if you want.

EDIT:

Whoa, I just played the demo and let me say...I'm thoroughly impressed! The controls are fluid, the atmosphere set by the music is fantastic and the game is very intuitive. The game has a nice single-screen C64 feel to it, but those restrictions never feel like they're holding the game back. My favorite lizard was definitely the spring-boots one!

I was just wondering how many endings there are in the demo and how many coins there are in total. Or is this for us to find out?

This is just me trying to be a completionist. Also, is the footage in the video all in the demo? If so I have more digging to do! I did find a couple of the secret spots, but not all of them (if the footage is all from the demo).

Hm, well there should be two endings reachable in the demo by normal means. You may be able to hack or cheat to find others if you're resourceful.

For the demo there are 30 coins, but I probably will keep it a secret in the final version.

I found 3 obvious endings in the demo.

Oh right, I forgot about the river zone. I didn't count it because there will be a whole segment of game there in between the entrance and exit of the river.

All of the footage is technically from the demo, but there is one unreachable room with an iceblock that shown. There's no coin in that room though, so don't worry.

OK, just double checking! And what about the video, is it all demo footage? I'm mostly referring to the disco area/river scene which I have yet to find.

Ha ha, yes the disco! I forgot that one too. The river and the disco are technically in the build, but unreachable.

Ahh, so once I get everything then I will start the hacking

It's quite interesting that the PC versions are a separate implementation and not emulated. It's good to see that this kind of approach is viable for the whole duration of the project.

Yeah, actually, the C++ prototype approach has worked out really well for me. I put the C++ on the left and my assembly file on the right and just use it as a guide. I try to write the C++ code in a way that will be structurally similar to the intended assembly version, so that when I need to debug I can look at them side by side and think about where they differ.

My most common mistake with the assembly is accidentally inverting the branch case. There's a big cognitive dissonance between an if statement and a branch, since semantically they are kind of the inverse of each other.

I'm still chipping my way at the demo and finding new secrets and endings left and right. I also downloaded your soundtrack and was veeery impressed. Your years of musical experience really shine through in this one!

And yet...I'm a little confused about some aspects of your graphics. When I play games, I like to pop open my PPU Viewer and see what makes games tick. And one of the first things I noticed was now many tiles were used up by the player character...Why does the player character have a unique 16x16 tile for each frame? For really small graphics like these, wouldn't it make more sense to separately animate each 16x8 portion of the character and have the head be a separate sprite? The upper half of the player barely ever moves, so I think you could get away with animating just the lower portion and reusing the tiles for the upper half of the character. That way, you could free up some CHR space and have room for things like, say, ducking or turning sprites.

There are currently about 5 redundant head tiles. I have left them this way in case I want to revise them, or if there is an emergency later and I need spare room. The rest of the head positions I like to have for the purposes of animation (walk wiggle, blink, up and down for jump/fall), which I prefer to a static head. I have one sprite for a skid-stop, which is already part of turning on the ground, but I don't want a dedicated turn (I prefer the snap when there is no current momentum). I don't anticipate any gameplay need for a duck.

Not even to shoot one out of the sky? "Pheeewww... plop! Doot-do-doot-do-doot"

Hmmm...OK, what about the tiles used at the top of the moving platform tracks? There are just a series of dots taking up an 8x2 space in the CHR rom that could be used for something else. I think if you used just four tiles, you could communicate the same idea without wasting so much space:



Generally, I think it's a bad idea to use up so much space for something that's only used once in the entire game. If you used the leftover space, you could add more details to the background or something that could be used throughout the area to beautify it.

Those two curves I considered unfinished. You probably noticed that this 1k CHR page is half empty as well. I tried a few ways to get it to look the way I wanted, but failed. The rough dots that are there now were a compromise for time, was planning to go back later to finish.

I like your solution for this. Thanks!

Nice! And I think I'm just about done playing for the day, so here's all of the rest I could spot for now...



1. In each tileset, your doors are drawn with 5-8 tiles, with separate tiles for black-background and sky-background doors, right? Why not trim those doors down to 2 tiles with a version that will work on both black and sky backgrounds?

2. Your logs have unique tile for each 16x16 area. If you trim that down to a repeating 16x8 tile like your pillars, there's no visible difference and 2 more minitiles you could use for other stuff.

3. And speaking of the pillars, you have separate 16x16 tiles for the foreground and background version. Why not reuse the 16x16 foreground pillar and apply a dark blue palette to it? Visually, cool-colored tiles retreat to the background and warm-colored ones jump out at you. It's a neat effect you can use to make your maps pop while making them more vibrant. This will also save you 4 tiles in your tilesets.

4. Last one for now...Your statues use up a whopping 18 tiles, with unique ones for left and right-facing statues. If you don't mind them looking a little more blocky, you could reuse tiles between the two and trim them down to just 7 tiles...that's 9 more free tiles you could use for other things!

Background and foreground tiles currently can't be shared; I use the high bit of the tile index as collision data. I could write extra code to make exceptions for specific tiles, but there's a tradeoff between simplicity, table size, code size, tiles, and speed there, so I probably won't want to go that route. I do already have different-palette background pillars in several places. There is a second variant of the pillar specifically because I didn't have enough palettes in one case, and of course it's duplicated in the foreground CHR tiles as well.

I'm not a fan of the blocky doors, sorry. I'm comfortable with the current version. Same with the tree trunks and the stone lizards: I like the variation. As the game gets closer and closer to finished I could always cut details like that for space, but I like to build myself a little breathing room in advance for these things. If I don't need it, I think the variations look better than repetitive blocks. I try to do what I can to bust up 16x16 blocks, where the constraints allow.

Graveyard Duck is immortal.

I... don't understand.

Hehe people were just throwing out literal duck jokes after you mentioned the game didn't need a duck.

Anyway, haven't tried the demo yet, but the game looks great in the video! Some nice animations too.

Oh right. Heh. Woah, I didn't even see Tepples' comment.

I should make this my signature here. This got me laughing hysterically, even though you were serious. :D

Well...after 3 days of playing, 27 coins, 3 endings and a humongous map I drew in MS Paint to show for it, it seems my Lizard adventure has come to a close. I know there might be some secrets I have left to found, but I'd like to hold off until the full release to 100% the game.

Ah...and I figured you wouldn't be able to remove some tiles because of engine limitations. Oh well...either way, here are 4 more graphical suggestions in case you ever find yourself hard-pressed for space:

1) It seems that you've dedicated an entire 16x16 tile to the seaweed in the underwater area? If you looped the first 8x16 seaweed tile, you could free up a little bit more space for your tileset...And there's also a 16x16 white dot to the left of that? Huh?

2) In the void zone, there are 4 tiles dedicated to creating 8x8 blocks and 8px thin platforms. If you wanted to, you could remove these tiles and redesign your maps, replacing the 8x8 blocks with 16x16 ones and the thin platforms with 16px-tall ones. Having thin platforms like these seem reaaally unecessary when the background of the area is already so bleak.

3) In addition, there is a 2x8 space to the right of that in the CHR-ROM that doesn't seem to be used at all. Huh?

4) Spoiler alert! Not really a space-related suggestion, but I was a bit confused when I saw the vulnerable sprite for the cheshire cat boss...I know the cat's head is supposed to be facing up, but the way you drew it makes it look really odd, like the cat's head transformed or something.

And with those parting tips, I wish you good luck in finishing your game! Everything in the demo was fantastic, and the entire game had a really great feel to it. Even though I had to retry both bosses at least a dozen times, they never really felt cheap or unfair. The game had an excellent difficulty throughout and you've really found that sweet spot for lengthening the gameplay via death without making it feel padded. In addition, the game just felt fun to play in that weird Fez sorta way. Like, even if I'm not making any progress and I'm going back through areas I've seen a million times, wandering around the game and taking in the scenery is just a joy.

But with that being said, the game does have one or two issues. Every time I reached one of the endings, the game would just stop. I would then reset, realize I have the knowledge lizard again and think "Oh no, I've lost all of my progress!" I would then go in the door, touch a save totem and overwrite my password. And it wasn't until many playthroughs later that I realized I could just continue by going left a screen and using the already filled-in password...overall, continuing felt really unintuitive...It might be best to just respawn the character in the password room if they already have a filled-in password.

In addition, there's a problem with the randomness-based enemies like the leaping cats or poisonous hermit crabs. Every time I encounter one of those enemies, a lot of my time is wasted just standing there and waiting for them to move. There really needs to be more on those screens to engage the player in the meantime, because waiting is not fun.

And to end on a light-hearted note...SKILLLLLZZZZZZZZZZ!



I can also send you my "completed" map, if you're interested. It might help tell you something is a little too-obscurely hidden to not be found after 3 days of searching.

Thanks for the comments. I do think the tone of this game is a little like Fez. I appreciate the comparison.

I'd love to see your map.

By the way, WhatULive4, if you're looking for an easy way to try all the rooms, if you put a breakpoint on the bankswitch to page 0 (the mapper is BxROM), I believe the X register contains the target room. You could change X to get other rooms (rooms in the demo go from $00 to $9C).

Alternatively you can force passwords by holding SELECT + A when you press UP to enter the password door. Here's two that will get you to inaccessible rooms:
JLMNN - river test
IJINK - disco

Just a random trivia question (hope nobody with OCD latches on to this): do those passwords have meaning (like does "IJINK" mean something special to you) -- and if so, what's the history behind those? If not, no biggie.

No, there are far too many states to make passwords by hand. I build them from GHIJKLMN because I couldn't think of any bad words that could be spelled with those letters.

"MILKING"?

Here's the set I use that encodes 5 bits per character. Not having vowels or S avoids both near-homoglyph confusion (O vs. 0, S vs. 5, I vs. 1, etc.) and profanity (unless a parent can read l33t). The "sometimes Y" is there, but most of the words in that infamous The 7th Guest soup can puzzle ("Shy gypsy, slyly, spryly, tryst by my crypt") also have S. The biggest flaw I can see is B vs. 8.

Having profanity in passwords is a really cool bonus, IMO! =)

I'm going to get in enough trouble when people find the lizard who smokes.

I'm gonna have to admit, when I saw the smoking lizard my first impression was "Ohh! Air puffs! If I go underwater I can shoot bubbles!!!"

Oh, how embarrassed I was when I worked my way to an underwater area and discovered this was not the case...

I noticed that this game is made with BNROM, which until recently, was only used by one game: Deadly Towers. Did you choose BNROM because of this distinction, or did you actually need what this board does? Or do you wish to gut every copy of Deadly Towers so that they could be turned into something better, a contrast from that one Shaq-Fu thing?

BNROM is a very simple board, and (inadventantly) by choosing it, he more-or-less requires people to use new parts rather than reuse old boards.

edit: fixed link

Every A*ROM can be turned into BNROM by lifting the '161 pin that goes to CIRAM A10 and wiring the trace to PA10 or PA11 depending on the game's mirroring bit. So yes, you could build a small Action 53 compilation (which also uses BNROM if mapper 28 is not available) and have it work on a Jeopardy board.

lidnariq: Your link is broken because of Referer protection on NesCartDB.

I chose BNROM because:

1. I like 32k paging. It makes it very easy to organize the data by having the maximum page size.
2. The hardware is incredibly simple, just a single 4-bit latch.
3. 256k BNROM is widely supported, including implementations on PowerPak and Everdrive N8.

You could more easily put this game on an AxROM board than a BNROM board, since Deadly Towers was only 128k. Someone looking to make a Repro would be better off dismantling a Rare game, probably... but, as I said, the hardware is so simple, this is one of the easiest boards to build from scratch.

The main disadvantage is that DPCM sound isn't really feasible (unless you want to duplicate samples in every bank, or not have samples playing when banking). Cross-bank code jumps are a little more complicated than with other mappers, but the banking code only needs to be written once, so I don't consider this a significant issue. Since it's CHR-RAM, you can't do CHR banking animations, but you can do some limited CHR animation through vblank uploads. I don't think any AxROM boards had WRAM, so that might be tricky to add if you need it (I don't).

Thanks!

This is a very good game.

I am especially impressed at how the PC version has the sound effects cut out the music, and how it seems to use the same OAM cycling code (as seen when frogs overlap).

For inquiring minds, I've made screenshot maps of the "front" and "back" sides of the game world (spoiler alert). Sprites/labels aren't included, and neither are the post-boss ending areas (mostly so I don't waste any more of my Saturday ). Mapping the void area was an interesting challenge, but once I figured it out (on paper) it was pretty intuitive. I chose to display it the way I did because I felt it presented the "architectural" part most contiguously.

I think I've found everything in the demo (within bounds), but I'm not quite sure.

BNROM uses 4 bits, one could get 8 bits by using a 74HC377. Color Dreams used it, so maybe there's some mapper support already. They used CHR-ROM, though. Extra bits could bank CHR (speaking of CHR, with RAM the cheapest size to get is 32kB), do nametable select in a single-screen mode, bigger ROM, LED, whatever. Speaking of bigger ROMs, I was looking on Digikey lately and 512kB flash cost is as cheap as ever, at about $1.30. Cheaper than 256kB, even.

If I was doing a simple mapper with Flash, I would want to include a 74HC139. I like that part because it can provide 2 chip enables, for $5000-$5FFF and $6000-$7FFF. Relocating the mapper register allows the flash to be writable. Yeah it'd be another part on the board, but wouldn't it be much nicer to program the carts before shipping, instead of before building them? Plus being able to save data, and use a bootloader.

I guess you mean DIP only?

Nice maps, RT-55J! I didn't bother making "front" or "back", I just did it all in one thing. (The front/back idea is good though, reminds me of Goonies 2 :-) ). I've been posting about it on Twitter (look for anything with the #LizardNES hash tag):

https://twitter.com/koitsu2009/status/5 ... 8808736768
https://twitter.com/koitsu2009/status/5 ... 5247085568

I haven't provided visual indicators or a legend describing what doors go to what other doors, where the lizard suits are, or what the hint blocks/columns say. I can see from your maps I've missed a few rooms (I recognise them / have been to them but didn't get screenshots of them). I also haven't used the codes he gave us to go to some of the areas we normally can't reach.

If you want the full map (Twitter seems to resize + convert/recompress), it's available here (pick "Download / Direct Download" in upper right of Dropbox): https://www.dropbox.com/s/0zjfnmjzr9yn5xv/m.png?dl=0

Be sure to note that rainwarrior will possibly be moving some stuff around + changing things before final release, and will also apparently be providing some kind of native map editor/viewer (nope, misunderstood).

All of the stuff in the demo is going to get a second pass, for sure, but the layout is pretty close to what I want in the final version. I'm actually waiting for an update to post about this on the kickstarter campaign (there's a time delay on it, in case you think of something at the last minute). Edit: the update is now published at https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1101008925/lizard/posts/1037421

Here's my "official" map of the demo: http://lizardnes.com/downloads/lizard_demo_map.png

I almost hate to post my version of the map. I really love to see especially how people piece together the VOID ZONE. I don't remember promising a native map viewer... but if I hit the open source stretch goal I'll share all the tools I used to make the game, of course.

Has Krikzz finally updated the EDN8 mapper to support larger ROMs? Last time I checked it only supported 4 banks.

I too like the simplicity of this mapper, and while it may look difficult to have your engine access data from different banks, it isn't all that complicated. I solved this mostly by putting the data and the code that uses that data in the same bank, and the main engine only gets the final results. This is often done with music (i.e. the player is in the same bank as the songs), but you can just as easily put the collision detection routine in the same bank as the level maps, for example. A certain amount of code replication is inevitable, but it isn't as bad as it may seem at first.

Yeah, Krikzz updated it a few months ago with 256k BNROM support (possibly 512k? I don't have one to test).

PowerPak didn't support 512K BNROM either until I made BNTest.

Well, if you want an interesting interpretation of that zone, here's an entirely verticalized map, and here's and attempt to tessellate that horizontally. Overlapping screens quickly become a problem, which makes me think that a cylindrical/corkscrew projection of the zone could only go so far.

I like how you made an "escape chute" back to the entrance for those who get fed up with fighting the boss.

I misread what you sent me on Twitter: "I hope you don't mind when I post my own tool-generated map of the demo in an forthcoming update...". Sorry about that.

If the Kickstarter is anything to go by, you are officially, in Bon Jovi's words "half-way there". That said, I wish you the best of luck, I have a feeling this will make it!

Do you also have a release for android / iphone in mind ??

The problem here is that a flat sheet of glass provides no tactile feedback to tell the thumbs whether or not they're over the button. I tried the free subset of Pixeline and the Jungle Treasure on my Nexus 7 tablet, and I kept missing jumps because I kept moving my thumbs outside the boundaries of the directional control and jump button. Same when I tried running platformers in the Nesoid emulator. It all cleared up when I paired my keyboard though. Because of the limits inherent in touch control when you're looking at something other than what you're touching, platformers for iOS and Android tend to be endless runners because you can't hit more than one button for jump and one for attack without looking at them.

To prove a port feasible, you need to do one of three things:

1. Suggest a good control method for exploration-oriented platformers.
2. Show evidence that a substantial number of people are buying MFi gamepads or JXD's Android gaming tablets, which have buttons.
3. Show evidence that a substantial number of people are willing to buy and carry a Bluetooth keyboard to game with.

Well, you can already play the NES ROM on an Android by using an emulator. I don't know what the status of emulation is on an iPhone, but I presume you'd need to jailbreak to do it?

As for whether I'd build a native version for either of these platforms, well, it is possible to do, but I have no current plans to do so. I'm worried enough about being able to finish the game at all; supporting Android and iPhone isn't even in the picture. Can interest be demonstrated in such a thing? I would need more funding to cover the development time involved.

Tepples brings up another point that fine controls are more difficult to do via touch screen. I suspect Lizard may not be well suited for that. Though, if you have an Android you can try it out already with an emulator to see how it feels. (I've not had a good experience with platform games and touch controls.)

Finally, Android is much easier for me to develop for as I already have an Android phone, can be developed for with any PC, and there is no restrictions on releasing software (I can just provide an APK for download). iPhone is a completely different story, as I don't already own either a Mac or iPhone, it seems that setup costs would be in the neighbourhood of at least $2000, and then when finished, still subject to Apple's approval.


So anyhow, long story short, it certainly can be done, but I would need to be convinced that it's worth doing.

With iOS, Wii U, Nintendo 3DS, PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4, PlayStation Vita, Xbox 360, Xbox One, and Windows Phone, the platform curator assumes that you will be making it a paid app in order to recoup devkit costs. Sell a few thousand copies and you're covered for parts (but possibly not for labor, depending on cost of living in your area).

PlayStation Mobile appears to be comparable in cost to iOS, except there are actual buttons on the thing.

Yes, exactly. The Kickstarter budget isn't a for-profit budget, it's a subsistence budget. I can't reasonably target a commercial-only platform unless the game becomes commercially viable.

Thank you for the extensive answer.

Would you say that pressing 3 buttons simultaneously could be enough for a platformer ?
Like : direction + a + b = holding a koopashell and jumping while running around (mario world / snes)...

played the demo & backed the game

It's not number of touches as much as ability to accurately place them blind because you're looking at a different part of the screen. The only things you can do blind are a tap and a swipe, not a press of a specific area. Perhaps left thumb swipe to start moving, left thumb tap to stop, right thumb swipe up to jump, and right thumb tap to attack? If you can point to other successful Android platformers on Google Play Store that have a free subset, I'd be willing to try them.

yes indeed. but not being able to press two buttons near each other, like on most emulators for touch devices, would also make some games not playable, like metroid, mega man, super mario

That would be terrible for quick/fine movement. Couldn't directions be detected by the relative displacement from the start of the touch? To stop you just lift your thumb. Much more similar to what you'd do with a common controller (the only real difference is that you have to touch the center first), and you can still do it without looking.


That sounds reasonable.

The funding goal has been reached, congratulations!

Yes! Lizard is a go!

CONGRATULATIONS !

Congrats on reaching your goal man! Lizard looks phenomenal !

Kickstarter goal has been reached, so I've put this back as a standard thread rather than an Announcement.

And duh: AWESOME!!!

Yes, congratulations.
I wish I had a large circle of people I could influence for projects like this (especially for the open source stretch), but alas I don't.

and now for a belated comment on the demo:
wow it feels like you gave us half the game already. Defiantly looking forward to this. My favorite track is Forest. Such masterful use of the noise channel especially in River.

I FINALLY got around to backing this, thank goodness I had some time left. Congrats on the project, and happy Thanksgiving! If they celebrate that in Canada, which I doubt. You'd figure that the US and Canada would share some holidays considering they're essentially sister countries, or so I believe.

We do celebrate a Thanksgiving in Canada, but it is a different Thanksgiving (with a different history) at a slightly different time of year.

...but regardless, I give you thanks for pledging to Lizard.

And Muslims celebrate their version of Thanksgiving on 1 Shawwal, the first day of the month after Ramadan.

I played the demo to check it out. I really like the music and the artwork. One thing I couldn't figure out though were the ? mark doors and I remember getting a long list of letters that showed up on screen which I couldn't figure out what that for.

I really like the small additions to the game like the little frogs and snails. Those are so cool, but it is somewhat trial and error because how am I supposed to know the slightly darker green frog actually kills me. I guess its a poison arrow frog right

Overall the game looks and feels pretty solid I just haven't gotten a chance to really get into it yet. Are you responsible for the music, coding, artwork? Or are there separate people working on it?

Thanks! Everything in there was done by me.

On the subject of American Thanksgiving:

But first you have to feed it three doses of "candy". (You couldn't say "drugs" in a Nintendo game in the pre-ESRB era.)


Nemo from Little Nemo: The Dream Master tosses a sedative at a lizard


The result

Was it really an illicit narcotic reference, or this another joke similar in the vein of "Mario is actually taking hallucinogenic mushrooms"?

It's "Using a lizard as depicted above reminds me of Little Nemo" plus the latter.

Last 6 cells of animation in rainwarrior's post made me immediately think of cats puking to techno. Don't ask.

Anyhow, it's funded! WOOOOOO!!!!!

I have a lot of work to do now.

You may have just been Joe jobbed. A hacker group called Lizard Squad managed to shut down PlayStation Network (via Slashdot). I hope people will be able to tell you from them.

Kinda lost track of this game's progress... Congrats on the funding!

I've been meaning to post about this glitch, and I'm not sure if it's been brought to your attention yet.
(I had to reset the screen a few times, because I forgot how I managed this. Though, it's easy to pull off flawlessly, once you know how.)

So: boing! boing! boing! boing! boing! secret world warp!


I have verified that it is indeed possible to do, on every screen with a snail, you may want to fix this.

Are you playing on the newest build? I found this the first day and I'm pretty sure he fixed it.

I can confirm it still works on the version currently on the website. But that may or may not be the latest build.

Edit: And now I have read stuff which says send an email for bug reports so I suppose I'll do that.

Yes, I knew about that bug. It's been fixed for a long time, but there was never any intention to update that demo. (There will be a new demo several weeks from now with the final release.) Thanks for the report, though.

By the way, it's not a "secret world" or anything. You've just wrapped to the top of the screen and ended up touching the trigger to enter the room above. You can get there normally.

Woah, I didn't know about this until just now.

Is there going to be a ROM release (I have an EDN8), or just the physical carts?

You'll be able to get a ROM too, yeah.

Oh! Good to know that you fixed it already. Can't have something silly like that, slipping through!

I'm well aware of what's "technically" going on. I said secret world, in reference to a famous glitch in Metroid. It is the same glitch, with incorrect tile-sets between areas. (But correct object formations)

Awesome.

I just saw a clip of this game, and played the demo...Awesome bro!

Love the music. Found it on youtube. Great stuff.

Thanks, Rainwarrior! It's very catchy game
How to defeat octopus?

She'll run out of eggs eventually.

This might be an Everdrive thing, but:

Huge image my bad

Once in a blue moon it'll just do this randomly while walking around. While holding still it might flip back to being normal, and do it a few times. Most of the time it does not do it at all. No flickering during, just wrong tiles. A CHR bankswitch gone wrong?

That's really odd. CHR is non-bankswitched RAM, so I don't think it should be possible for the CHR to be "bankswitching". CHR-RAM is written during room transitions, but there should be no hardware mechanism that lets the titles change while playing. CHR-RAM is also written in contiguous 1K blocks, and what you're showing looks like an address mangling.

If you compare the CHR layout that's supposed to exist at that moment to what you've got, it's really weird. It's like any tile in the columns 0-3 / 8-11 are reading from columns 4-7 / 12-15 instead, which I think might correspond to PPU A6 being forced to 1 when reading CHR (but not nametable)? (Or alternatively: D2 of the nametable fetch read?)

Does transitioning between rooms fix this, or does it just flip randomly while playing?

I'm pretty sure this is a hardware failure for the Everdrive, you might send a report to Krikzz.

Well if it's CHR RAM then probably no, not bankswitching related I would blame the cartridge edge, but as you mentioned it doesn't look like the nametable was having any addressing issues.

The sprites were also fine during. I'll hook up the NES again (it's in a box) and see if I can coerce it into doing it again. I don't remember if a room transition helped, but I do remember it flipping to this and back to normal without me doing anything, just holding still. The owl above moved like nothing was wrong.

Actually I think we can rule out the nametable fetch getting corrupted, because in your screenshots the sprites are showing the exact same corruption. I think this is PPU A6 being forced to 1 during CHR fetches.

The owl looks fine because its sprites are in columns 13-15, all unaffected.

The lizard sprite look mostly normal because the body sprites are arranged in pairs of columns across all columns. The face, however, is susceptible to corruption and you can see it in the picture you took. Face tile $2A has been replaced with cigarette tile $2E.

You're right. It's possible the cartridge edge's A6 was simply making intermittent contact. I didn't play any other games during that sitting so I didn't see the possible effect on other games.

I've been silently following the Twitter and Kickstarter updates, and I'm so exited for how Lizard has been shaping up. I wish I had the proper equipment and internet connection to live stream Lizard once it's released, but I'll still enjoy it.

The trick of updating the tint color is a great idea for performance profiling...I used it on a well known game to get an idea of how much "frame time was left".

I ended up using greyscale because it was the easiest to notice for the game I was looking at

Just curious. How long (roughly) did the c++ standalone implementation take vs the assembly version.

That's not comparable. You only do prototyping, revision, iteration, etc. in one language. The other one is just a port, basically. For analogy, it's sort of like asking whether it took longer to write The Three Musketeers in French, or the English translation.

If you're asking whether I think it's quicker to do things in C++, my answer is absolutely. It's hugely more efficient, and that's the main reason I do it.

Programming is probably only <20% of the work on this project though. By far what has taken the most time overall has been building/editing/revising/testing the world.

You're right it wasn't a great question. And I can imagine the iterative testing would definitely take a good chunk of the time.

Three years past the original projected date of completion. This is the Lizard of Elephants in the room.

You have Steam Greenlight and tens of thousands of dollars backing you from Kickstarter. What's going on?

Reality.

Not three years, two years. You're off by a year. (I'm only off by two. )

I don't owe anyone tens of thousands of dollars worth of stuff. I owe individual people like you tens of dollars worth of stuff. Anyone who thinks it's been too long and wants a refund is free to request one, and I'll gladly give your money back. I know it's been a long time. I'm in debt because of it ($18k CAD definitely doesn't last this long, especially after half of it goes into fees and material costs-- most of the real funding actually came from my own savings), and I'm trying hard to get this finished so that debt stops accumulating.

It's not an "elephant in the room". I've never ignored anybody who's asked about it. What the hell do you mean by that?

I'm still working on it, and it's sill not done, and it's closer to being done than it's ever been (though this is always true). I've stopped giving estimates because I still don't feel I can actually predict the time it will be finished.

What exactly do you want to know? Part of the delay is from literally doubling the scope of the game, but most of it is just from discovering that I am a much slower worker than I expected. Really.

If that's not a satisfying answer, you're going to have to get specific with your questions. "What's going on" is too vague to answer. (I do know it's been too long since the last kickstarter update; a new one is imminent-- I've been writing it over the last few days. Not done yet, though, like always. Sorry.)

That'll do, Lizard. That'll do.

Just hurry the hell up.

"The first 90 percent of the code accounts for the first 90 percent of the development time. The remaining 10 percent of the code accounts for the other 90 percent of the development time."

WOW!!!
Seems like my co-worker is stricktly following this rule!!
"I don't belive in calendars!!" Is his most (in)famous quote!!
Thankfully I'm not in his team anymore.

I'm fully capable of delivering work on a deadline. Lizard is different. It's 100% my game, and all added costs of spending more time on it are borne by me alone.

Most of the KS backers seem okay with the extra wait, and I've refunded a few for whom it was too much. I'd give back all the KS money if it was asked of me, but otherwise I'm going to try to reach the goals I set for myself, which do in fact have a pretty clear "finished" point in my mind-- it's not like I'm going out of my way to think of new things to extend development. I have had a plan since the beginning and I don't want to cut or sacrifice any of it if I don't have to. ..and I really haven't. I'm pretty happy with the state of the game, and the remaining parts are well planned and have a definite end point.

I, for one, am really looking forward to the finished product. Take as much time as you need!

Here are my thoughts on the project. This game Lizard, was probably one of the first homebrew NES games that I came across. I also played the demo.

I understand and know that making new games is very hard because I have made one too and there are still things that I need to do to finish my own project. The problem with working alone verses a team is that EVERYTHING depends on you. So when you stop the whole game stops. Even if you have 99% of the game finished if you don't finish the last 1% then it will never be done. The game won't finish itself on it's own.

I know that you are passionate about your project since you are literally dressed up as a lizard and all, but I think you really need to turn on the after burners and get the project finished by the end of this year. Since this was one of the first NES homebrews that I came across I had always thought that it had been released by now, but apparently I guess not.

I know and understand that making a worthwhile game is kind of like making some kind of art piece and you can't just force it to be done because it has to be something that you are proud of. While this type of thinking is really what making a good game is all about you also have to know that there are time frames. I've seen many other new NES games which have been started after you have started Lizard and those same games where finished before you have finished Lizard.

I would really like to own this game on a real NES cart, but you really need to wrap it up this year and finish this.

And here are my thoughts: no, he really doesn't. This game is his baby. I'd rather have a game that's completed to Brad's satisfaction than one that is rushed out to meet some arbitrary deadline. That seems to be Brad's mentality as well, and as one of the kickstarter backers, I'm completely okay with that.

I wouldn't be opposed to seeing more frequent status updates, though...

Ha ha "this year". If I don't finish it this year I'll be dead in a gutter somewhere.


I'm writing a kickstarter update currently, hope to have it finished today. I'm aware it's been too long since the last update, but I'll explain that in the update. Update.

Name'mtables.

It's interesting, reads like a Hardcore Gaming post.

I find myself thnking more parallax layers would be nice, at least, one on the other side of he water too…but it's your baby and your call.

It's not really my call. If I could think of a practical way to do a second split without an IRQ, I probably would.

I guess you already ruled out using sprite overflow and/or counting a fixed number of cycles from vblank?

Sorry if this is rude, but I don't really want to get into a pedantic discussion about ways it could technically be done in this thread. I was just responding to Myask's comment, not making a request for help. I had considered doing it, and decided against it. No plan or desire to revisit it.

(Yes, I have reasons for not doing either of those two things, but I don't really want to try to explain that here, sorry.)


Myask was referring to the update I posted to Kickstarter a few days ago, by the way: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1101008925/lizard/posts/1820518

Though, the stuff in that update isn't really intended for the NESDev crowd; it's all kinda common knowledge here I think.

I guessed right, apparently. Sheesh!

That or downgrading the drums to Tim Follin fidelity so you can (ab)use DMC.

Nope.

Since Brad is busy finalizing Lizard and definitely not getting distracted by trivial forum posts, I'll share my thoughts on how I would approach more parallax on a stage such the Lizard river zone, for the benefit of everyone except him, since he is too busy to be distracted by this...

- The scintilla dots/lines on the water could be sprites scrolling across the screen. May have to limit to 1 or 2 per line, but would work well regardless. Just set to low sprite priority. Flickering would be a benefit, as light shimmering on water often does so.

- The clouds could also be sprites. But if they are in the same VRAM pattern table ($0000 or $1000) as the background tiles, what you could do is have the first half/third of the screen set BOTH tables (PPUCTRL $2000) to draw from the same table, then after the cutoff point (via IRQ or sprite overlap or counting cycles) the PPUCTRL would be set to normal, where sprite and background tables have their own tables.

Hope this info is useful to anyone out there making a game with some kind of parallax.

I'll try very hard to take this statement in good faith, but if you want to talk about parallax without "distracting" me this thread is literally the opposite of where you should be posting.


Sprites are a nice idea, but I simply don't have the free palettes to use on either clouds, or dots on the water.

Before you follow up with a suggestion that I could change my other sprites and palette usage to make room, I will say that I have other design goals that are more important to me (and are consistent with the rest of the game) which necessitate those palettes.

Also, the clouds (spoiler?) _{aren't actually "background" in my game, they are platforms you can stand on as part of the foreground,} which makes me want them not to parallax with the orange rocks, though maybe that's a stupid artistic choice that nobody else would agree with. (It's my game, though, so I'm gonna go with my gut there.)


Anyhow, since you all seem not to care that I didn't want to discuss this and keep egging me on, fine, I'll respond to the other suggestions:

DMC IRQ: my game doesn't us DMC, and leaves $4011 at 0, so that's free. It does, however, use IRQ as an error handler (which technically shouldn't fire in the finished game, but it has a very useful development function so I lean heavily toward keeping it). That's the primary reason I wouldn't want to use it, but I also have to deal with making it work on both NTSC and PAL and test it, and there are a bunch of other details about it which I think are a hassle. It's the most doable of these unsolicited suggestions, though.

Timed NMI for the first split: I could cycle-time the first split and use sprite-0 for a second split, except now I'd be wasting 1/4 of a frame on the first split, and fitting the wait loop for sprite-0 into an approriate timing for a second split would be difficult. I'd have to design enemies around an update patterns that I could guarantee would fit into those timing windows. That's a big pile of constraints that I don't think would make the game play better. (I'm making a game here, not a graphical demo.)

Sprite overflow: In case you didn't know, sprite overflow evaluation is buggy. It's usable as a split point for a static screen, but I've got to deal with more or less arbitrary sprite combinations here. Then everything I said about timing the second split with sprite-0 in the last response applies again.

So... anyhow, if you really wanted to know, that's the jist of it. None of these suggestions are things I haven't considered, and all of them conflict with the design of things as-is. I haven't even mentioned how much code the river area shares with the rest of the game, and how all of the constraints from that impinge on its design as well. (Code space is getting pretty dear at this point in development, too.)

I would kind of like it if I could make the trees at the bottom have another split, but they're also already moving fast and hard to see, and if you pause the game, there's a pause bar at the bottom that completely covers it, so you can't really even stop to look at them. Maybe that would give you some idea why I don't think it's a visual effect I would prioritize over other goals.

It's a whole interactive system that has to work together, I can't just change one thing without having to redo a lot of other work. I have no use for unsolicited suggestions like this. Sure they sound simple to you, because you're only looking at one minor detail. To me, I have to fit it in with the hundred other parts of the finished river zone. You're just looking at the tip of the iceberg.



It would probably be a lot more "useful" to post ideas like that in a thread called "techniques for implementing parallax", instead of burying it in a thread about my game.

Similarly, I didn't really want to have to respond to this stuff because I don't think it's helpful to anyone (least of all me). Everything about the decision is specific to my game and how it works.


I don't mind being asked "why'd you do that?". That's usually a good question. Or even "I don't like this", or "did you consider this" are usually fine, but there's a gradual escalation to "here's how I would have designed your game", and an implication that you think I should justify the decisions I've made to you. I don't really like that.

Myask made a pretty innocent comment, and I made a short reply about it. Pubby was curious about that reply, and I got a bit pre-emptively defensive (sorry) because I knew a good answer is complicated and didn't want that to be demanded of me, but then collectively you persisted despite my protest, so... this is what I get I suppose.

Lizard eye is white, cloud/water is white. Don't need exact color match for dots on water. Could even use a bright yellow or grey.


Doesn't mean that a certain area could have special clouds.


That's what the search bar is for.

People care about your project, so it's kind of funny you would get annoyed when they ask questions. Do you really expect them to understand your design choices/tech limitations without knowing what goes into it?

Let me tell you quick story. There's this game called Pacman on the 2600. People said, "Why'd the dood make the colors all wrong? Why does the maze not look like the arcade?" Well the answer is that management demanded the background not have black as it was an internal policy to avoid screen burn in. And the maze was limited by the Rom space which the programmer had no say in. Now when you know the story behind why it has a seemingly arbitrary color palette that deviates from the source Arcade material, it makes more sense, and you appreciate the project more.

If the programmer said, "Trust me, I made the best possible game, I know what I'm doing, you just don't know what you're talking about," do you think people would go, "hmm, yeah, that's a satisfying answer, what a cool guy" ? Every engine and project has limitations. You seem to be taking things a bit too personally. Maybe people are just genuinely curious. NES development is a fascinating process.


Uh, no. Who ever said that? It sounds like you're stressed and you're taking your feelings out on the fans.

Yes, but it's perfectly reliable if you use 9 high-priority sprites (say, 1 through 9 since you're saving sprite 0 for later) with no others above them. I don't know if that qualifies for your game, but those conditions are easily met in most status bars at the top of the screen.

The bad part for me is dedicating up to 10 sprites just to raster effects, leaving "only" 54 for actual game objects. On the other hand, Felix the Cat used more sprites than that to hide scrolling glitches at the right side of the screen, which not only sacrificed sprites but also effectively reduced the sprites per scanline limit to 7, but somehow still delivered large, interesting sprites, so maybe this sacrifice isn't such a big deal after all.

I've had a lot of trouble with the DPCM technique, so I personally wouldn't rank it so high in a list of possible techniques to use for raster effects. IRQs don't fire a consistent amount of time after the CPU requests the sample to be played, so you actually have to measure the error in order to compensate for it later. Another problem is that sometimes there are "phantom IRQs" firing immediately after you start the sample, which I could never understand or find the proper way to avoid/ignore. After a lot of trial and error, I got things to appear to work fine for several seconds, but every once in a while something would happen and completely mess up the effect for a frame.

My reply to pubby's question was a bit rude and hasty, and I regret it a little, but my goal was to not have an off topic discussion about pedantic stuff in this thread. That goal has thoroughly failed, I guess. I can resign myself to that but I'm not going to like it.

I really did mean it, though. You could start a thread about parallax techniques, and it would be a very nice place to talk about such stuff. Much better than right here. You still could do this right now. Anybody could. (Please.)


Was that not a fair paraphrase of: "I'll share my thoughts on how I would approach more parallax on a stage such the Lizard river zone"?

You provoked hostility by mocking me for being "distracted". If you'd just made your unsolicited suggestion politely by itself, you would not have gotten the same response.


You didn't ask a question. Neither did tepples.

I don't expect anyone to understand my design decisions. Why would anyone understand that? If there are questions, I'm generally willing to answer, but just because there is a question doesn't mean it's entitled to an answer. It takes a lot of effort to respond correctly, and I resent it when this is not respected.

Sometimes I'd really rather not go into it. Can I not at some point say "there are a lot of details and I don't want to discuss them here/now". That's what I tried to do in response to pubby, but maybe not very tactfully.


Is what I've done here really equivalent to this statement? Is this really what you're comparing me to?


I think I've tried to answer every question that someone has ever put to me about this game, and this has been hard to do, so I do feel quite a bit insulted by this.

There are certain questions like "when will it be done", or B00daW's "what's going on?" from a few days ago, that are very difficult to answer, but I still try to make an effort to respond, even if I can't answer the question as asked.

If you want to mock me, or if I don't want to use your suggestion about sprites you wanna argue about every little detail about my response to it (use white sprites, or make special clouds even though I just said specifically I didn't want them to be)... what do you want me to say? I'm not going to have an argument about what I want in my game.

If there are things you're actually curious about, and you want to ask, please just ask them, as questions.

Ah, I had forgotten that detail of it. Thanks. (I do have some sprites that would go above the split point, though I suppose I could move the overflow way up and delay the split significantly to compensate.) Still, my real problem is having to have an extra wait loop mid-screen. One wait-split it not bad, two waits breaks up the execution too much.


This technique kinda forces 8x16 sprites too. (Doesn't hurt to have CHR banking in this situation either.)


Yes, this is some of what I meant by it being a "hassle".

This Lizard is not the Lizard of Parallax Technique Discussion. (link to topic for discussing that)

consider adding this one

Heh. It me.

Really fun thing. One issue though, please change this enemy's look. It's easy to mistake it for a checkpoint. Or change checkpoint, doesn't really matter.

There's a Win 3.11 version of Lizard?

The Windows version is built for XP... maybe that's just a 3.1 skin? Or maybe a 3.1 emulator running the NES ROM?

Win 3.11 coding wouldn't be that different from NES actually, banked memory and all, just 16-bits. Everyone is doing things for old consoles, but old Windows is all forgotten :'(

Probably because there's not nearly the sort of qualitative difference between developing for modern Windows and 16-bit Windows, or even between modern Windows and a 3D console, that there is between Windows and a 2D console.

I think there's been a lot of recent games with an "old Windows" aesthetic, at least. (e.g. Kingsway, Hypnospace Outlaw, Cibele)

Wow!.... That is weird. Kingsway really makes me want to try it out. That last one though, is kinda disturbing.

Retro City Rampage has an unfinished Win 3.x port.

Looking forward to seeing this game completed. Here is a quick playtest/review of the demo. Here are some things.

- There are some platform jumps which seem hard to judge whether you can make the jumps or not. It would be great if these jumps were more clear.

- The jump boots power up seems awkward to use. Why do you have to hold B to activate the power up then press A to use it? Why not just let B be the super jump power up?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qAyDFrP ... e=youtu.be

Thanks for the feedback. I very much appreciate anyone sharing what they felt in response to playing my game, good or bad.

I'll respond to a few of your points that interested me. I don't really want to debate what good design principles for games are, but I'd be happy to share what I think about some of the things I put in the game that you commented on:


1. Some jump distances/heights are very intentionally ambiguous to encourage you to try and fail. On the three specific instances you mentioned:

• In the room where you get the Lizard of Bounce, I want you to try and jump for that coin, and you did.
• On the right side of the bridge, you can make that jump, but it leads only to a non-essential secret. It's okay and normal/intended for you to fail here too. There's also a nearby hint to encourage the attempt.
• In the room with the Lizard of Heat, the platforms have been moved around slightly to make getting through there smoother. That particular jump that you're calling misleading is a compromise with some other constraints, but in the final version its impact is mitigated a little bit by other changes around it.

2. The Lizard of Bounce's boots are not for jumping, they are for bouncing. Pressing A to jump is actually unrelated to the bounce; pressing them at the same time does nothing special.

There are probably a lot more places to play around with it in the full game than the demo, but I do hope you'd eventually be able to figure out how it works with some experimentation. ...and if not there's 5 other lizards you can play with. I don't expect people to figure out everything immediately, or in some specific linear order. You can get to almost all places in the world with any of the Lizards.


3. I'm surprised by your closing comment, because the demo actually has two bosses, and three ways to reach an end screen. I think this video covers only about 1/3 of the demo.

I was also surprised at the point where you declared yourself stuck and reset. You can get past that blue frog, but the easier way to escape was to go down in the next room over. I think resetting is a valid option for returning to the start, if you want to use it, but I've intentionally left an "easy" way to get back out of every area in the game, even if it's not immediately obvious.

In the final version there's also a map that might help you orient yourself.


4. You asked a lot of questions about things like what the coins do, or what does that text mean. I'm glad to have succeeded at raising that question in your mind.

The idea that the text is a password is an interesting thought, but it is not a password; also the passwords in the final version will be numbers rather than letters anyway.

The Lizard of Knowledge can do a lot more in the final version too. Many creatures (e.g. the Panda) can talk, that couldn't in the demo.


Edit: 5. You mentioned a password being a cost saving measure. In this case that is not why I chose this. This game does not have a significant amount of saved state, by design, and I think a battery backed save would actually be inappropriate. The password is only 5 digits long (3-bits each), and takes only seconds to enter. If I thought a battery would improve the game, I would add that cost.

In a thread about the password system of Owlia and other games, rainwarrior described the basics of Lizard Demo's password system.

Here are my additional notes about Lizard Demo's password system:


See lizard-demo-notes.zip for the password encoding notes above, along with:

• the Lizard Demo map with room numbers added to it
• a list of all possible passwords
• a FCEUX lua script I wrote to help explore the map
• some other secret codes rainwarrior has mentioned in various posts

Thank you Bavi_H, this is a gift.

The game is essentially finished. It's currently undergoing beta testing. Cartridges will be available after testing, but if anyone here wants to get in for the beta test, this is where it lives:
https://rainwarrior.itch.io/lizard

Congratulations! I picked this up last night and my girlfriend and I have had a great time playing it so far!

It has a really interesting feel to the gameplay, the structure seems more like a computer adventure game from the 286/386 era, while the gameplay is definitely very nes. This goes withiut saying, but its really nice!

My single piece of criticism so far would be the nag screens. With the difficulty of the jumps and the die to reset after falling mechanic (Ive been throwing these lizard bones all over the place after a bad jump) its a little like a chiding. I think we went though 6 or 7 of them fighting the octopus.

Its a really charming piece of work, and I'm off to play some more now! Thanks!

Congrats

There are exactly 6 of them, then they stop appearing. If you reset, though, it'll start over, so you might start seeing the same ones again.

I do want to keep them in, and there's actually some "story" information in some of them, even though the 2nd and 3rd are more like tips for people who haven't read the manual. The later ones take longer (the 6th one should have taken another 43 consecutive deaths after the 5th one!).

It has been hard to tune how often they should appear. The first one comes up after 13 consecutive deaths from the same save point. Some people go a long time before that happens, but other people start hammering away at a particular challenge right away and hit it very quickly. Getting info about this is hard cause I basically need to watch someone play it for the first time to see. (Thankfully I've been able to do this several times since the beta began!) At this point I think I'll tweak them to be a little less frequent, I do think I agree that there's too much of them at once.


Anyhow, I'm actually in the middle of a few difficulty reduction tweaks in response to stuff I've learned in testing, trying to smooth out a few parts that have given people the most grief.

That seems like a good idea. It's BRUTALLY hard right now.

Also a question: I started a new game, got lost in the void zone, finally got out and found the lizard of swim, then beat the octopus boss (after dying about 4 million times). Then it went to a screen saying the adventure was over, and it started over.

Was this supposed to be confusing by design? I was totally lost about what just happened. (Did I win? Did I lose? Did I just warp back to the beginning but still going?)

If it's supposed to be cryptic, I'm happy with that answer. But didn't know if that was the goal.

Yes, you have the intended amount of information.

What would be useful to know, though, is whether you managed to answer those questions for yourself, and what actions did you take to learn?

I didn't manage to answer those questions. I started over and went a different direction, then got a little frustrated after dying a bunch more times without really understanding what I was trying to do or accomplish, and put the game down and went and did something else.

(I hope I don't sound too negative. You've made an impressive game!)

I haven't spent much time with the beta yet, but I have been having fun exploring the differences from the demo. The first message that appeared after dying a lot of times was a nice surprise, and I immediately sought them all out for their story elements.

I remember being surprised by 2nd message's tip to press SELECT at the starting screen to access the options, because that wasn't mentioned in the PDF manual. I now see it's in the text file, but how will players of the cartridge version know there are options available at the starting screen?

Also in the PDF manual: It bothered me a little that both of the map pages mention the direction west in their descriptions to refer to something on the left side of the page, because when you flip between the sides, the "west" from one description is a different side of the world than the "west" from the other description.

Yes, that's a big reason I put them there. The manuals were actually printed before I implemented that menu for the title screen, so I wanted to get that message into the game.

Whether the word west or east is confusing in the manual... I dunno, I don't think there are common terms with a precise and accurate meaning that I could apply to a space like this which is topologically different from the real world. So... I chose "west" for left, and "east" for right, on either map. That this bothered you at least indicates that you have figured out for yourself how this world is really shaped.

I also considered something like "toward the edge" and "toward the fold" to give a hint about the nature of these maps, but I felt like that was even more confusing. On the other hand, if I had said just "left" and "right", I felt these words were similarly inadequate to east/west.


At this point I plan to leave the manual as it is.

Full house! Im liking the story text that is slowly unvailing. It sounds like gauauu and I took roughly the same path.

Without spoiling anything (and I don't think I've got far enough to spoil much) I got that ending and it reset, but then I discovered something which made me think I might want to keep the password and carry on using that game, rather then reset everything.

If that's the case, you might want to leave some kind of hint at that moment, as the ending made me think I should start from scratch. Unless there is one in the text, and I just overlooked it.

Also, yes, brutally difficult! Great enemy interaction though.

Finally, I like the structure of it and appreciate the save points - but if its tough both backwards and forwards it can feel like they tie you to a certain place in a bit of death loop. Maybe the option to warp back to the main first point from a save point? Similar to the reset function? Although I appreciate that suggestions like this late in the day sometimes aren't exactly helpful.

Still very much enjoying the game and we'll be cracking on with it today. Oh, and the map and overall world design is awesome - were going to start drawing a map today, and I can't wait.

Curious to see the beta, but I don't mind waiting for a full, more polished game, as I'd prefer my money going towards a genuine cartridge copy instead of a digital download.
Hoping you aren't "dumbing it down" too much due to complaints about the difficulty being too brutal

And congrats on your upcoming release.

I'm saving myself as well, but only because i don't have the time currently. Else i find the testing process rewarding.

I prefer to think that the game is "smartening up".

So I maybe have described what I'm doing generally as reducing difficulty, but that's only because saying exactly what I think I'm doing would be too much to say. Difficulty isn't just some single monolithic quantity where some people want more and some people want less. Every element of is is an individual case with special meaning. There are things in my game that I think are difficult in ways that are worthwhile and fun, and other things that I think are difficult in ways that are not.

I tend to theorize in this matter quite a bit after so many years of playing and designing games. I have a very personal opinion about this: it's fine that it's difficult as long as it is fair, and fair means that a situation is difficult for you *only* because you don't have the required skill, a skill you can get solely by practice. When the difficulty comes from "chance", it's not fair. And this covers a wide spectrum, including situations where you as the player are not in complete control due to poor design.

If the required amount of practice is too high for your standards, then the game is simply too difficult for you. This brings a new matter: as long as "chance" is not involved in difficulty, the game designer should decide on which audience he or she is focusing. And nowadays the amount of people who have the time or will to master your game no matter how hard it is is low, sadly.

So I find it interesting if you are a bit forgiving in your game until the point that your players get hooked. Then, you make the learning curve steeper. Letting the players get some achievements in their first go is a good idea.

There's a very famous game in Spain, released in 1985 for the Sinclair ZX Spectrum. The game is called Abu Simbel Profanation and it was a blast back in the 80s, when people had access to less games and tended to persevere more. Nowadays, this game would have been a complete bluff just because it took you dozens of tries before you could even get past the first enemy. Once you got past the first screen, the game felt much easier and really got you hooked. That's bad design, in my book.

I'm really looking forward to this game to be released and I hope I can purchase my copy even though I wasn't around for the kickstarter campaign.

The beta seems like it's winding down (people are only going to be interested for so long, anyway).

I think the version that is up now (4192) will likely be the last before release. I'm pretty happy with the way it is now.

Lizard if officially finished.
Digital version is available now: https://rainwarrior.itch.io/lizard

Carts aren't for sale yet but that will happen fairly soon.

Currently working on a new demo version, then steam release.

Have you considered a Game Boy Advance cartridge release using either the C++ codebase or PocketNES?

No, not really. I might port it to another platform for fun later on, but GBA isn't really an interest of mine. If it runs on PocketNES already, I don't see the point of doing any work toward this? People can just play it there.

Is there a good C++ compiler for Genesis though?

gcc still targets 68k, and produces ... passable? code?

No idea if the maintainers have broken its optimizer or code generator in the same way they broke SPARC's.

People are continuing to make new SMD games using it (e.g. using SGDK); I'm certain there's people around here who could give you a clue dump.

GCC 7.2 runs perfectly for Gen, even LTO and garbage collecting work. The generated code is not asm-coder-perfect, but it's very good.

Disclaimer: I write C for Gen, not C++.

Ah, well that's interesting. I didn't expect that GCC would target 68k... but after looking up its history apparently that was its first target?

Anyhow, my line of thinking is that it's not really worth doing anything for a non--modern platform that's powerful enough to just run an emulator (like GBA), and on the other end of things a platform that is too underpowered to support a C++ version would require porting the whole thing.

In this middle ground are a few that I'd been considering playing with: SNES, Genesis, DOS.

Not that this is a promise to do anything of the sort. I don't think there's much good reason for me to do so, but a SNES or Genesis port might be a fun learning project for me. The DOS one would just be a nostalgia trip: I cut my teeth on DJGPP.

Sound in PocketNES isn't perfect for two reasons: the way envelopes on the DMG APU work (piecewise linear hardware envelopes, with annoying period resets if full software control is attempted), and the triangle channel can't be heard so well on a tiny built-in speaker whose high-pass response resembles that of a third-order 800 Hz Butterworth filter. Perhaps emulating the game but HLEing the audio? It should run C++ though, so long as you don't try iostreams or any of the other landmines for which GCC with libstdc++ emits ridiculously oversized code. You might need to rethink camera control to compensate for the less tall screen.


For Super NES, much of your NES code will still work in 8-bit MX mode. But you'd probably need to improve color depth somewhat and arrange the music and sound effects for the double polyphony and sampler mentality of the S-DSP. If you don't feel like getting your hands dirty in SPC700 assembly language (which is a 65C02 in drag), there are a few pre-built homebrew audio drivers, such as SNES GSS.

I don't need to do any of those things.

Maybe I wasn't clear enough, but: I'm not porting this to GBA.

I only mentioned the three platforms I did because they are things I actually have thought about prior, though I would have kept this to myself if you hadn't brought it up. As I said, I have some interest in learning SNES or Genesis, and a port of Lizard could be a suitable project to do so. DOS is a different case, I just have a personal interest there.

However, in general, I don't see much value in porting the game to these systems. It will not increase accessibility at all. Anybody with a computer that is capable of downloading my game can run it already in some form. There's no utility there. (...and please don't harbour any expectation that I will actually port it to SNES, Genesis, or DOS.)


Lizard was made for the NES, body and soul. I don't want to redo the art or music for another platform. Everything in the game is touched by the constraints of the NES in some way, and that's a really important aspect of the game to me. I would want any port to be as close to the NES version as I can manage. (See the PC version for a demonstration of what I mean.)

Even now, preparing for a Steam release, I'm looking at the trading card art requirements and not really enjoying the prospect. The ambiguity of pixels in their small resolution is really important to me. I don't want to make official art that forces a single interpretation of these characters. (I welcome fan art though.) Lizard's box art is already a source of cognitive dissonance for me, even though I think it does stay pretty close to the game.

It might be fun seeing Lizard running inside Magiduck's engine, but I'm certain it'd be way too much work.

I totally get this.

What exactly are the requirements? Five cards minimum? Do they care about the contents?

I'd just upscale pixel art by some factor if that was permitted.

Out of curiosity I tried Lizard on PocketNES right now in an emulator. It seems pretty playable. The noise emulation sounds a little weird, and none of the graphic modes are ideal (the full view looks squished, the follow mode will probably prevent you from noticing important things), but this look OK if you really must play Lizard on the GBA.

Even if I wanted to make a native GBA port (which I definitively do not) I think the screen size problem basically makes it not a sufficient superset of NES to be worthwhile without significant redesign. PocketNES is a better compromise.


Is this document publicly viewable?
https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/marketing/tradingcards

It's a whole suite of things: cards, badges, emoji, wallpapers, and extra wallpaper-sized versions of each card too.


I probably will end up drawing a few new things that don't extrapolate too far from the sprites. Right now I've got Blender rendering a pile of cartridges as one of the wallpapers.

I really wish that I was part of the beta testing for Lizard, but I hope that the input that I gave for your demo at least provided some valuable feedback. If I'm part of the beta testing then I feel like I was at least part of the project and thus I'm more likely to buy a cartridge.

Congrats on finishing this!!

All feedback received was useful, yours included.

I wrote an article on this subject: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1101008925/lizard/posts/2098969

So, the digital version is now fully released, available on Steam as of a few hours ago. Info on the game here:
http://lizardnes.com/

The cartridge version will be available for sale this Thursday (March 8, 2018) at InfiniteNESLives:
http://infiniteneslives.com/lizard.php

Congratulations! I'm definitely gonna get myself a cart.
I'm assuming you don't have any European distro, right?

InfiniteNESlives will ship internationally, but they are located in USA.

Shipping isn't the issue
I've bought from INL before though, and have been very pleased with the transaction.

Surprised people aren't talking about this game. Finally got the shipment yesterday, and thoroughly enjoying the game. It deserves a lot of praise.
However...

What exactly does the password save??

I'm sorry if this has already been adressed before, but I got really bummed out from this... after spending several hours with the game yesterday, exploring a large part of the game world and finding and beating four bosses, as well as a majority of the coins in the game, etc. I realised it was getting really late and I should go to bed.

With all the stuff I had done, I briefly considered leaving the NES on, since the password was obviously too short to save all the coins I had picked up. I figured it would be insane to just discard that kind of stuff and thought the game probably has some sort of saveram for it, with the password system kept in as a curiosity...

But, well, seems that it didn't, and my entire progress was lost. Apparently the password saves where I am, and my current lizard, but even the bosses I previously fought, I now have to do all over again? All picked up coins got reset, and world states like opening shortcuts to the castle was forgotten, which makes me feel like even the ability to do that in the first place is kind of pointless.

Now, I'm a big proponent of playing NES games in a single session, and I don't mind doing all the challenges over again (except from the dreary rabbit boss), and knowing where most things are, it will definitely be faster the second time around. But one of my favourite aspects of the game is the exploration and puzzle solving involved in finding all the coins. I have absolutely no idea what they do yet, but I really enjoy finding them, and wanted to go for 100% of them, or at least close to that.
I went all in and took pictures of coins located in areas where I couldn't get to them yet, and went out of my way to backtrack to some areas with a new lizard to pick up some that I previously missed. It took a lot of effort, and especially the ones that involve dropping into blind jumps, or really getting an overview of how areas connect to find, feel like they will be either impossible or unnecessarily exhausting to go for again. I really love the game, but the thought of having lost all that progress is something that just immediately makes me burn out on any game, and very reluctant to pick it up again.

Rainwarrior, I'd really love to see your thoughts on this aspect? It feels like a really tough blow to new players, and I can't imagine you haven't considered it doing development. I guess maybe I'm not playing the game "as intended", but the coins were there, and this was the most intuitive approach to me. :\

Aside from this, the game is great, and I'll go into details about all the little touches I love about it at a later point.

So, to answer the direct question of what the passwords do, they store (or restore):

• 1. Location
• 2. Lizard

Nothing more than this is captured, and nothing more than this is affected.

"Why" questions are a lot harder to answer. Well, if it's something that happened by mistake, that's not a difficult answer, but this is deliberate. I plan to write an article about this a little later, but I'll try to give a short-ish answer now.

Probably the most agonizing thing about game design is that every decision is a trade. Anything that I think will make one player feel good will make someone else out there feel bad, and I don't say this as if it's a numbers game trying to maximize the number of good feels, just there is a constant wringing of hands while thinking about which benefits I think are important enough to justify the detriments that come along with them. What I should keep, what I should give up, what I should change...

So, with that preface I'll try to explain why my passwords are this way. I wish this forum had spoiler tags. I'm going to put the following text in tiny font so that anyone who doesn't want to accidentally read it can hopefully skip it. Sumez you might want to play the game a bit more before reading this, but it's up to you:

AVAST! SPOILERS BE LOW!
I wanted to make a game where you start over ever time you power on. You don't accumulate power gradually like Metroid. You aren't granted incremental progress for every minute played like with XP in an RPG. I wanted that familiarity of starting again at the beginning. (The randomized character appearance is also meant to reinforce this, a small reward for coming back.)

I also wanted you to be able to chose your path, so that you can try different things each time you play. In this respect, there are 6 episodes of this game. Each one is its own a loop of finding a lizard, then finding its corresponding boss. These episodes are overlaid on each other so that you can spend a while getting oriented, learning the space, learning the rules, and planning out your route for each boss. All of that learning is stuff you don't need to encode in a save; once you remember it well enough, getting to where you want to be is fairly quick.

The passwords are for this episodic game. Being able to go back to a place with the lizard you had will let you make incremental, saveable progress toward each of those 6 goals. Each of those episodes has its own "mini" ending, but I also felt it was valid for the player to consider it the actual end of the game.


On top of this episodic game is the "full" game where you beat all the bosses and continue on to get a "final" ending. The primary intent is that this was for people who master the game, a new way to play once you've gotten good at the 6 episodes. Some people don't discover this for a little while, but I'd say most people clue into it fairly quickly. The passwords do not directly help with this long game, but a lot of people will expect that they should. The basic need for the password was for the player that has a hard time completing a single episode in one sitting; the "advanced" player will probably outstrip this need rather quickly, and at that point they might start to seem useless.

The way I did passwords is maybe a bit more subversive to a lot of people than I intended it to be. Generally games made now always have a save feature, or else they are intended to be played through in maybe 30 minutes tops. People have developed a lot of expectations about this. Super Mario Bros. 3 would absolutely have a save feature if it were made today; you can easily compare New Super Mario Bros. as a similar game with a similar length, but obviously has a save feature. As a result, there is a lot of potential for a traumatic dissonance when a player of my game realizes their expectations were thwarted.

I think there is some good in it, and some bad. It will for sure feel very bad for many players at least momentarily, but I hope that most can recover from it. For some that recovery itself will be enjoyable. For others this will be a wound that never heals, and that was a choice I made. As you have already mentioned, you expect you can beat the bosses again pretty quickly now that you know where to go: this was an integral part of this design. If you're willing to experiment a little with the passwords, you might even discover that you could use them multiple times to go straight to the bosses. I very much did intend for this game to work by starting over every time you power on the machine, and I tried to make the design conducive to this, even though that is not how most games are made today. That's partly why I wanted to make this game; I wanted to experiment with this concept as well as others. Restarting from scratch is a core component of the game as intended, but I also did it with the full expectation that this will rub some people wrongly.


Going back to the SMB3 vs NSMB comparison, though, look at the difference in Warp Zones. In NSMB they're kinda vestigial, missable, unimportant, not very useful. In SMB3 they're so important that everybody knows about them, we pre-emptively tell each other about this secret because it's such a rewarding feature to be able to use. You don't need warp zones in NSMB because you have saves, and can go backwards through the map. I guess this all applies even as far back as Super Mario World, where already just having a warp feature was kind of boring and unuseful, so they added multiple layers of things just to add new interest to the warp zones, i.e. unique and weird star road levels + the ultra secret SPECIAL challenges.

The passwords in my game are sort of a low-key warp zone. Something that's not a secret, but figuring out how to use them effectively might (or might not) be an interesting challenge/experiment for the player. I also have cheat codes. For example, there's a diganostic screen cheat you can use as more or less "a password for coins and bosses" if you want to. I consider this not just a debugging feature, but a critical tool for anyone who doesn't want to play the game by its base rules. If you're mad at the game for not saving your stuff, please take control. However, this stuff was deliberately left out of the manual, too. I put the cheat code information out into the world (and it's findable) but making people find it through side channels was something I thought was important. The manual and descriptions of a game are very much a part of it. (I also have the expectation that few people will even read the manual, but that's a whole other discussion.)

There's also emulators and savestates, of course. Pretty much every emulator has this feature, and even the AVS and Everdrive and PowerPak have it. Once again, this was fully in my mind while making this game. It's intended to be completely playable without such a feature, but I think it's perfectly valid to use it if you want it. Again, also very important to me that this is not an explicit in-game feature, though I did implement a weaker version of savestates, more of a suspend/resume feature for the PC version, because I did not want to punish those who wanted to play the long game in sessions by making them use an emulator instead (and most other gaming platforms have a suspend/resume now). The stock NES version will lack savestates, of course, but there are still cheats at least.


Ah, I didn't mention the coins. Well, I hope it's obvious that I designed them to provoke that question about what they do, or whether they do anything at all. I can't say whether you'll be satisfied by an answer to that question, but I think the stuff I said above might obliquely shed light on why they are the way they are.


My next major NES project has already begun, and it's going to be pretty much the opposite of Lizard, in these respects. Don't want to say too much about it, but it'll be a direct and obvious action game, no exploration, no mystery, not so experimental.
HARK! SPOILERS ABOVE!

BTW if there's a question you need answered about the game, I feel like it's much better to discuss the game on a forum with others than have an official response from the author. I don't really want to establish an "official reading" of the meaning of Lizard, but if you ask why I did something that is necessarily an answer about myself and my own interpretation of it. If you do find yourself with an important question that you eventually find an answer to, maybe consider sharing it with others on forums, or maybe submitting to GameFAQs or similar place. I definitely think this game would benefit from a well written guide, but I also feel like it would be inappropriate for me to write it myself. :S

Anyhow, thank you for sharing your experience. I hope to know how you feel about it proceeding from this realization about the passwords. I do not mind at all when people share their experiences of my game, negative or positive.

I worry a bit about trying to thoughtfully answer "why" questions like this because it seems to open the field for argument I don't need or want. If you do have an argumentative response to any of it please keep in mind that this game is done. I will gladly entertain new or interesting ideas, but I have had years to debate every minute detail of this game with myself (and often others) already. ;P Like I'm definitely not trying to justify my decision to anybody, if you don't like it or think it's bad, I don't really mind, to many people the game (or any particular part of it) is bad, but I'm trying to answer the asked question of what I think about the thing I made.

Another interpretation: Compare Super Mario Land 2: 6 Golden Coins, whose six boss stages lose their completion bits upon Game Over.

rainwarrior, I salute you! Awesome game!
Now, I'm only waiting for the 60pin Famicom release

Regarding your first spoiler paragraph, I can completely get behind this. I love that approach, and it's one of the first things to really made me like the game. With a couple of exceptions, you're never really required to do anything specific before anything else, and you can go everywhere from the beginning of the game. It's a brave descision, and the game's design really supports it. I love the "open ended" aproach to using the lizards' powers for navigational purposes (ie. the dynamic "Little Samson" model as opposed to the horribly strict and guided "Little Nemo" model).

I can get behind the idea that learning how the entire world is connected is the "true" progress of the game, and it is my favourite aspect of it. I am kind of confused however, why you'd even have the password system then. I guess this is not the place, or at least it is definitely not the time, to discuss that, but it seems to me that it serves little other purpose than confusing and misguiding the player.
I have also been arguing the value of warp zones over save games many times, but in the case of Lizard, I think the game/world design serves as the warp zone, not the password system.

None of that really has anything to do with my core issue, though, which is the coins. I'm sorry if it sounds like I'm coming hard down on it, but it just seems like a schizophrenic implementation of a collectible system.
On one hand, the coins themselves are extremely well designed. I love the puzzles and challenges involved with each of them. Sure, I have the main challenge of the game to seek out the bosses and beat them (which I did last Friday), but that feels like such a small part of the whole thing considering how fun it is to go for the coins.
Now on the other side of the coin though (unintended pun, I promise), it severely bothers me that I will never go for finding all of the coins, which I assume is required for whatever happens when you do. The reason simply being that some are so extremely well hidden (I'd like to compliment some of them specifically, but I think that would be spoiler'ish) that I would never find them in a single session. I can remember most of them when I turn the console back on, but a lot will be forgotten, and some I will never find. Maybe I will find all of them except one, and I have no idea where to look. I keep looking, and eventually I will have to turn off the NES, which means my progress is reset and I can start all over again.

I ordered copies for a bunch of other guys over here so that we would save money on the shipping and custom fees, and whenever I hand out a copy for each of them, I've been warning them not to spend time going for the coins on their first playthrough, and it just makes me a little sad that I have to tell them that. I guess that's the gist of my issue. Everything else is really great.

Well we are discussing it. Sorry if my last statement seemed like it was trying to shut down discussion. I probably shouldn't have said it that way. I've had good conversations and bad, but here it's been mostly good.


The un-collectability of the coins is antagonistic, for sure. They are designed to look like other coins at first, but eventually realizing that you can't keep them changes that a lot, right? That's what I meant about what I said about the passwords applying to coins as well. They do a thing that is partly familiar and partly not, and realization the latter part is a bit disturbing for most people. I was very interested in how someone recovers from that. You make a choice at that point about how to proceed (or even to stop).

Giving up on collecting all the coins is a perfectly valid choice. Giving up on collecting any at all is just as valid. Depends on what part of getting them is good for you. Similar to the way that the "final" part of the game is something some players won't find naturally, it's okay to me if they experience an "incomplete" version of Lizard. This is also why I made the ending stats give you a coin count but not a collected percent; I didn't want it to be insisting that the player is missing something. On the other end of it, some people have found all the coins, and some people think they've found them all but haven't. I wanted the best way to find out to be by comparing notes with other people.

So, it does create problems for the person who wants to collect them all. It's hard to remember what you've collected. It's hard to find them all. It takes some endurance to even get them all. There are ways to overcome it, though. If you can't remember, you can take notes. If you can't do it in one sitting, you can leave your NES on overnight. Some people have done these things. Some people have done it with no aids at all. Some people have decided not to do it. Some people have cheated to do it. Some people are waiting for a YouTube video to appear that shows them someone else doing what they want to see.


That's actually wonderful to me. You've had a real reaction to the coins, and you're sharing it with others. I appreciate hearing about it.


The only "incomplete" Lizard playthroughs that are disappointing to me is that occasionally someone goes in totally blind, finds and beats one boss, and thinks this was the entire game. A few more people have done this than I expected. I can casually drop hints about the scope of the game in the form of clips in the trailer or screenshots or vague description (or just hope someone is there to tell them), but every once in a while I've seen someone do this. It was an expected consequence of how I wanted the game not to tell you where to go. Like to everyone who has asked me for an automap, to tell you where you've been, to tell you where to go-- that's the complete opposite of what I wanted this game to be.

Especially interesting when I see people discussing the game and deciding an automap doesn't exist because it'd be technically hard to do on the NES. It's not really that hard to accomplish, and I sketched and implemented various forms of one over the course of development to try it out, but I decided that it was much more valuable to not have the game tell you where to go. In many ways this also leans together with the passwords and coins and ephemeral state of the world-- if I implemented an automap it'd be a completely different game for which I would absolutely have wanted to include a battery save, and coins that save. Everything would be different. All of these choices have consequences, and many of those consequences are a net negative for some players, but I couldn't really have it both ways. :S


That's another reason I'm worried about explaining my own intentions. I think for some people it might be better for them to believe I did something a certain way because it was "too hard to do it on the NES" than for them to think that I did something with purpose, because without that crutch to lean on they might think I'm a very mean person. :S I'm not sadistic, and I don't want people to suffer, but many of the ways I intended for one kind of person to enjoy the game will be painful for someone else. If I'm honest I can't say this isn't a deliberate choice that I made, but I don't really want to go out of my way to tell someone who is having a bad time with my game "yes, I wanted this to happen." Maybe that does seem mean? If someone comes to me with a question, though, I usually want to try and answer.

You're not going to be one of those publishers who asserts copyright against people who make such videos, are you? I seem to remember Atlus applying a progressive disclosure policy to public videos of Persona 5, allowing them to be made up through in-game early July at first and then through mid-November later on.


Another way to think about it: Lizard represents a landing operation. The player character couldn't bring that much tech with him into an initially unfamiliar world. But once the character establishes a beachhead, more resources will become available in sequels.

I have always encouraged streaming or making videos or sharing my game in various forms. I officially encourage anything except piracy. I actually think embargoes on streaming are a very stupid business decision in most cases.

I haven't played Persona 5 but I feel like how specific you are being about these "in game dates" is a spoiler in itself. Kinda like anything you try to say about it just draws more attention to it... ...which is not unlike the design problem I was describing with Lizard. I very much believe in the value of surprise. Trying to decide what to put in a trailer or screenshots was a bit agonizing.


Well, that would be an interesting interpretation of Lizard, but probably not compatible with the actual game's ending.

I have zero plans for a Lizard sequel, though. I don't have any idea for a meaningful continuation of it, and I don't really like sequels anyway. I want to make something else. I have 3 other NES game ideas i'm excited about, and they're each in a different genre.

I'm not really sure what to make out of your thoughts on the coin collection, and the intricacies of it. I can totally see why it's amazing from the point of view of a game designer, as people take on the quest of discovering some of the true secrets of the game, and the way it affects the community, much in the same way many NES games came out in a time when people couldn't just look up stuff on the internet, and even magazines had a ton of misleading information.
one of my favourites was following the entire flow of the lava as a stone lizard, from the top of the volcano - I know you don't have to o all the way to get the coin in the bottom, but I loved that it's possible

However, the way it's set up, the only way I see a 100% coin collection being realistic for me is exactly through community effort, which isn't particularly satisfying for me personally as it would essentially be what you hinted at - wait for a YouTube video showing me all the coins, and just follow that. Alternatively I could dump the game and play it in an emulator (which I guess is what the majority of the people who bought the game are doing anyway, or via the Steam version which as I can tell actually does save your progress!

Hell, as a mildly experienced NES developer I'm sure it wouldn't take me more than a few minutes to whip up a LUA script that lets me set the Lizards position with my mouse cursor to quickly scour the entire game for secrets (which I have a theory would turn up a few interesting things, as I have an impression that you really dig that stuff). But I was hoping for a more low tier personal experience of playing the game on an NES via the classic rules and just find a coin one at a time having fun with that. I really enjoy taking notes of coins that I need to get later, and areas where I theorize there is something to be find - but of course that won't work if I can't save my progress. Of course, as you're making clear, that's just not how you designed your game, and I'm not going to tell you how to make your game... but I really feel the game misses out on a potential here, that's ripe for the taking. Even just a smaller goal of something rewarding from finding just a few coins. I'm sure it could be done without compromising the sense of mystery.


Sorry, I was the one trying to make that argument - I really didin't feel like discussing wether the game should have a password system with the things I said in mind, because the game is finished, and you have made your own weighed descision. I just wanted to share my thoughts on it.


That would have been horrible.

Yes, I really do understand the gulf between the ease and appeal of collecting individual coins, and the methodical difficulty of collecting all of them. You're not alone in feeling this gap of effort is too wide, and I am sorry that this is a disappointment. It isn't really something I'd want to go back and change, I'm happy with the way this is, but I do have some sympathy for the player that wishes it wasn't quite this way. I never considered it to be a task for every player to complete, but maybe it was a little more cruel than intended by making the task so obvious as it is.

As for whether it could be a community effort, I consider that an important avenue for it, but only one of many. I've talked to many players who have found all the coins (and some did do it on an NES), and many others who decided it wasn't worth trying. People have managed it on their own, but I do also hope that community stuff can provide a way to close that gap for people that want it to be a little easier to accomplish. Also, I know a lot of people don't like the idea of using cheats, but I wanted that to be a viable option too. Was especially important to me that it have built-in cheating, so that external hardware like a game genie (or emulator) would not be necessary. Of course, hacking is a fine approach too. ...but I consider any way you want to play it valid. It's your game to play.

You don't have to dump it yourself (unless you'd enjoy doing that); I do provide download/steam keys for any cartridge purchases on request (normally through the official lizard at lizardnes.com e-mail).

The PC version's resume feature makes it an imperfect port, but it seemed a necessary compromise to keep it viable vs. using an emulator, and/or providing something like a suspend/resume functionality like most modern gaming devices have. (There's also an option to turn this feature off, too.)

A free demo version of the game is now available on the itch.io page. (This replaces the old alpha prototype demo with something that's a lot closer to the finished game.)

https://rainwarrior.itch.io/lizard

Is the famicom version still coming? INL still shows April/May 2018. I was holding out for a famicom cart, but I might give in and buy the NES cart if it's not coming anytime soon.

Sorry I haven't replied, am waiting on a response from INL.

As far as I know, Famicom carts are a thing that's in motion, but there's probably been some unexpected delays for INL on that. So... I'd expect it to become available within the next few months, but I couldn't say when.

(Sort of related: a Japanese translation may eventually become available as well. Someone has offered to work on that.)

Oh, I may be interested in the famicom one since it is very uncommon to be in that format (and I don't have my original nes any more, sold all my stuff from Canada before moving). But first I need to understand more about the game. I tried the demo without reading much about it (I wanted to be surprised, hate to know too much about a new game) but I had no idea what was my goal so I gave up until I have some time to figure it out ^^;;

I've released the source code. Have started a new thread about that:
https://forums.nesdev.com/viewtopic.php?f=22&t=17944

In an update to Loopy's question, Famicom carts will be available probably in a few weeks. I'm still waiting for a translation to be completed.