Super Marxsky Comrades

Hello!!! For awhile now I have been chipping slowly away at an NES game engine.
The engine itself is pretty simple; one-way scrolling; RLE compressed meta-tile map format; Scriptable Objects; etc. The level editor I use is Tiled and I have written my own tool to convert Tiled's XML format to my map data and Enemy/Object data formats. Boss related functionality is still under construction so to advance to the next level just jump up and hit the Boxy looking guy drawn to the background layer (and pray you don't have epilepsy).

What I intend to build with this Engine is what I would call the Eastern Bloc knockoff of SMB. You play as Karl Marx hopping across the rooftops of sloppily constructed pre-fab apartment buildings in Eastern Europe, fighting for your life against the Capitalist elements creeping into your glorious Commie Utopia. Your weapon of choice? The glorious patriotic yellow hammer of socialist democratic justice! It is up to you to save the motherland from the Imperialist dogs of war!

tl;dr Here's 3 demo levels I put together. The music isn't mine; they are the demo songs bundled with famitone. However the lack-luster programmer-art graphics are mine!

EDIT4:
Fixed translation. Thank you Eugene.S.

I thought I recognized the music.

BTW, if you press 'select' the top says 'ERROR' and the game crashes.

Cool!

I find the play control (particularly the speed and acceleration of the player) to be extremely difficult, and a bit frustrating.

Oops! Forgot to mention that select executes a BRK instruction and thus goes to my IRQ-Error Handler ( really useful if I screw up some stack operation and it winds up executing a brk somewhere in ROM)



Thank you! I'm working on implementing some form of friction to make it a bit easier to navigate.

Not a bad start.
You can start a jump when not on the ground in a way that's not due to an input buffer.

You can do it after falling for a while, and it can zero out your speed only to fall again. It looks pretty odd.

Hammers aren't destroyed after death.

Player control is indeed quite slippery.

Jumping physics are a bit reversed. In real life you're going the fastest when you start the jump, and gravity pulls you down (until you're falling at the same speed you started rising). (A bit like adding a fixed value to Y speed every frame.)

Variable jump heights tend to preserve the fastest going up thing. You can add the most at the start of the jump when A is held to offset gravity, or set Y speed to a fixed value when A is released (if Y speed is not already greater than that arc value), or increase gravity when A is not held as opposed to (essentially) decreasing gravity when A is held.

Just some thoughts.

Edit: Oh right, you run faster than your projectiles. It's worth reconsidering that.
Edit2: Permanently stuck due to one-way scroll plus collision:

How do you make those GIFs? Do you first have to export to AVI and then convert that?

Licecap, Gifcam, take your pick. (There might be something for linux, but I don't know it.)

I prefer licecap, but gifcam is better for most people I think.

Alright! Looks like I have some bugs to fix this weekend. Thank you Kasumi et al. for your suggestions and/or bug reports.

I think I have [hopefully] improved movement and jumping. Some of the glitches and oddities Kasumi pointed out should also be corrected in this build!

Edit:
Updated ROM build in the original post!

'd go with using an emulator's video capture/dump function and then avconv(formerly ffmpeg) it to a gif.

Added a speed toggling feature by pressing Select and added friction as a property of tiles. What do you guys think of that? Perhaps I could make the speed toggling an unlockable thing.

Why "Град Товарищ!" ? Do you use machine translate?

"Град" means ice balls on storm
Also "град" means shorten "город" = town, city

The common English word for "ice balls" is "hail". The same word "hail" is also a salute or greeting, like "hello" but kind of has a military connotation.

So, probably it was trying to translate "Hail, comrade!", but the translator picked the wrong meaning for "hail"?

"Ура, товарищи!"
or
"Пролетарии всех стран, соединяйтесь!"

Will be much more retro and communistic-like

Super Stalin Bros?

I'll update the title screen soon. Thank you for the correction.