The Banketh - The Video Game.

**UPDATE 20/03/2017**

Good Morning:

Finally the crowdfunding project for the production of video game The Banketh - The Video Game for the NES console has failed to reach the target of 3.500€

From RetroNES Software we want to thank you for the support offered, and we hope to be able to continue offering another project soon, less ambitious, and with the wisdom that has given us this failure.

Without further ado, many thanks to all. See you.

**UPDATE 07/03/2017**

How it was made The Banketh - The Video Game

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gfiNwqP85qw

**UPDATE 08/02/2017** CROWDFUNDING time!

You can already collaborate in the crowdfunding of the videogame from Verkami: http://www.verkami.com/locale/en/projec ... video-game

We have 40 days to get a minimum of 3. 500 euros to make this project a reality.

The video game itself, consists of the cartridge, box, instructions, and protective case. It has been priced 39 € (shipping costs to Spain included).



It also offers the acquisition of cup with the logo of RetroNES Software and blue shirt with the cover of the game.

But maybe what interests you most is the complete video game pack plus beer La Grúa, who will make a special run of his Australian Pale Ale with the video game cover The Banketh in its labeling. It's cool.





I leave you the promotional video of crowdfunding:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BwKwSSHDvXg

DEMO: download/file.php?mode=view&id=7513

Well, after many months of work, I can make the presentation of my project, The Banketh - The Video Game.

I want to get a demo in a few days. For now I can teach you images of the game and some gif.

The game is linear adventure type, but with small details of exploration.

It is composed of 5 levels, plus 4 sub-levels that make connection between the previous ones. In this way, the first level is a culvert, the second level is an office, the third level is a park, the fourth level is a cargo ship, and the fifth level is an old street. Between level and level we must mount in a motorcycle and overcome some obstacles to reach the next level.

Mutant monsters have kidnapped my four friends and I must go through all Santander in their search, and then exterminate the chief of the mutants. Very simple.

Each level has a riddle or secret to discover to be able to overcome, whether keys, buttons or anything else that is hidden.

All scenarios are based on locations in the city of Santander (Spain).

It is mounted on a UNROM 128Kb card.

Programed in C with the Shiru library.

I have to create the music. For now I have only been able to create some sound.

It also contains some bugs that I still have to solve. Some problem with collisions, etc ...

I teach you captures:







The reason why it was relatively hidden was just so my friends did not know anything, since the main objective was to make them a Christmas gift with this video game.

I explain a little: The Banketh is a name that means nothing. It is a play on words mixing Spanish and English. When we were very young, we spent a lot of time sitting on a bench in a street near our homes, and sometimes we played the "Spanglis" that was invented words in English with words in Spanish; Simply by laughing a little at how ridiculous those words sounded.

In this way, as we were always sitting on a bench, it occurred to us to play the word game with this (in Spanish it is called "banco"), and came out "banketh ". And since then we call ourselves The Banketh.

Today at last, being Christmas, my friends have woken up with the finished gift (lie, it really is BETA 1.3) under their Christmas trees. Some have cried a lot, because they did not expect it, and in general the reception has been very great.

The next objective is to fix the problems of the game, create music, improve the sound, outline some levels, and later make a crowfunding campaign ... although the latter I still have to think a lot.

Right now there are 5 units that I have created by hand, and it has remained like this:



A greeting from Santander. I'll go slowly posting the news.

Keep up the good work.

Very niceueno! ;-D

Jajajaja, yesi!

Looks great! Congrats for your first game. The physical version looks goorgeous by the way

Very cool!

At last. Here you have a small demo composed by the first level and a subphase where we can drive a motorcycle and dodge obstacles.

The reason for the delay was because I have been sick with the flu and because I had no music. In the end I have invented something as I could, but I do not rule out that I end up resorting to some professional for that work.

**UPDATE 09/01/2017** DEMO

download/file.php?id=7513 [64.02 KiB]

Please leave your impressions.

Congrats for your game !

I know that I'm not good at video games, but I don't understand where I can get a weapon to beat those monsters ?!

There is the grace of the game: discover where things are

OK got it ... I guess I really suck at it haha

This is pretty cool! A zeldaesque dungeon crawler in a modern town.

Here's a suggestion after my first try: Consider excluding the player objects' head from the hitbox so that it's more of a square. Getting hit when think you're walking by doesn't feel right. This problem also leads to the player being able to fall in a hole that's north of the player when pressing left or right.

Is there a way to back out of the story back to the title screen other than waiting it out?

Being able to reach the boss before getting the weapon and having the door close on you is something i'd want to alter somehow, either by being able to exit, or by having to destroy the door mechanism with the weapon in order to open it or something else.

Same here for me.

Maybe you could use a 'walkbox' to avoid falling in a hole.
And yeah handle Z axis to avoid being hit when walking in front of an enemy could be good.

However this is very nice !

All your suggestions are welcome. I'm not a professional in the field, and above all the issue of collisions has given me headaches.

I'll try to improve on the head and the cliffs. In level 3 there are some mobile platforms that I must also improve. My friends have been able to play the whole game and have mostly complained about those platforms.

I'm not a pro at programming, but I do what I can

After all, this is a beta.

Same goes for me.

How do you currently define the player characters' area for hit detection? Knowing that may help me and others provide leads on what you may try.

When I saw the title a Banquet/Feast (pt: Banquete) immediately came to mind. When I opened the thread and saw the title screen I thought of something in the lines of "The bench cometh!" (bench is exactly the same in spanish and portuguese).

An unique title, definitely . Suits well your game since it also feels unique. Can't wait to try the demo.

Many people will see such platforms as a terrible injustice. Welcome to the 8bits era.






What do you mean? I do not understand the question.

The player has four collision points (top_left, top_right, bottom_left, bottom_right) as well as enemies.



Thanks!

Pardon me. Let me elaborate the question:

1)the player character is made up of four sprites, unless you're using 8x16 mode. which of the sprites' x/y positions do you use for a base when calculating your collision points?

2)What offsets are you using to calculate these points?

Why would the meta sprite data directly dictate collision data? Make an object system, and have collision data as well as meta sprite data as just attributes of that object. The object itself has X/Y coords. All other X/Y positions inside the object are relative to the main object coords.

Yes, that is much better.

However, collision box properties+position and sprite position still relate to one another in practice, albeit indirectly via the object position. A mismatch between these two is what's causing the hit detection to be percieved as off/misguiding in relation to what you see on screen.

Within a few days I launched the crowdfunding campaign through Verkami. I leave you an advance:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BwKwSSHDvXg

**UPDATE 08/02/2017** CROWDFUNDING time!

You can already collaborate in the crowdfunding of the videogame from Verkami: http://www.verkami.com/locale/en/projec ... video-game

We have 40 days to get a minimum of 3. 500 euros to make this project a reality.

The video game itself, consists of the cartridge, box, instructions, and protective case. It has been priced 39 € (shipping costs to Spain included).



It also offers the acquisition of cup with the logo of RetroNES Software and blue shirt with the cover of the game.

But maybe what interests you most is the complete video game pack plus beer La Grúa, who will make a special run of his Australian Pale Ale with the video game cover The Banketh in its labeling. It's cool.

One week later, one-third of the project exceeded.

First of all, I must thank you all for all the support you have received. On Wednesday of last week began this crowdfunding and seven days later we already have 1. 167 € raised; a third part.

From the retroNES Software team we could not be happier. As a thank you, we are going to show you a few pictures of the development moment of the video game The Banketh - The Video Game on paper, which especially the curious ones will surely please.


Before you begin, draw the concepts on paper. Already he had thought about the phases of the motorcycle, and also began to imagine about the perspective of levels.


The maps of the five levels. In the end there were too many changes and have nothing to do with the final result.


Initially the street would be walkable, and had to walk to the motorcycle before riding on it.


Scheme on the development of collisions. No doubt what brought the team to the top.


Function loading procedures and more collisions. At first there was a box that we moved across the screen pushing it. This served to perfect the shocks.


A very primitive image (about June 2016) of how the game was initially seen graphically.

This is a page of the instructions of the video game. They belong to the beta of last Christmas, which was given to the protagonists of the video game.

The tone of humor is important to add value to the charisma of enemies. The grades will be improved, and for the english version, it will obviously be translated.

The translation of this page would be like this:

Green mucus
This mutant being is born directly
Of the sewers of Santander
City. It is part of the waste that
Could not be eradicated in the
Sanitation works on the bay
Of 1996.

White mucus
Its origin is similar to that of Moco
Green, with the difference that
Set of their organic remains
They leave directly from the Faculty
of Medicine.

The eye
A failed experiment inside
Of the Faculty of Chemistry did
That this being was born. Appears
Both in ponds and in
Precipices.

Nuclear sun
A piece of walking sun
Devotes to bouncing between matter
That surrounds him.

Surveillance Cameras
Bought in china. More than
Watch, shoot
Nor are they. In addition, they
I live all over Asia via television
by cable. An entertainment, listen.

Security guard
Your mission is to secure the area.
This demoniac, so much
Eye with what you do.

This video is a mere curiosity about a first alpha as a test that arose during the development of The Banketh.

It contained the first enemies, collisions and objects, as well as the selection menu. In addition, the doors between screens were functional, and it was even thought to develop parts both outside and inside within the same level.

On the upper left side you will see a series of indicators in pink. The first one told us which room we were in, the second one told us how many enemies there were in the room, and the third one told us what state was the animation of the sprite of Rulo.

As curiosity you will see the box object, that could be pushed and even interacted with the enemies.

You can also see that at first it was thought of the way the enemies did damage, pushing Rulo to one side. Discarded by problems with the collision of walls.

The music that sounds belongs to @dougeff game that he used in one of his many development tutorials for the NES.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QUmYlvHNYCk

How it was made The Banketh - The Video Game
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gfiNwqP85qw

There's just one week left. Encourage!

https://www.verkami.com/locale/en/proje ... video-game

Good Morning:

Finally the crowdfunding project for the production of video game The Banketh - The Video Game for the NES console has failed to reach the target of 3.500€

From RetroNES Software we want to thank you for the support offered, and we hope to be able to continue offering another project soon, less ambitious, and with the wisdom that has given us this failure.

Without further ado, many thanks to all. See you.

It looks like you've done a lot of great work with high production value. I hope you are able to finish it up and do a good release.

Are those manual images set in stone, though? Your manual picture shows that the screenshots used for the characters and enemies are extremely low-quality JPEG screenshots with tons of color artifacts. You may not want to print them that way... The security guard character shows this a lot.

Indeed, it is the BETA manual. The end result would not be like this

UPDATE 2019

After two years of the crowfunding attempt to be able to manufacture one hundred units of The Banketh, this April I have finally returned to the project.

As you know, the aforementioned crowfunding stayed at a thousand euros to achieve the goal and had to give up. After this, I disregarded the project and got involved in others of lesser depth, although equally difficult and laborious, where I was able to learn new things and develop better in the programming techniques to take advantage of the console.

Right now the Banketh project has been redone, taking advantage of the original code as much as possible, but making very important base restructurings.

IMPROVEMENT OF BACKGROUNDS CREATION:
Among the improvements we have the metatiles inclusion to form the scenarios. Before I used the tool to create backgrounds and sprites NEStool, from Shiru. This tool made it possible to create our graphic tileset easily, and allowing to save raw and compressed backgrounds, than the CC65 compiler, understood and then expressed in our final development. The downside is that in the end consumed a lot of space in the ROMs we have for our video game, and used again and again tiles that we repeated constantly in each background. Come on, that everything less optimal.

Now we have created a system of METATILES of 16x16, where we use the tiles that we need to create these metatiles. This generates an address file forming a hexadecimal array that represents these metatiles, which we can then use to create our screens thanks to the Tiled map editor. This gives us a range of possibilities and we managed to compress A LOT the space destined for backgrounds that The Banketh had.

In addition, the space for the marked lives, points, etc ... that was repeated on each screen, now only read once and repeated where we want, which helps to further compress the space.

To show an image:

This was the space reserved for the five original levels of The Banketh's beta in 2016:



This is the current space using the same five levels taken from the beta of The Banketh using the metatile system:



As you can see, the space used is WOW, which allows it to be used to create even bigger and more complex levels, add new ones, improve them, put better cutscene, etc ... Whatever comes to your mind.

Now I'm still using the NEStool tool from Shiru, but only to create the tiles and in any case capture backgrund tests to see how the graphic creations are on the screen, before creating an array of final metatiles. Apart from this, I still use it for the creation of sprites and frames of animations, which is very good.

IMPROVEMENT OF COLLISIONS:
The collision system has been partially changed. The way in which our sprites interpret the map where they have to move, but with improvements is preserved.

The mapping of collisions, which was previously a file independent of the background that was loaded after this in memory, now with the same fate, associating each metatile created a data type of "colision", "no_colision", of so that it is read only once, it gets into memory and the machine already knows that metatiles collide and which do not.

In addition, thanks to the library nesdoug we use the function chek_collision(), written in assembler, for the collision between sprites. Before I used a code written in C for this same function, but it consumed many resources and gave some problems (sometimes, it is not known why, there were invisible collisions in the map) that have now been solved.

IMPROVEMENT OF BOSS LEVEL 2:
Right now I'm going with this on my hands. In the original beta of The Banketh, the boss was a helicopter with three attack routines. This did not make much sense, since all the enemies are mere mutants, even the bosses, and the helicopter was an easy way out that I found at the time to finish the project on time.

Now it has been changed by a giant city pigeon, which... I think you'll like it. It is not finished yet, but it looks very good:

Version 2016


Current now



NOTE: This text is translated with Google Traslater from Spanish

Nice to see this project is still alive !

Looking great. Congrats! You know, never cancel projects, just postpone them

Unless you discover a problem that requires a project to be postponed until someone unrelated to you dies and then for 70 years after that. One of my own NES projects is in that situation; I can explain over PM.

This video game was never really dead, there have simply been changes in my life and I have had to delay it. But I've always had the intention of improving it again and creating another crowfunding in the near future.

I leave a video for you to see how this boss of level 2 behaves. You have to improve things:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XVJ2bSnw5Dk

In this video I show how the progress of the script of the final boss of level 2 of the game The Banketh is going.

Originally, in the beta version, this was a helicopter, but this did not make any sense given that the history of the video game narrates an attack of mutant monsters, and in this way, it was best to put a transformed animal and not something mechanical.

I chose for this a city pigeon, typical of Santander, and transformed into a mutant.

It has three differentiated attack routines as you can see.

You still have to fix some details, but practically, this will be the final boss of this area and his way of attacking.

The sprites of my friends when they are rescued, have been completely redesigned.

Before they were very ugly.

Before:


Now: