Ludum Dare The Sequel: Who Dar-rays Wins

Ludum Dare is coming up this weekend. I'm working on a big project, but intend to knock up a quick nes puzzle game on the side around the theme.

Who else is in?

Man, I haven't done Ludum Dare in like a decade. Maybe I'll give it another shot this weekend.

Any musicians interested in teaming up?

I'll be doing it. Not sure exactly what kind of game I'm going for, but I'll definitely be making an NES game. Probably going to try my hand at a cc65 project this time. (Most of what I've done in the past has been pure ASM.)

Using this as a base: https://github.com/cppchriscpp/nes-c-boilerplate

Looking forward to seeing other retro entries again!

I'll stream on https://www.twitch.tv/pubby8

Dunno if I'll make anything though. Might quit in a few hours.

Sounds excellent!

The theme is "a small world". I have no ideas yet, but I have a nice CC65 framework set up for when I (eventually) do.

I look forward to seeing what you two make.

Here's what i have so far - not sure what I'm building yet though. Maybe nothing too original.



This is loading levels built in tiled and compressed to the same format as Sumez's level editor.

ccpchrisccp - I checked out your boilerplate code, nice choice with MMC1! Does MMC1 allow for switching of nametable mirroring while the cart is running?

Yes it does! There's actually a function in boilerplate to do that: set_mirroring(MIRROR_VERTICAL|MIRROR_HORIZONTAL)

If I get time I may be using that for some cheap scrolling between screens.

Also I like your graphics - I'm about to the same point with loading levels, however my graphics currently look like hot garbage. Oh well, enough to build some mechanics on, at least.

Stream is going back up. https://www.twitch.tv/pubby8

ccpchrisccp - thanks! I'll have to check out that code. MMC1 is one of those that switches the whole bank as well, is that right? I quite like the idea of that, as it seems you could make something with two split game types quite easily.

pubby - I checked out your stream, I look forward to seeing what you put together, that engine you posted a while ago was great. I was flicking through and think I saw some kind of awesomely complex build chain?

Here's where I am so far - we have full physics with collision. They're not optimised - pressing select will show the frame time - and most of that is taken by pulling individual tiles out of storage as I don't use a separate collision map.

Any comments welcome. I've tried to go with an exaggerated loony toons feel for the character. The sprites are quite rough still.

I realised I'd actually bracketed out the deceleration, so that has more instant twitch controls then I was expecting.

Here it is with proper deceleration!

It looks great! I hope you finish

I absolutely dig the style of the animation. Looks superb.

Thanks!

I've been working on the main trick of the game all morning and it's getting there...



How is everyone else doing?

Here's the current build - gravity is working, and the frame of the map is there. I've got about 7 screens to do and then tying the whole thing together with pickups and win fail states.

Any comments welcome, especially if you find yourself getting stuck in walls or something similar.

Select is also set to switch your gravity manually as debug.

Really nice idea, reminds me of some of the 2D stages in Mario Galaxy, and I can totally see it expanding into a bigger game.

I got stuck in the room under the number 19, when standing on the floor with "regular" gravity and leaving to the left you end up inside a wall.
Also the tree on the room where you start has some funny collision detection, I can sort of provoke it by jumping into it from a bit to the right, angling it so that the jump arc connects with the corner of the tree. A wild guess says it could be caused by an open area that's lower than your character's bounding box? Classic issue.

Hi Sumez,

Thanks! I've fixed the number 19 clipping (I think) and worked a little on the jump - you can no longer get your head stuck in objects - not sure if this fixes the tree issue though..

Here's the latest build. Around six more screens, some inventory logic, lives, and few other bits to go.

Awesome, a few people doing ludum dare for retro consoles. Ran into a guy who did a game on the vectrex on IRC, so that's pretty cool.

Here's my entry: See Entry
Or play it online here: Play
Or... since you already know how awful the web-based emulator is, here's the rom: Download

Or, just check out the god-awful source: Source Code
(Note: Yes, I did some awful, awful things, both in terms of code and in terms of RAM/ROM space usage, etc... it's interesting what you find yourself doing with a strict time limit.)


Just played with the rom of "A Small World" and I like the quirky movement! Super curious what the final game looks like.
Looks like Pubby's got a separate thread, so I'll check out that one there.

Man, that was really neat. I loved collecting the worlds and seeing how the level would grow. And it was impressive how many screens you had in the game. Making levels takes more time than people think.

I only wish it was a bit harder (I like sadistic games!), and that the player's bounding box was a bit tighter, but other than that it was great.

Also, that online emulator was good idea. I tried a few Javascript ones with my game this morning but none of them worked. I'm hoping that's because I used illegal opcodes and not something else.

Thanks for the feedback!

I've found two web-based emulators that are passable. The one I typically use is nesbox: http://nesbox.com/emulator - the project seems to be dying/dead, but it has pretty good support for anything I've ever done. (I've yet to find a JS one that's workable, sadly...) The only real downside is some minor input delay, and some major sound delay. It's generally playable, though.

I recently found this one that looks promising too: https://bitbucket.org/tsone/em-fceux - my only issue with it is that on my machine, it constantly produces right inputs, making most games extremely hard to play. (I should really file that bug...)

So I managed to get mine in before the deadline, which is excellent.

Here's the latest release,





(edit: swapped out from original version for a bug in sprite blanking and screen changing)

edit: added a version to fix a bug in the final screen


also on itch.io here:

https://team-disposable.itch.io/a-small-world

and ludum dare link here:

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/$27471

I intend to make an out-of-competition version and activate the coins, which are currently just non-collectable clutter.

Also, there is a bug on the end screen causing some random garbage to appear on screen. I'm not sure why as I'm not writing anything to the screen there.

Anyway, let me know if you play it and have any comments!

EDIT: Also, I forgot to mention - this uses shirus NES library (exclusively just the OAM sprite loader, I wrote my own functions for everything else), and also has famitone in the codebase (although it is not used), both of which are wonderful pieces of code!

Just played through and managed to beat it!



Great entry; that was a lot of fun! I do have a couple nitpicks:

You already know the coins being uncollectable is a bit off-putting at first, but no big deal especially where you mention it first thing. also made my way to one of the floating disk things. (Also not collectible) and got a little discouraged when that wasn't the goal either. I eventually found the right things though. One thought: Could you have just set the image for those sprites to be empty in your chr file to hide them in a quick-and-dirty way? I tend to let a lot of hacks like that slide when I do things like Ludum Dare - it's a short coding contest; I'm not gonna be maintaining my code for years to come.

the other thing - I was kinda sad there was no music or sound. I'll be the first to admit I'm awful at both of those things - I've yet to make a song I've truly liked and my sfx aren't much better. That said, in playing games by others over time I've found any music/sound at all really adds to the game. It's something I'm really sad I didn't get in the Gameboy game I did a while back.

That aside, I really enjoyed playing it.

I really liked the direction mechanic. The controls took a moment to get used to (my up is now the character's left? What is this madness!? .. then my brain broke) but it made sense and worked. I also really liked the art (esp the main character) - it's really hard to make anything with a 2-3 day limit. My frog looks like a paint blob got in an unfortunate accident, so I have to respect that.

Always a pleasure to see more retro games made during these things; thanks for a fun little diversion!

That's great feedback, thanks!

It having been a little late in the day, it literally didn't occur to me to patch them out. It would have been the sensible option, definitely - I think I was still rather hopeful to get them fully working in time. Here's a quick patched post ld version:





edit: ld2 new build with bug fix and entry point back in to map

edit: ld4 with collectable coins, however they don't do anything yet

Currently I've been leaving sound dev until last - however that seems to invariably mean it doesn't get done. I'll definitely bump it up a few notches for the next project.

Thanks for taking the time to play the game and for the excellent feedback!

That was tricky! It took me a while to beat it. The flipping gravity was more clever than I first though.

Good job.

Also, it seems like you got all of the bugs worked out, so that's good. I didn't get stuck in walls like I did in the beta version, heh.

I'd definitely play this if it were made into a bigger game.

I tried this in FCEUX and got stuck on the far right side, after "THIS WAY OUT". At top right (A) is "YOUR RIDE IS LOW ON CRYSTALS"; I can't proceed past this. At bottom right (B) is a screen that repeats if I go down. where if I go down x times, I have to go back up x + 1 times to leave. And if I try to reenter through "THIS WAY OUT", when I jump to position C, I get pushed through a block at the far left side of the screen.

And why B to jump?


EDIT: Added screenshots

Thanks for playing the game! I'm glad you enjoyed it! I fixed the bug Tepples discovered, and added an entry point back in to the map for more adventurous souls. The gap to get back in the map seems like a bit of a big modification for a Ludum Dare release, so I've put that one in the post-dare release.




B to jump as it's the only button used in the game, and I like B!

In the gravity maze, you can fall through the floor where the bright purple-pink arrow is.

(huh, an actual reason to want a real spoiler tag in this forum...)