Lunar Limit (Ludum Dare)

The game I made for this week's Ludum Dare is called Lunar Limit. It's an early 1980s-esque arcade shooter about blasting space ships and dodging bullets. In the game, you're in control of a miniature version of planet earth; "Mini Earth", and must use your faithful satellite; "The Moon Cannon", to survive.

Controls:

• DPad - Move Earth
• A/B - Rotate moon
• Select - Use Powerup

Let me know if you find any serious bugs before I submit it to the Ludum Dare website.



Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hya0hYITBwQ

Enjoy!

Edit: I've fixed a rarely-occuring crash and have uploaded a second rom.

Nice job. I'm especially impressed at how effortlessly it gets really hectic without slowdown or annoying consequences in the gameplay.

This game is pretty fun.

Interesting way to aim, and I remember that "infinite bullets" idea. The mini earth is cute.

I like it.

As for bugs, after the PPU warmup I notice there is one frame of "random" (uninitialized) sprites before the game starts. Seems to indicate that your OAM buffer in RAM is not initialized. If it's just that, it's probably inconsequential, but if you're not initializing the rest of RAM you might want to.

It also seems that you can pass through ships (but not bullets). That's probably not a bad design, just I was surprised by it.

Consider adding "D-Pad - Move Earth" to your list of controls.

(I tried the game out before clicking on the video. I don't usually think of the Earth as being able to move, and I didn't try pressing the D-Pad until after several Game Overs.)

This is ace. Love the use of the nametables, too.

This is awesome; I love it! I like the infinite bullets to allow for greater control of your tiny world.

Always nice to see another entry for older consoles. I'll be sure to poke at it again once voting goes live.

Thanks for the comments everyone.

I wrote a short article on the danmaku.nes bullet code for the Ludum Dare blog. It's written for non-nesdev people and there's a bit of hyperbole and bombast in there to make it sound more interesting/technical than it really is, but if you're interested here's a link:

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/ ... cal-part-1


Haha. Whoops!


Should be fixed in the version on the LD site.

This looks outstanding!

This is really neat!

I'll be honest, when I first saw the danmaku demo using nametables for bullets, I didn't see what the purpose of it was, especially with the non-smooth movement. But here it totally makes sense; the shakiness actually helps the enemy projectiles to stand out, and making the background out of sprites solves the problem of not having any nametables to work with. The added camera drift completes the effect nicely. Color me impressed!

The technical aspect of this game is insane

Really impressive work!

This game is good I like this game. However, I have some ideas of altering the scoring a bit (so they aren't always a multiple of ten):

• If you collect heart when you already have nine lives you can earn three points.
• If you collect alphabets that you already have then you can earn one point.
• If you activate "B" to destroy everything then you can earn one point.

The battery version that can save the high score can also be the possible idea, to more easily to keep track of high score. (I think my highest score is something a bit more than 09000 although I did not actually keep track of it.)

Also, why it says eleven games even though is only one game and why it says VCS even though it is actually NES?

There is also a bug sometimes the hearts and alphabets will seem to teleport to a different location rather than moving properly.

Thanks. I'll look into that if I ever work on the game again.


It was a parody of VCS box art, which tends to be nonsensical.

Space invaders was 112 games, apparently: http://www.videogameobsession.com/video ... rs-vgo.jpg

It wasn't really completely nonsensical -- The VCS (Atari) boxes listed the number of game variations. Many Atari games had quite a few game modes -- sometimes as simple as adjusting difficulty or enemy speeds, but sometimes having major feature changes between versions (Space Invaders, for example, had modes with invisible enemies, bunkers or no bunkers, 1 or 2 players, enemy bullets that could move horizontally (or not), and more). Once you had all the permutations of those features, you could easily come up with 112 variations. I'll admit that calling them separate "games" was a stretch, but it did make some level of sense.

I also wondered, when seeing your box, how to access the other 10 game modes.

It made as much sense as 9999-in-1 Famicom multicarts that have about 40 unique. At least Action 52 was more honest.

Can this be included on the cartridge alongside the 2016 compo entries?

Yes, as I mentioned earlier.

Yeah, this is even in the coverart.

Anyway, is that a custom watercolor for the coverart? It's very good.

I missed that, thank you.

It's an ink drawing by Galileo.

I recently got a AVS system from RetroUSB and decided to test all of Action 53 games so far.

This game glitches quite spectacularly on the AVS (on all firmware versions I can get, up to v1.20).
The earth ship rotates through all the CHR tiles, while shooting random sprite types that remain on screen like mines, and other types of side effects when memory gets overflowed like that.

Nothing wrong with the game, just an interesting tidbit. I might read up on the source code to try to figure out what the AVS is tripping on.

Edit: I think it's most likely the alr ($4b) and/or axs ($cb) unofficial opcodes in the sprite computation code.

That's interesting. I didn't even think about the AVS choking on unofficial opcodes until now.

Mishandled unofficial opcodes should make the music in STREEMERZ and Driar malfunction.

I checked it out by running blargg's nes cpu test (keeping in mind the website redirections), and found that the AVS implements AXS. So the MUSE music engine will work. however the AVS definitely chokes on ALR.