Lucky Penguin

Hello!
I'd like to announce a new NES homebrew project. It's a puzzle game called Lucky Penguin.



Lukasz Kur (from recent Oliver Twins NES releases) is the programmer and I'm doing the graphics.
My favorite thing about the visuals is that I'm using flickering on backgrounds (to create illusion of more shades/colors on screen). But you can turn off this effect in case you want a traditional NES look.

Flicker ON vs. Flicker OFF:


I think that all graphics and sounds are already finished. But there's still things to be tested/adjusted related to programming. All screenshots are still WIP - but I think they're already very close to their final version. Feel free to ask any questions about this project. Hope you like it!

It looks very nice from your screenshots! I've wanted to experiment with flicker this way too but haven't found the right opportunity to do so yet.

Good luck with your project!

I tried some of your flicker ROMs from your blog. That 60hz flicker really bothers me, I can see it perfectly. I'd also think it could be an epilepsy trigger.

Link: http://mcbremakes.blogspot.com

Using flicker to get more colors is a very risky thing to do IMO... A lot of TVs, current and old, may not blend the frames as intended. Every flicker demo I have tried on my different consoles and TVs has looked like total fail. At least you're offering the option to turn the effect off, so this may not be such a big deal.

Another thing you should keep an eye out for is how close to the edges of the screen some of the text is... You have text way outside the safe area indicated by Nintendo back in the day, so you may want to rethink some screen layouts or at least make sure that any parts that may be cut won't interfere with the gameplay.

Other than that, the game looks pretty good! I really like the overall aesthetics!

Yeah, when it's a toggle option, i think anything goes - it's great for those who can display it.

But generally, i think subtler switching is the key, e.g. one, two or a few colours in a selected area and circumstance, like some edges or highlights. Changing hue is easier on the eye than changing brightness. In the latter case, if you can provide a material reason for the varyingly visible flicker (striplight or candle light), it's better.

Years ago, I made a demo called RGB121 that uses flicker to coax more colors out of the NES to display dithered photorealistic images. Checkerboard dither interferes with the NTSC artifact pattern, and some alignments between color burst and pixel clock inside the PPU make this interference look awful.

Yes, you probably will need to rethink screen layouts to avoid having a TV cut off the sides. The article "Overscan" on NESdev Wiki explains. I've taken the liberty of illustrating what it looks like under worst-case ("Title safe") and typical-but-bad ("PocketNES safe") situations. Click to zoom.


Also stop using Photobucket unless you can afford $399 per year for the third-party hosting upgrade that it recently started requiring. See "Photobucket Breaks Image Links Across the Internet" by Matthew Humphries.

Thanks! =)



So make yourself a favor and avoid my blog - there are *much* more flickering stuff to come.



Everybody sees it perfectly. I never said this not noticeable.
Majority of people said to me over the years that the visual improvement makes the screen blinking completely tolerable.
Others (especially people here at nesdev) really don't like and I respect it (that's why you can turn it off).



We'll have to wait and see. Let's find out if the cute penguin in fact is a murderer.



That's exactly why I'm doing this. I love experimental stuff.



There are a lot of "Dos" and "Don'ts" when messing with flickering (and I've learned it the hard way). Many stuff I used to do 6 years ago should simply be avoided - however when you know what you're doing I really don't think that end result will look like a total fail. But I know this is not for everyone.



Thanks, I'll take a look!



Thank you!


I'm not using checkerboard dithering. It doesn't work on NES/AV.



Thanks!

------------------

EDIT: Credits screen was changed. Thanks to tokumaru and tepples for the overscan advice.
And to Nesrocks for testing and taking the picture on his old CRT TV! Much better now.

I need to take some time to try and see how many levels I can beat.
To those wondering about the flicker: on my CRT it looks really subtle. Doesn't bother me at all (NTSC). Especially with the technique used with similar colors blended (it isn't flickering red+green pixels for example). I think my tv is super sharp for NES standards, but of course it could be sharper with component cables. Maybe then the flicker would be slightly more noticeable. On a blurrier tv 99% of players wouldn't even know it is flickering (it's hard to notice on my TV if you're not looking for it).
Anyway, in the end, I'm all for using techniques such as these on complete new games for the NES. I think they did an amazing work! What great novelty games could be made if only people opened their minds

Title screen was also fixed (left-old and right-new).
Thanks again for the tips regarding overscan!

This is all I see:

That image displays fine on my end; it doesn't seem to be suffering from a block on external websites... at least not in the way it was in a previous issue was where it replaced with a warning image? (Though, as has been mentioned before, this forum has its own image attachment feature.)

The new title screen looks good!

Thanks!

Demo was just released. We still have to fix a couple of things (like in-game texts position to avoid overscan). These remaining problems won't exist in final game.

Have fun!

Played through! I liked it. Very polished.

Here's some thoughts, if you're interested in opinions:

Difficulty: I like that the difficulty shifts significantly with level style and music. This is the proper place to do so, IMO.

Score: The bonus for getting two clovers within a second(?) is a good way to differentiate scores between playthroughs (besides the time bonus). I kind of feel that the time bonus is a bit overshadowed by the massive amount of points you get for clovers, maybe 500 (and 750 when getting one fast) would balance better against time? But if you're fine with the current balance, that's good too.

Complexity: Will additional mechanics be introduced along the way? Depending on how many worlds the total game will be, new mechanics can help maintain interest, beside increasing challenge.

Sound: It's hard to judge this without a regular tv to plug into, but the pulse (and maybe also noise) channels felt a bit loud? I often find it more relaxing to the ears tone them down a bit relative to the tri wave, which is often used for bass duties - bass frequencies take more energy/pressure to be percieved as 'loud' than hi-mid frequencies, and conversely, the ear is more sensitive to mid-high tones and sounds. Wikipedia article on the subject.

Style: Everything looks adorable! The smooth animation of the character goes well in hand with the "extra" colours.

One thing stood out as slightly less polished than the rest and just perhaps a little bit outside the stylistic direction: the red cross sprite used for showing that flicker is off. Three things on top of my head you could do: a) A black, dark gray or dark blue/teal drop shadow could help a lot. b) and since you know the exact position of the sprite, you can also soften some jagged edges with another colour between the red and the main bg colour. c) To make it more consistent with the theme, you could swap red for pink (the one you use in the checkerboard) altogether.

Semantics: More a question than an opinion. Is flicker the best word to describe to a non-technical gamer what the feature is?

Played through the game. Nice simple ice puzzles, pleasant, not too long. I didn't lose any lives, but maybe that's because I've seen this kind of puzzle many times before.

The flicker looks fine on my laptop screen at least (with occasional momentary twitching), though I'll have to put it on my NES + LCD to see if it looks OK when interlaced... To be honest, though, the graphics look perfectly good with flicker off anyway.

One thing I did notice though, is that because I have FCEUX set to randomize RAM on startup, sometimes the arrows at the edge of the field animate and sometimes they do not (varies from power-on to power-on). This suggests to me that you are not initializing the contents of RAM before you start using it-- at least for the arrows but maybe for other things? I would highly recommend just wiping RAM to 0 in your reset routine.
Edit: Never mind this, I think I was completely wrong.

Another thing at program start is that the gray screen feels more noticable because the music starts right away while the picture is not yet ready. The music is a signal that 'game is on', but the picture is still gray for some while. I think i'd turn it on after all graphics are loaded and in place and the fade in is either done or halfway through. This is being veeeery nitpicky about presentation, though

The music over grey screen doesn't bother me (kinda reminds me of loading games from disk on my Atari ST: always appreciated music to pass the time) but...

...with a lot of modern TVs there is a loss of picture for a second or two (or more) after reset anyway, so anything that starts playing so early can be easily lost. (Kind of like a modern "safe area" but for time after reset?)

I would highly recommend NOT wiping RAM to 0 in your reset routine, at least not until you find out what is causing the observed bug so you can properly fix it instead of assuming crearing RAM once in the beginning will fix everything even long after reset.

Cool game! The flicker is practically unnoticeable on my LCD monitor when it properly syncs up. The sync stays quite well, albeit not perfect, in FCEUX. I guess some other emulators that pay special attention to vsync might work better here.


Are you sure? I didn't get any notifications about uninitialized accesses in NDX, and the game is written in C (I believe) with neslib, so I figure Shiru's initialization code takes care of clearing memory.

It seems, though, that the arrows do not animate when the flicker mode is turned on, so maybe that threw you off.

Re: signal detection/channel switching - That's a very good point! I assume they do that to cancel channel/source switching noise/pops and/or take some time to detect a signal in a stable fashion. The silent pause seems a bit exaggerated though just to hide that or to detect a signal so there might be some other reason?

Edit: Come to think of it, many commercial era games begin with some logo and/or legal notice under silence. This way, we don't notice that sound is cut out on modern tv:s/monitors

Well, if anyone is interested in further reading in this debate, tokumaru and I discussed it thoroughly here previously:
https://forums.nesdev.com/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=15394

In any case, thefox appears to be correct that it fully initializes RAM. I think there is code that fully initializes it to 0 anyway (except for one byte at $27 which is initialized as $08... that should probably be considered a bug in NESlib). So... my guess as to the cause was wrong.


I initially thought it was tied to the flicker mode, but I believe I had them animate and not animate in both modes over several attempts. (Having difficulty reproducing this now though. My observation may have been a mistake...?)

Thank you! It's always good to read compliments - but it's 10 times better to read compliments from a talented artist like you.



Thanks! I've sent your opinions to Lukasz (he takes care of programming and game rules - while I make graphics and the silly Penguin voice only).



We don't have how to change anything in music, sorry. It was made by Ozzed and used under a Creative Commons license - he's not actually working with us.



Thank you very much!



I did the cross sometime ago - but as far as I remember there was almost zero space left for graphics in the bank. So I've made 1/4 of the cross and mirrored/flipped 3 more copies of these same sprites on screen (that's why it will be impossible to make a shadow there, for instance).

I'll make tests with different colors - but I confess I like the brownish-red. It looks very unpleasant and it's sort of what I wanted (I want brainwash people to use flicker all the time!).



Hmm, I don't see problems using this word (even to someone who doesn't know what it means the explanation is just a Google search away). But if you can think a better one feel free to suggest!

I confess I prefer to use a real term instead of creating something like SUPPAGRAFX ON/OFF.
In the box art there's a text like "presented in glorious Flick-o-vision" or something - but it's much more a bad joke than anything.



Thanks Brad! Yes, the demo levels are all easy ones.



Please let me know results of your tests!
And I'm glad you liked regular graphics - I personally can't stand playing the non-flickered version anymore.



I can't give a proper explanation because my technical knowledge is next to zero - but I remember that Lukasz told me that arrows would only move in non-flickered game.



I'll see what can be done. Does the screen starts grey on NES? I know it happens in FCEUX but not in Nestopia (it starts black) for instance.



Thanks thefox! If I'm so crazy about flickering it is because of your Nes Image Converter (I still mess A LOT with this program as a hobby to this day).

I think the patterns you used combined with interlacing degrade the image quality, unfortunately. Look especially at the ice tiles and how they have a bunch of stripes through them:

Now I'm wondering if there's any emulator that offers a 480i interlacing output (ideally with NTSC filter)... even though it'd be the worst option to play anything it would be good for testing since it is a very common playback case on real TVs.


Yeah, I think I just completely misread what was happening, sorry. There's no problem here.


Grey is the colour you get when your palette is filled with $00, which some emulators initialize the palette RAM to. On a real NES I think the startup colour is "random" (but each machine probably boots to one particular colour most often).

On reset, the pre-title screen is just whatever the last background colour was when I hit reset, so blue or white etc. depending on when I pressed reset.

Thanks for testing!
Stripes are there because only line-dithering works on NES (without creating those artifacts that looks like diagonal rainbow lines). Checkerboard dithering would result into a much more convincing effect if NES could display it correctly.

I presume this is already known, but according to CC BY-SA 3.0, you can from a legal perspective "remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially.", provided that you "indicate that changes were made" and distribute those contributions under the same license.

So in case you want to experiment with changing the mix, that's at least doable from that standpoint. Are you using the famitracker engine for sound?
I think my reasoning here is that "flicker" describes what it does to achieve the effect, but it doesn't necessarily describe what the user will get out of it by enabling/disabling. Flicker is also closely related to sprite priority cycling and your average retro gamer will think of blinking sprites. But i don't feel strongly about this. I'm just wondering what other words there might be to concisely describe this technique; in a game or when talking about something using it. Strobe? Colour Strobe? (too long for the menu, i know). Strobe blend?

I had a peek and it did indeed look snugly tucked in at the end of the pattern table.

Demo plays great. Animation is gorgeous, and although I haven't tried it out on hardware, the flickering effect looks good on my mobile phone.

I would consider taking a more marketable approach than "flicker" when referring to it though, especially since most consumers likely associate flicker with sprite flickering (for scanline usage). Something like "Enhanced Color" and "Standard Color" instead "Flicker" and "X Flicker" could be both more informative and sound more commercial.

Then, somewhere in the documentation, or some "learn more" screen of text explain something along the lines of:

Enhanced Color mode alternates specially chosen patterns at a rapid rate to produce the illusion of more colors on screen. The effectiveness of this mode depends on your game hardware, type of display, and visual sensitivity. If you find the flickering of Enhanced Color mode distracting or uncomfortable, select Standard Color mode.

I forgot to contrast the version with flicker off, which I think demonstrates something else important:


Comparing the ice blocks here to the ones with flicker on, you're actually getting some in-between colours already just from the horizontal halftone patterns VS the NTSC + TV signal degradation.

Just food for thought. I don't think either version looks bad at all, but the no-flicker version is definitely better on this TV in my opinion, and it's not to do with the perception of flickering (non-existent because it's 480i 30fps) but just the problem of interlacing.

That's an interesting side effect, but it's somewhat agreed that HDTVs are horrible for retro consoles without proper upscaling, I don't think nes devs should care too much about it. When my everdrive arrives I'll test it out on my led tv and see how it looks, but last time I played smb3 on it I almost puked

Fun. Looks nice. Haven't tried on hardware yet.

The rolling arrows being on the edges whether you can cross at a given location or not seems like a mistake, though.

Ha, very interesting! Thanks for posting.
But as Nesrocks pointed I won't worry too much with the NES + AV + HDTV combo right now (I wonder if there's an uglier way to play Nintendo).


You're right about giving a good explanation on this in the instruction booklet.

However I'll keep the name at title screen. First because it's not incorrect.
Second because there's no space to a bigger name (on screen and in image bank).
Third because I feel I would underestimate people if I replace a technical name to an easier one.

I remember myself as a kid figuring out what "SAVE" and "LOAD" mean when I played Excite Bike (just to give a random example) - then a magazine explained and I loved to learn that. In fact I think that a good number of people from my generation learned English by ourselves only playing videogames (since there was almost zero games in Brazilian Portuguese back in the day). So if someone play this game to have fun - but learn a new concept as a bonus - to me this is edutainment at its best.


I don't have knowledge to change music in Famitracker. If I mess with these songs, I'm sure I'll destroy them!

This is about true for me. I first learned english via my brother introducing me to Magic the Gathering (trading card game). My next source was games like zelda and metal gear (i can hear you giggle from here). Then school.


If you're interested, PM me the ftm files and i'll edit them so you can compare. Should be a quick "job".

It's quite obvious that a lack of good upscaling is bad for the picture, but that doesn't stop it from being convenient.

Most people don't want to buy an extra TV or a $300 upscaler to play their NES games on. They just want to hook it up to the same TV they use for everything else, which has a fixed comfortable position in front of their couch. In "real life" I know a lot of people with an NES, but I'm the only person I know who owns an upscaler. Everybody seems happy with the "worst" but easy solution of just plugging it into their regular TV.

I don't see why this isn't relevant to an NES developer? I think it's a good idea to consider the actual conditions your game will be played under. At least, that's why I'm interested in it.