A Homebrew Game I made called Get It!

Hello everybody. I'm mostly a lurker, but I've made a few posts and would like to become more of a community member.

This is a game I made a while back that I want to share. It's my first NES game. It's simple, but I'm proud of it.

http://www.gravelstudios.com/getit/

I'm (slowly) working on another game now. Anyway, thanks for your time.

Haha, love the pac-man style personality for the enemies! I like how the collisions with the wall feel smooth, well done. I imagine it's even better for 2 players. The way the enemies leave their hut reminded me of arkanoid.

I enjoyed the music and sfx. One suggestion for a score-based game, it's probably best to tack a couple of zeros onto the end, just makes it feel like you're getting more points.

Thanks for the replies!

I'll be honest, even as a kid, I always thought that scores always being a multiple of 10 or 100 was contrived. It's just a personal pet peeve of mine. I like it that that counter represents individual items.

On a related note, I figured that it would take over 24 hours of uninterrupted gameplay to roll the gem counter back over to 0.

I disagree. I do not like that, even though many games include such thing.

I love the look of this game, will get me and the kids to have a go on this one tomorrow night

Congrats on finishing your game off!

FYI, it's really designed to be played with a joystick rather than a d-pad. on an emulator, use a controller with an analog stick. If you play it on an NES through a flash cart, it really shines with the NES advantage.

I appreciate all the positive vibes. And I didn't mean to be too critical of the scoring suggestion. I think I came off kind of negative there. Thank you guys.

I can happily say it has passed the "let the kids play with i"t test!

They enjoyed playing through your game as best as they could, my littlest particularly liked the music

I just played the game for the first time today.....

I LOVE IT! Amazing work. So simplistic yet so strategic. It's so hard for me to stay in the "safe zone" lol. Fantastic. I'll upload a video soon.

Okay, finally got around to making a video.

First of all.... AMAZING GAME RIGHT HERE! Love the graphics, gameplay, simplicity, music.

Here is a video.

Get it! a new NES game

My current score right now is 5,032 with 29 lives left. I actually quit on purpose just because. The video is cut short though. I think I have mastered the game well enough to play it for 24 hours straight to roll over the score as you have mentioned. However, near the end of the video I started blanking out due to playing the game for so long. Everything just kind of looks like everything else at that point.

The other thing is that my right thumb on the d-pad really took a toll with the game. I'm usually pressing hard on the d-pad because I'm trying to move as quickly as I can and while pressing harder doesn't make my character move faster, due to human cognition I can't help but think that it does. LOL

The game could benefit from a high score display table which keeps track of your high scores.

I noticed a bug/glitch in the game that happened a few times. Sometimes I will pick up a powerup and it does something that it shouldn't. In my video so can see this first hand. If you go to the 1:39:04 mark, I clearly get a diamond yet it really gives me the feather (speed) power up.

Great game overall though and would really like to see you do a cartridge release. The game is awesome!!!

I really like this game! Would you be interested in making some minor graphical changes to suit a theme I have and then selling it or licensing it to Epyx to release on a physical cartridge?

I feel this would be a great fit for our retro range!

Fun little game! I don't really have anything to add that others didn't. I like that you changed the palette slightly after every level; it helped keep things interesting. In general it felt very like the early era of NES games to me.

Nicely done!

Wow! I haven't checked back in here for a while, so I didn't see the most recent comments. I'm really humbled by your reactions. It's really great to see people playing a game I made and having a good time.

I've taken all of your advice to heart. To me, Get It! is a finished game and rather than constantly going back and tweaking it, I prefer to take the lessons I've learned working on it and apply those lessons to future projects.

I already posted most of this on the great video Erockbrox made, but I thought I'd share it here too:

I'm really impressed. You've got way further than I ever have (at least, without using hard-coded cheats that I removed in the release version). I wanted to share some information about the game.
First, I can't believe you're playing with a standard D-pad. The game really plays best with the NES advantage IMO.
I actually began work on this game as an assembly programming project for a college computer science class. In my final presentation, I brought in my NES and had some friends play it. one summed it up: "That green triangle is a bastard." I spent a lot of time on the enemy AI, and I'm very proud of it. I was going for the same vibe as in Pac-Man, where the enemies seem to act as a team, each with different roles. I don't think it's as good as Pac-Man ghost AI, but I tried.
Regarding the glitch you mention where it seems you get a different item than the one on screen: It happens because the next item happens to spawn right on top of the player sprite. if you collect a gem, but it seems like you get a feather, it's because the next item to spawn WAS a feather, but it spawned on top of you and you collected it that same frame. And since items can spawn in the safe zone, veeeeery rarely in the first level the key will spawn on top of you and you instantly go to the next level. It's rare enough that I didn't bother fixing it.
The feather is my favorite item. It just feels so good to be able to outrun everything.
You should try it 2-player as well. It subtly changes some things you might notice.

Some more things: the enemies slowly get smarter over the course of the game. You might not notice while you play because it's very gradual, but when you go back to the beginning after a high level, it's very noticeable. The game technically has 256 levels, but after about level 200, the green triangle becomes so aggressive that I personally find it almost unplayable at that point. (A decent hacker could probably find the ram address of the level number and set it for themselves to see what I mean).
The collision detection is wonky in the tunnel, and sometimes enemies and items will pass right through you. Another thing that's rare enough that I didn't think it was worth fixing.

Well, I'm actually playing with an original NES dogbone controller, which has a slightly bigger D-pad compared to the regular NES controller. I thought about getting an NES advantage, but as a competitive player I usually stay away from turbo controllers.



Oh got it. I was thinking that it was a graphics display issue. Where you collect a diamond, but got the feather because the feather was displaying the wrong graphics.





I wonder how far I got and if I got past level 200? Once I felt like I had mastered the game, it didn't seem as if it were a challenge anymore. I was hoping for some type of difficulty increase, but I honestly never saw it.

What happens after level 256?

I am also wondering how you worked out the issue involving the spawned item and how to make it take the most interesting "path" around the screen. For instance it could have been such that the spawned item and the angle that it moves didn't allow for an interesting path around the geometry of the level. But you managed to make the spawned sprite bounce around to all of the areas of the screen and go through the tunnel.

It seems like the Triangle enemy was the most aggressive enemy. I also near the end of the video was kind of blanking out from the repetitiveness. I probably could have played for a few more hours if I was going for a high score.

Overall this was an EXCELLENT game and I give it a solid 10/10. Great arcade feel, great music and the whole simplicity of the game makes it easily accessible for anyone to pick up and play and understand.

I say make a physical release of this game and also make it up to 4-players and you have an excellent party game!!!

Again, great job on this!

You were only at around level 40-50 in your video (you can tell by the number of items--each level has that many items before the key appears). To be more accurate, the orange circle and green triangle AI increases every 16 levels, so you should have seen 2 increases at your point. After level 255, it just goes back to level 0, although you keep your gems and lives, the enemy AI and number of items in the level start over again. I took my own advice and hacked myself up to level 255, and it's very difficult to survive long. the green triangle just goes right for you. It's technically possible to survive, but you have no leeway for mistakes at that point.



This was just trial and error experimentation. My original maze design was much tighter and more complex, like a Pac-Man maze. I discovered that the game played much better with a more open maze design. I just experimented with different mazes. Often, the items would get stuck in 'loops' where they would bounce around in a predictable closed path. I didn't like that at all. I wanted Items to be able to go anywhere. I just tweaked it until I was happy. There are still a few places where items can get stuck in closed predictable loops, but it doesn't happen often.



If I were doing it again, I probably would. At the time, it didn't seem like a big deal. I was just trying to finish the game and I didn't want to fall into the scope-creep trap. My goal was to finish a game, and I finished it. I don't really have any intention to go back and 'fix' stuff. I HAVE thought about making a sequel to it some day. Maybe then...