Gimmick! exAct * mix

At JAEPO 2019, a project that I have been working on for a little while made its first public showing. The working title is Gimmick! exAct * Mix, and it is an arcade release of Gimmick! for the exA Arcadia platform.

I am happy to answer questions to the extent of my ability. If not for NesDev as an information resource and community, a project like this probably would not have happened.

I can't really get specific with any details that haven't already been revealed from that demo, but I can say that I have a lot planned, and that nearly all of the demo's assets are placeholder ones. I drew Yumetarou's sprite on a bullet train to Kyoto using a ThinkPad Trackpoint!

There are many things I am already changing, and deadlines are real. I am very picky and attentive to the kinds of details that matter for this kind of game - if something bothers you in the demo, there is a high chance that it really bothers me.

A few videos were put up on YouTube by viewers of the exA stream:
Full Gimmick! Demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7TrmauKOwTU
Introductory Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2cYIlPcbwW4
Official exA full stream: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h9sC1Gs8pnE

As for the JAEPO demo that was presented:
* The original game engine is in use; the game physics are perfect when compared to the original.
* With the original HUD chopped off, Famicom PAR adjustments (within a tolerance) and only a slight amount of cropping (a-la PocketNES) the game runs in 16:9.
* The graphics were redrawn from scratch (though very closely mimicking the appearance and contours of the original, to a fault)
* Please don't ask about a console release right now
* There is an arranged sountrack, of my own creation, alongside the 2A03+5B original
* Character positioning is done by reading the game state in RAM, rather than the sprite position OAM data, so placement of sprites is done in a more precise 4096-point space.
* Obviously sprite flicker is gone
* I have scoring plans for scoring changes and some (small and subtle) difficulty changes
* If present, buttons C and D on the arcade panel can map to Item Switch and Item Use
* Please stop asking about putting it on a console
* HUD indicates that a checkpoint has been reached
* Popup HUD for item switching

I am cautiously interested in trying to document the development process, since there are some cool technical solutions behind this that would be fun to write/make a video about. I generally trust people on this forum to be civil when interacting with a developer, but fans of games have a pretty bad track record when sharing their opinions with public-facing developer accounts, so I am nervous about this being a chance to receive a lot of hate based on some snap judgements. That said, I value the feelings of others who like this game and would want the best from a modern re-release of it.

This sounds fantastic. It looks very nice and looks like the engine is truly replicated.
When I saw the video, I took it to be a standalone remake....but by reading the bullet points it doesnt seem to be the case...?
Is it somehow emulated or something? If you cant say, its fine.


Can I ask for it later?

I wish luck with the project, it looks to be a very good, thought one.

This looks absolutely lovely! Congratulations on the showcase!. I really love this project.



This is a personal record in being a nitpicky pain, but i feel as though the rear cloud layer on level 1 has lost a bit of its definition by being just big bubbly forms. Low res pixels can be pretty abstract and leave room for interpretation, but i read the original clouds as a bit more defined in spots (allthough subtly so - the extra definition is placed with care), even for that darker shade. It's just a random theory but i think people are going to be the most comparative in the first couple of scenes, and then going to relax more and more.

I cannot imagine what kind of negative feedback could anyone have about something like this. Maybe "Loool why not make it 3D??? Developer sucks!". Ignore those people.
I am deeply interested in seeing what you did here! So it's emulated? You have a "layer" running on top on an unrestricted screen simulation? Seems really cool.

edit: though I agree about the clouds hehe.

Looks really awesome!

That's awesome!
Is it me or there are still a little bit of details missing, like the fishes when Yumetaro (is that his name?) is crossing the underwater pipe?
Although the clouds on the 1st screen seems a bit different, I really liked the parallax effect on them, that's very cool!!
This seems (and sounds) great!
Excellent work, I'm looking forward to see more!

Another thing about the clouds - i couldn't put my finger on it yesterday, but in addition to the remark on the cloud outline... The way i read the original, some of the more minute white fields in those clouds were not intended as being as much "in front of" the darker cloud formations, rather, they were either highlights on the same distance plane, or else distant enough to be somewhere in-between. Having them on the front parallax layer makes the perspectve a bit confused, at least to me.

Maybe, you could experiment with keeping these either at the same scrolling speed as the darker clouds or somewhere in-between.

I'll be honest and say I'm deadly jealous of you getting this opportunity!
Gimmick is one of the best games on the NES platform, and just generally a really unique and timeless gem of a game.

I'd like to remind other people in this thread that the graphics shown so far, are temporary placeholder graphics.
I'm really looking forward to seeing how the final assets are going to look, and hopefully it's not just not just upscaled/smoothened versions of the original graphics. I'm hoping for some tasteful details added, in the spirit of the original. Honestly, I'd consider toning down the outlines, or at least keep them at a darker version of the fill color (Don Bluth style), rather than a solid black. I feel like the game would have had that if the NES had allowed it.
(EDIT: Lol, the game does in fact do that! I never really noticed it - they are very dark as it is)


This alone will improve the game by a huge margin.


I'm really hoping for a functional scoring system! There's a lot you could do with this game, and although the 10p you get for jumping on the head of enemies works great at controlling the "randomizer", there's also an issue with potentially rewarding the player for wasting time (ie. riding stars around in empty rooms). This is made worse in the original by the lack of a stage timer. I'm assuming the arcade version will have a timer so you can never just waste time indefinitely.

The game also has a bit of an issue with extra lives. This isn't a problem at home, but it won't work for an arcade game.
The score extend is way too low (you get a bunch of extra lives just for picking up the first treasure above the first room). And the infinite 1up machine on stage 5 obviously has to go, or at least have its usage limited somewhat. I'm sure you have already thought about these things, of course.

I know BIL on Shmups has a bunch of thoughts on how to improve Gimmick! to make it into a genuine arcade game, did you look into his comments on the game?

Thank you all for feedback. I have a few things to which I can reply.

About emulation:



I probably shouldn't write about it now, but maybe you can compare it somewhat to M2's ShotTriggers series?
About graphics:

Yes - the pipe scene is definitely the hastiest of them all. There was no more time for the fish!


The clouds were pretty tossed together, but even in this state maybe it was my mistake to interpret the small wisps as being in the foreground, rather than highlights in the background. However the clouds turn out, the paralax is definitely here to stay, even if it ends up reduced to one layer.

Thanks for this note especially - dealing with how to use outlines properly has been more troublesome than I had imagined. I was drawing over an onionskin of the original famicom sprites, scaled to the full size, and chose line widths that would respect roughly the size of one famicom pixel. I think a lack of line weight variation sucks a bit of life out of it. It is something I have to continue to play with.

Yeah, the original scoring system really only serves as a way of milking extends and controlling the randomizer. The latter definitely needs to stay, as it is a big part of playing the game effectively.
As for extends, I found the routine that rewards extra lives, and it's endearingly primitive. Even in this demo build, the table for that routine has been modified, and a lot less extends are rewarded. You'll notice in the demo video that, after getting the secret, I'm not rewarded with an extend!
Almost certainly there will be a stage timer, or at least a segment timer. I would like the scoring system to reward fast progression and nuanced play over life hoarding.
As for difficulty, unskilled players get thrashed pretty quickly, while skilled players enjoy speeding through the game efficiently. That is already how an arcade game should play. I may have a broken sense of difficulty, because Gimmick has felt like second nature to me for a long time now.

I am very interested in reading about this shmups thread about making it arcade-ready; have you got a link handy?

I mean, the details in question might very well be intended to be small independent wisps; it's hard to tell. But either way i interpret them as being pretty far off.
Oh and yeah, i didn't have anything against the parallax effect in itself - i think it's a neat addition! Sorry that wasn't clear from my previous comments.

Anyway, excellent work! Congratulations.

Hmm, in the restricted photo FrankenGraphics posted I would consider the small white bits as part of the background cloud layer.

However, in the larger context there are a lot of similar small white blobs that are unambiguously foreground. To me when I'm playing that first level, those definitely feel like foreground, especially because of all the other similar white blobs which are placed in more clearly disconnected places.

I think the palette on my Famicom has slightly more contrast than the one FG is using too, which probably subtly affects my perception.

I think what I'd suggest instead is just moving the blob in question up or down slightly so it doesn't so directly conflict with the line of the background layer. (If we were back in time nitpicking the original Gimmick! art, I'd suggest doing it there too.) Resolve the layer ambiguity rather than trying to add extra depth/texture to the background.

(Of course in a commercial production context I think I'd probably just say it's good enough and tell the artist to keep moving onto something else. )


I've said this privately but overall I really like this plain and clean adaptation of the style. I think it works really well.

Yeah, i agree the majority of white blobs are on a foreground plane. Maybe that wasn't clear either from my first comment, sorry about that. I guess the ambiguity of the encircled blob is simply due to that they didn't have to think that hard about it back then, all while there's other tasks to cross of the list.

Oh, uh, I should also post that I'm hoping to hire an artist who is interested in doing HD sprite or tileset work; if anyone is seriously interested then I would like to chat.

I liked the interpretation, and with the narrowed context (and maybe that subtle palette difference) I definitely saw it too. It made me think about the crest of a wave. I'd never have interpreted it that way without you pointing it out.

Looking at the tiles, it sorta feels like a compromise between trying to break up the limited shape of the dark background cloud, and having small foreground clouds that can also kind of attach or sit near bigger foreground clouds to make their edges a bit fluffier. Kinda trying to do double duty? Hmm.

Maybe a third interpretation... what if it was a third layer of bright clouds behind the dark ones, just peeking its head above? Probably not a good idea, but it's another way I can make myself see it.

Gimmick! is so cool... It's always been one of the ones I look to most often for comparison and ideas.

Just to say this looks amazing, but it's a shame there's those guys talking and we can't hear what the remixed music sounds like.

I think a varied line weight would mesh well with the game. I always saw Gimmick as having a style fitting somewhere inbetween the likes of classic hand drawn animation, and something along the lines of SunSoft's own Waku Waku 7 where the colors really pop!.


I'm glad to hear so! Gimmick is a game where it's super fun to just zoom through the stages in a solid flow, so rewarding that would definitely be a good choice! Skilled players would employ star riding for even better times (maybe even have a speedrun mode built in?).


I often hear people claiming that Gimmick is deviously difficult, so there is definitely some truth to that. The controls really take getting used to, and so does wrapping your head around the fact that the enemies react much more intelligently to your actions than what is usual for an NES game.
That said, I think once you get the controls down, Gimmick is still a fairly easy game albeit with a few spikes. I wouldn't mind some ways to to further increase the difficulty (maybe dynamically based on player actions, with a higher scoring potential to follow?), but I don't have any specific ideas at the moment.


BIL tends to bring it up every time he namedrops the game Not saying that much outside of what we have already discussed though: Fewer 1ups and a stage/section timer.
Example
There's some more in-depth talk about it somewhere, but I honestly can't find it among the noise.

Same. I'm really curious to hear more. I first discovered Gimmick through some friends in the chip music community raving about the soundtrack about a decade ago... fast forward to last year, my band did a cover of Happy Birthday. So yeah, the original soundtrack is pretty important to me.

Masashi Kageyama's soundtrack demos for most* of the songs were released on CD back in 2011 - it's not hard to find online, I was able to import the CD a couple of years back. They're mostly the same as the final 2a03+5B versions, just with different synth patches and drum sounds. I haven't listened to them in a while but I do remember being surprised at how certain details translated between the different versions (ie: the snare flam in Aporia, the softer bass tone in Just Friends) - goes to show how practically every detail in the soundtrack was intentional and planned.

mikejmoffitt, out of curiosity, do you have access to any "source material" beyond the original famicom game? Beyond just the soundtrack, the manual, for example has some hand-drawn renditions of some of the characters, items, the overworld map, etc - I guess it's probably not likely that any assets beyond those survived, but it would be pretty cool if they did.

*Apparently no demos of Slow Illusion, Lion Heart, Cadbury, and Strange Memories of Death exist.

Wow! I had no idea the demos were released. I've purchased the disk just now, so I'll take a good listen to those for sure.

I can't comment on the availability of source material, but I did suck it up and buy a boxed copy of the game in Akihabara a month ago. I sold my loose cartridge to lessen the blow to my wallet a bit... however, it was important to me to get access to the original manual in a high quality format.

This track is not related to Gimmick!, but I tossed it together a while ago as a demo for an X68000-style sound that I wanted to use: https://soundcloud.com/mikejmoffitt/tri ... 0-opm-demo

This looks cool. Is this like an updated HD version of Gimmick for NES but only running on another platform. It was hard for me to make sense out of it, but the game seemed very cool.

I am considering taking the graphics in a bit of a different direction. I am going to ask if it is okay to share potential concepts that aren't confirmed for the game.

I'd say it's definitely worth it brainstorming different concepts.
I would love to give my feedback too, but of course it's ultimately your own decision.

As long as you don't compromise "cute" and "colorful".

Would love to see/read what direction you're exploring!

Oh please, I would totally love it!!

Well, I don't think I'm going to be able to post something like that any time soon, but I think the change will be for the better.

About music, though, I will see.

okay guys, here's the new art style in action

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RMpNAMPF4mA

changed the gameplay a bit too

That is so much better! The bad side of it is that now the game's gonna take so many years to be finished as the art team adapts the graphics to this style with its acute level of aesthetics. It'll all be worth it though.

Oh yeah!
Amazing!! LOL

I love it <3

I'm taking a break from tearing out what little hair I have while working on graphics, and am focusing on some more technical aspects.

One little irksome behavior that Gimmick does is that it takes advantage of the 256px screen width when having objects push or pull other objects. While acceleration and movement occurs in a 12.4 fixed point position representation, sometimes objects are a bit lazy.

For example: When Yumetarou is walking against a wall, he stops, and his animation continues slowly. It appears that he smoothly stops on the boundary of the wall.

When you extrapolate his position, though, and consider the floored 4 bits of precision, it becomes clear that he is actually walking into the wall, which then "bounces" him back by one screen pixel (or 16 on-screen units). For the HD rendering mode, this is pretty obvious

Another example is the boat at the beginning of the second stage. In the original game, it appears to move 0.5px/frame, so you'd imagine the programmer would simply set the boat's dx to 8 units/f and be done with it. Unfortunately, it appears to actually increment the X position by 16 units every other frame - the lazy way of moving at subpixel speeds

I have a few ideas to explore to solve these. I am trying to avoid patches to the game itself whenever necessary.

mikejmoffitt still has a full head of hair, read: more than I do. Don't listen to his nonsense! ;)