Introducing: Super PAKPAK (2-4 player game)

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Introducing: Super PAKPAK (2-4 player game)
by on (#65024)
Hello,
I have been working on this NES game project for a while now.
It is an entry for Assembly Summer 2010 gamedev competition to be held in Helsinki, Finland.

The archive is here:
http://media.assembly.org/gamedev/2010/ ... _games.zip

The other entries are here (mine is the only NES game, though):
http://www.assembly.org/summer10/news/g ... -published

by on (#65026)
Very interesting game! Still have to play it with an actual person for the real experience, but so far, I like it! The presentation is very nice too, with interesting distortion effects, smooth screen transitions using fades... Congratulations!

A little off-topic, but the way the scenery can be destroyed reminds me of Worms. That too would be a fun game to play on the NES, and after seeing your game I believe it can be done!
awesome!
by on (#65032)
Dude! This is a really fun game yo! Nice work!

I love how your own stray bullets can kill you. hahaha

by on (#65057)
That's really cool.

by on (#65077)
Wow nice game! This supports a four score I suppose? It could be the ultimate party game for us NES entusiasts!

Would it be possible to put it on a real cart? What donor cart should be used then?

by on (#65095)
This is super cool! Any chance of updates? By the way, very nice documentation with the game.

by on (#65098)
Cool little game, nice presentation! But why no ingame music? I used to play cave flying games like this a lot on PC when I was younger.

Anybody think it would be possible to implement a multidirectional scrolling version of a game like this with split screen for two players (using single screen mirroring)? I don't think there are any split screen scrolling games like that for the NES, if somebody knows any let me know. :)

by on (#65100)
thefox wrote:
I don't think there are any split screen scrolling games like that for the NES

Well, there is Bigfoot for NES, the one most often trotted out as an example of rewriting OAM mid-frame, but after having watched a few video reviews, I wouldn't exactly call that a "game".

by on (#65105)
thefox wrote:
I don't think there are any split screen scrolling games like that for the NES

Mappy Kids has split screen scrolling in 2-player mode.

by on (#65107)
Kreese wrote:
Wow nice game! This supports a four score I suppose? It could be the ultimate party game for us NES entusiasts!

Would it be possible to put it on a real cart? What donor cart should be used then?


Check the readme ;)

by on (#65108)
artoh: Sorry for not reading the documentation! It was great. I must make myself a cart of this cool game... Tried it on the PowerPak and it worked fine.

by on (#65111)
tokumaru wrote:
thefox wrote:
I don't think there are any split screen scrolling games like that for the NES

Mappy Kids has split screen scrolling in 2-player mode.

Cool!

by on (#65121)
tokumaru: I think Worms would be possible on the NES. At least there is a gameboy version of it, which isn't that bad.

Kreese: UNROM donor cart is fine, but I actually start to feel bad for destroying an existing cart:) Four score was tested, but also a famicom-style multitap should work.

arfink: Not sure about the updates. Maybe if one finds a very bad bug from the game.

thefox: I thought of ingame music once, but currently the whole thing is so cpu intense, that I had hard time fitting everything in there already. I should rewrite the whole thing to get music :).


Thanks for testing it out and for the comments. I actually haven't really tried it with over 2 players. I'm interested to know if it is actually playable...

by on (#65122)
Destroy Winter Games. All copies of that excrement should be changed into reproduction cartridges.

by on (#65125)
Haven't you thought about ordering some parts from retrousb.com and make some carts and sell them? I know it's quite expensive doing that, but I'm quite sure that there will be people willing to pay for this game! At least I would. :)

by on (#65129)
Well, if you already have a drawer of chopped up NES carts (I do) then it doesn't matter too much if you are using an original cartridge. And yes, Winter Games deserves to die!

by on (#65131)
I forget which emulator I used, but I know I had played Tecmo Bowl and Solar Wars with netplay before. I wonder if there's any chance an emulator supports 4-player netplay?

by on (#65143)
I haven't specifically tried it, but nestopia likely supports 4 players online. I know it support 4 pads and have played online with two people with it before.

by on (#65144)
I tried playing a 2-player NES game online (LJ65 in Nestopia). It was far too laggy to be playable. Wouldn't 4 players suffer from even more lag?

by on (#65145)
I've never hard problems with lag with people and servers close to me. What server did you use?

by on (#65567)
I tried playing the game with a friend in the next city with Nestopia (I had a kaillera server on my other machine). It worked fine, except my friend complained about the ingame sounds being strange.

I added a page on the nesdev wiki today: http://wiki.nesdev.com/w/index.php/Super_PakPak. Have you noticed, that the game also supports an analog controller (specs on the wikipage). I haven't had time to try it myself :)

If it works fine, there might be even a slight market for a real cartridge bundled with 2 analog controllers with example? The current game binary must be free to distribute, however, because of my contract with the Assembly organization.

by on (#65572)
artoh wrote:
If it works fine, there might be even a slight market for a real cartridge bundled with 2 analog controllers with example?

Arkanoid came with a paddle, and that paddle still fetches a pretty penny on eBay.

by on (#66478)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TnYQN7FUVLU

I let the visitors at Kulturkalaset (Gothenburg, Sweden) try the game a couple of weeks ago. They liked it and really enjoyed playing it.

by on (#67861)
Hi Artoh,

Have you considered directly supporting the Horiatrak? It's the only analogue control (that I can recall) for the Famicom and it can be adapted to work on the NES. The beauty of it is that they are pretty inexpensive...and easily obtained. Sadly, only a few games had software support for using them, and they don't have a digital trackball mode like the CX-80 does, so the selection of games for them is rather limited.

I guess it would be possible to adapt Apple II, Atari CX52 or Atari CX-22 (or even the ProLine TB) controllers to work as analogue devices for your game, but the Horitrak is ideal as it is designed for the FC hardware and requires no adapter to function.
Re: Introducing: Super PAKPAK (2-4 player game)
by on (#134947)
This game may be included in Double Action 53's multiplayer-only section.

I've been given a copy of the source code so that I can properly reset patch it. I adapted it to my build system with the help of an NESASM to ca65 translator that I wrote in Python, and I want to make sure I didn't make any serious mistakes. So I'd like people to test the attached copy.

Technical specs:
UNROM, 65536 byte PRG ROM
The second half of 16K banks 1 and 2 are unused. I will eventually stuff a couple 8K programs in there.


Xious: Could someone send me an NES-adapted HoriTrak to test with? I'd eventually like to make a single library that works with both Super NES Mouse and HoriTrak protocols.
Re: Introducing: Super PAKPAK (2-4 player game)
by on (#134953)
I played through the 12 levels on both original release and this with two nes controllers on powerpak and everything tested out ok.

Though I wonder why the data from $1010 to $2010 (ines offset) is shifted over by one byte. Only reason I noticed is I've been recently looking at various ROMs through a CHR viewer.
Re: Introducing: Super PAKPAK (2-4 player game)
by on (#134999)
43110 wrote:
I played through the 12 levels on both original release and this with two nes controllers on powerpak and everything tested out ok.

Thank you for testing. Now all I have to do is shove other 8K games into the gaps at $6010 and $A010 (iNES offset).

Quote:
Though I wonder why the data from $1010 to $2010 (ines offset) is shifted over by one byte.

It's an artifact of the game trying to put 8194 bytes of data in an 8192 byte segment. NESASM is slightly more lenient about this, but ca65 will report a 1- or 2-byte segment overflow.