Video of my homebrew in progress. MMC3 parallax.

Video of my homebrew in progress. MMC3 parallax.
by sdwave on 2012-04-02 (#92100)

Video of my homebrew in progress. MMC3 parallax.

Tell me what you think:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vkQGznb9 ... MxVOZvYIQ=

The parallax is done using MMC3 irqs and the $2006/$2005 trick. Everything but the music/sound player code is my own. The music player code is Famitone, which is working pretty well. Video was made using Nestopia, but it runs on a actual hardware as well on a powerpak.

Sprites are 8x16 and all art was drawn in YY-Chr which has been working well for me (albeit a little tedious).

So far I've got about 40 different levels done, shooting for ~120.

by Hamtaro126 on 2012-04-02 (#92101)

Very well pulled off! This is by far using the NES to the maximum potential!

Although glitches are prone to exist, as I can see issues in the vid, (but it is a demo, so this is ok.)

Good Work!

by tepples on 2012-04-03 (#92104)

It looks almost 16 bit. But what it could use in the next rev is more fluidity of motion in the jump animations.

by tokumaru on 2012-04-03 (#92105)

Pretty cool use of parallax effects! The fact that you have to design levels in stripes really limits what you can do layout-wise though.

The splits are indeed looking kinda glitchy at this point... You might have to time the scroll changes better so that they always happen during HBlank.

The illusion of 2 scrolling layers really makes it look like a 16-bit game. If you used other common tricks such as layering sprites (or at least combining sprites with different palettes to form meta-sprites) to increase the amount of colors per meta-sprite you could fool a lot of people.

The physics could be improved a bit, although it looks similar to what was used in early 16-bit games.

by Dwedit on 2012-04-03 (#92108)

To really complete the effect, throw in a few sprites that stick out of the background layer, so it looks less like a line where things suddenly end.

Looking amazing BTW.

by thefox on 2012-04-03 (#92110)

Looks pretty nice. Music is not very good though (although I'm not sure if it's just a test track or meant to be taken seriously).

GL with the project!

by tokumaru on 2012-04-03 (#92112)

Dwedit wrote:
To really complete the effect, throw in a few sprites that stick out of the background layer, so it looks less like a line where things suddenly end.

Good idea, the frontmost layer can gain some vertical detail with the use of sprites. You can even make walls out of sprites to make level progression less linear, as long as the walls are thin enough (16 pixels wide) to not interfere much with the sprites-per-scanline limit. Stairs can also be implemented as blocks.

by sdwave on 2012-04-03 (#92118)

tokumaru wrote:
Dwedit wrote:
To really complete the effect, throw in a few sprites that stick out of the background layer, so it looks less like a line where things suddenly end.

Good idea, the frontmost layer can gain some vertical detail with the use of sprites. You can even make walls out of sprites to make level progression less linear, as long as the walls are thin enough (16 pixels wide) to not interfere much with the sprites-per-scanline limit. Stairs can also be implemented as blocks.

I've got a few levels where I use sprites as "support beams" to connect the different spans. Also, in the strictly vertical levels, the background has "stripes" which act as window frames. Character set switching is used to make the "frames" scroll at the same rate as the foreground.

I have a train level with windows also that I alternate from frame to frame to give the semitransparent effect. Judicious color choices were necessary to make the flicker non-apparent.

It's a good idea to use a couple color palettes for the metasprites. Some of the bosses have that so that they can have different skin and hair color from their outfit colors. The train pirate with lasers and everything needed
that (unless I wanted to make his jacket from human skin! Yikes!)

by Celius on 2012-04-05 (#92202)

Very nice! Parallax on the NES can be very tricky to pull off. I think the separation in the first part with the two strips is a good idea, because it really makes you think that there are multiple layers of background.

I usually stick to CHR RAM updates for parallax. But each method has its pros and cons.

by OscarRichard on 2012-07-30 (#97302)

Excellent graphics! Liked the music and how she shoots (Is a woman, right?).