Double Action Blaster Guys

Double Action Blaster Guys is the sequel to my contribution to the 2011 compo, Forehead Block Guy.
It's completely rewritten so it's nowhere near as buggy as FHBG was, and I took the opportunity to rewrite it with two simultaneous players in mind, hence pluralizing Guy in the title.

Features:
* Simultaneous two-player support (either player can join in at any time by pressing A+B)
* 32 levels
* Over a dozen enemy types, plus a final boss
* Several types of blocks (not just solid and empty like the original FHBG)
* 4 different level goal types
* Level editor
* Open source

Download (with source)

Great, playable game!
One thing I find strange is gravity. When you drop in the bottom and no platform is in your way, you'll end upfalling from to to the bottom again, and again etc. Meanwhile, gravity will increase to ridiculous point and, after some more time, it will reset itself to zero. It's not a big bug or anything, but I'd fix it by limiting gravity max potential at some point.

You can exit "extra" menu by selecting empty option:


And it's never mentioned about SELECT button functionality-you can skip levels with it(debug leftover?)

Overall, this is great, and multiplayer adds to it's greatness. I'm gonna play it with bro later. Thanks

Great little game NovaYoshi! Nice work!

I limited both player and enemy gravity to falling 8 pixels per frame, and reduced the "extra" menu to three items.

The blank slot on it was from back when I thought I was going to go over the limit for NROM-128 and I would have unused space in the 32kb of PRG ROM to add in more stuff that would warrant another menu item, but I made it fit.

I also left the select key level skipping on purpose, and FHBG had a debug key too. I figured it would be convenient for someone who just wanted to check out the levels and the title screen already lets you skip ahead to level 13 or 25 if you want. Select could be repurposed into being an "insert coin" button if I did a version that took the arcade style further and tried to make it like an actual arcade game and didn't want users to be able to skip.

Select does something similar in Lode Runner. Or you could use the method that Thwaite and PyFHBG use: a "practice" option in the menu.

This is not bad.

Actually, I suggest instead to make SELECT do nothing but program it in such a way that a Game Genie code patches a single byte of the ROM to make the SELECT button to skip levels (you can include that code in the documentation). If you want to make a arcade game with insert coin, you could use the Vs.System function for that, though.

Downloaded, thanks for sharing!

Details of the changes in the compo edition:
*Changed to NROM-256 with CHR RAM, decompressed at the start before the title
*Revamped menu system (and the editor asks for confirmation to quit now)
*Versus modes with powerups
*More levels to use new blocks and enemies
*Levels can scroll
*New blocks: Bombs that go off every 4 seconds, tiles and platforms that toggle between solid or not every 4 seconds, switch to instantly toggle all toggleable blocks, moving springs and moving hazards, teleporters, insta-kill spikes, tiles that cause a bomb to drop above you when you walk through them
*New enemies: rolling and jumpy balls, enemies that shoot aimed at the player, Thwomp clones, a flapping owl, a potion and an enemy that continually shoots right
*Various bugfixes and minor changes

Compo version downloadable here

Currently in the works:
*A new game mode that's an infinitely scrolling level with random chunks based on templates

I have about 5 kilobytes left and I intend to put it to use. I don't expect the scrolling to take up all that much and I think I should put space to making the game prettier, but I'm not sure how I want to

In the compo edition there's a bug in game mode selection:
If you select and play a 2P fight game and finish, all other modes are unable to start (until reset) as they are incorrectly interpreted as a 2P fight game.

It also had randomly crashed in the middle of the double boss head level.

Now if you start the game with a Four Score, the Action gets Doubled again:



(also includes some bug fixes and minor changes, as well as the two player colors from the PlayChoice-10 version)

When I originally wrote DABG I used constants for the player count, and I didn't have to do very much to increase it. There were a lot of unrolled loops (that didn't use .repeat) that needed fixing, and I had to put in new logic for versus modes.

I don't feel like the sprite scanline limit is as much of a problem for this kind of game since the players are going to be jumping from platform to platform and going after different enemies.