RHDE

Want to download it?
The latest version should be available on my web site.


Nova and I are working on a game that could best be described as a cross between Rampart and Animal Crossing. Nova came up with the ideas and some of the graphics; I'm doing all the programming and the rest of the graphics. This game, which I'm developing for the next compo, will probably be the first NES game not to use a fixed-width font anywhere.

Anticipated spec: NROM-256/BNROM, 32 KiB PRG ROM, 8 KiB CHR RAM (ROM is currently 60% full)


Concept art


Actual screenshots of last night's build taken in FCEUX

Current task: populating the pop-up. Each side can use up to 48 tiles.

Wow, that looks freakin' great Tepples! The two of you are really setting a high bar for next year's competition!

Looking good!

I like the concept art. The proportinal font gives a nice look too.

Interested to see how the game play turn out. Nice to see Tepples working on another simultaneous multi-player game. That's one of my favorite features of Thwaite.

The font looks really good, at least in a crispy display like this one. Does it look good when transmitted through composite video?

The building and furniture arranging steps kinda remind me of The Sims... It's an interesting concept to see on the NES.

It did when I used it for the Action 53 menu. This screenshot (720 × 480 pixels) uses gray (color $10), but it looks just as sharp with yellow ($38).


Yeah, Animal Crossing is essentially Nintendo's version of The Sims.


EDIT: My camera sucks.

I'm stupefied at the proportional font. Nevertheless, all I can think about is this game should look like the D-Day scene from Conkers Bad Fur Day on the XBox :p

What comes to my mind is a Spy-vs-Spy element. Traps, anyone?

I missed the picture before. The font looks pretty good! The tiled floor OTOH... You might want to consider something less noisy, or the furniture will be hard to identify.

This is what furniture looks like, both straight out of FCEUX (scaled to match PAR) and run through blargg's NTSC filter. Click to zoom for full-size view. If you have trouble identifying any of the furniture, let me know because I consider that a bug.

I think I was able to figure out what everything was, but only after staring at it for quite a while and using contextual clues. Like, I recognize the bed OK so I know that the crapper isn't likely to be in the same room. But the crapper looks like a lower-case j. The bookcase blends into the background too much [it's less so on the left than on the right]. The sink/oven/fridge look like robots floating in the kitchen?

Maybe a bland "tiled" kitchen floor [single color with straight lines] and a lower-contrast "carpeted" look for the rest. Or perhaps a linear "wood-grain" for the dining area? I'm not aware of too many houses with the same flooring throughout.

Looks fine to me.

I'm having trouble making some things out. The book case wasn't very obvious, but I eventually got it. The toilet on the other hand, I still can't see. I assume that the "lower case j" is the toilet, but I really don't see it... Oh, I do now, it's facing left, ok. The sink (I assume it's a sink because it's present in the kitchen and in the bathroom) is a tough one too. Kitchen sinks don't usually have columns, but even if the did to top is pretty hard to make out. And what's the thing in the lower right corner of the bathroom? An empty space surrounded by walls?

The heavy dithering on the floor really is an issue IMO, it really isn't helping. I do understand that this is all using a single palette, so if you used solid colors for the floor it would lose a lot of depth, but there must be a better solution than dithering the hell out of it with pixels that "adhere" to the tiny objects and make them even harder to make out.

On a lark, I tried erasing the halftoned carpet and just replacing it with any one of the colors that seem to be in that palette (yellow, red, green, black):
The grey is the mask I used; the original is included for completeness.
The black has problems that would require significantly redrawing the furniture. For the rest, is it any easier to identify what the furniture is? (Trying to decouple "busy floor" from "awkward symbol")

I feel like having explicitly separated the furniture before makes it easier to recognize when back on the carpet.

Thank you for the feedback regarding the indoor art.

The kitchen sink and the bathroom sink are the same item. I plan to have it evaluate the house based on what furniture is near other furniture, and both an oven and a toilet give a bonus for being put near a sink.

The space surrounded by walls is probably the same space surrounded by walls seen at 1:00 in this video or at 1:50 in this video. It happens when four wall tiles in a 2x2 square are present.

There are two problems with having different kinds of flooring in different rooms. First, furniture has the flooring behind it baked into the tiles. Second, how would the player set what flooring applies to a given room? It's not like Animal Crossing, where each room is a separate map and the furniture is ultra-low-poly 3D models. But if you can make a better flooring pattern with 8x8 pixel tiles using black, red, and possibly yellow, I'd like to see it. Aesthetically, I'm kind of liking the solid red, but (as shown in the first set of screenshots) the units wouldn't stand out very well in front of it.


So does seeing the furniture being placed.

I realized what's bugging me about the toilet, besides that it looks like a "-j" which makes me think "-sqrt(-1)". The line that I think is supposed to be representing the deliniation of *top* in the isomorphic sense (the line that is creating the separation between the body of and the dot of the "j") seems like it is delineating the bowl/tank separation point, but it's too high to be doing that. I think if you tipped the toilet so that the bowl is visible as if you were looking down on it...or otherwise make it somehow more isomorphically obvious that the dot-of-the-j-is-the-top.

A game like this is a good concept, I'd consider this a Apartment Construction and Vandalism Simulator, a step up from SimCity despite being a small space for a large building in comparision to SimCity!

Also, Compared to SimCity clones, Most of the stuff here is mostly interesting, especially on NES!

I played around with it for a bit.

I think the patterns and both feel like nice compromises between busyness and visibility of both rovers and furniture. On the other hand, the 3/4 red pattern is too red to show the rovers.

Some dithering patterns look completely different once they go through the PPU's NTSC encoding, so you really gotta test with that before deciding which one gives better visibility. Unless you don't care about that and assume that everyone will be playing this on emulators or consoles modded for RGB.

Any spatial features that are significantly below half of the colorburst frequency aren't going to be significantly harmed by NTSC; I deliberately paid attention to that for these patterns.
But, fine, here's blargg's nes_ntsc standalone converter output, set to composite, low sharpness and gamma:

Well, I see some very obvious diagonal lines that aren't present in the unfiltered image... I'd call that a significant difference. That being said, the diagonal lines actually make things look better! They prevent the floor from blending with the objects too much. The top one is the best IMO, because the more black you have on the floor the more it blends with the objects.

And the more red you have on the floor the more it blends with the rovers. I'm going with the one in the middle for now. Thanks lidnariq.

Video of work in progress
(to play webm, use VLC, Firefox, or Chrome)

Send me a PM if you like Rampart or The Sims or Animal Crossing and you want to help test.

It is in testing phase? That's great, the concept is unlike anything I played, looking forward it.
...Guess I know how's going to take first place in nesdev compo.

I'd love to help out, but I'm WAY too busy!

It got second.
Try it

Random thoughts:

The game throws you right in, without any particular idea what's going on.
It wasn't immediately obvious to me (I can't read, I guess) that the online help was only available from the title screen.
The first time I played I had no idea that the rocket launcher item did anything at all
It wasn't obvious when I was trying to get through my opponent's doors that I had to blow things up first.
Does the bat do anything?
It's possible to place walls such that there's no place to put the rocket launcher ... but maybe you deserve what you get, then.
Is there any game over condition?

Something resembling waypoints for the roamers would be nice, especially given how easy it is to make awkward walls.

A one-player "test" mode might be nice, as a pseudo-tutorial. Or maybe a real tutorial, or a slideshow, or an attract mode.

And now we start polishing this turd for the multicart.


So the short description of each phase isn't enough, I take it.


Should I make it so that either player can pause the game and view this mode's help? That'd be possible (as the screen can always be redrawn from scratch in my rendering architecture) but time-consuming.


And now you know why Navi was all up in your "Hey! Listen!" during Ocarina of Time.


The bat was supposed to be to break down doors and fences and to take away one third of an opponent's unit's HP, causing the unit to faint. I didn't finish it in time.


Nova and I debated that. After playing the compo version for a while, I plan to make the player with the most points after each furnish phase the winner of that round. And then after seven rounds, the player who won the most rounds wins.


Any idea how to do this without taking huge amounts of time and memory for full PC RTS style pathing? The idea was supposed to be that you'd move onto one doorway and switch to the other unit until he gets there.


So long as it doesn't go this far. But suggestions of how to design a single-player sandbox/training mode are welcome. I have plenty of video memory left during the battle and build phases, not quite as much during furnish.

I think in the case when both players can not do anything during the vandalism round, it should skip instead of everyone waiting for it to time out.

I was very confused and couldn't do much during the 3 minutes I had to play the game yesterday. I don't like reading manuals, so I didn't come anywhere close to memorizing all the instructions given in the intro screens. You shouldn't have to study before playing a game, that's boring. Then again, this game is somewhat more complex than any "pick up and play" games I can think of, so I'm not sure what the best approach to teach the player about your game would be. I'll give this a try again later, but I really dislike having to master all the controls for my very first time playing it just so I can do anything at all in the 30 seconds I have to buy/place furniture.

Well, it's certainly partway. I understood "play with the store" and "place furniture", although I found the UI a little difficult—I kept on accidentally leaving the menu instead of whatever I meant to do.
There's very minimal feedback in the store as to when you've bought something; the inventory number increments and things you no longer can afford just disappear.
Placing blocks and doors was fine, although for no good reason I didn't understand that it also pruned unwanted blocks for a while.
Walking over and stealing things was more-or-less a non-starter without knowing that the rockets blow up walls.

I think the big problem with the rocket launcher was that, unlike everything else, I never saw a name for it (because you don't buy it, it's just always in your inventory

Oh, a very minor thing: both players' rocket launchers are right-handed, so it's very slightly in favor of blue (since the rocket launchers seem to be indestructable and unstealable)
Time consuming for you? Time consuming for the game?
I don't think it's worth using your remaining temporal budget, but I wouldn't mind the online help taking a second or two to start or stop.

Tangentially related, is there any way to pause? Like maybe both players pressing start or something?
The more I played, the better I got at using it. I just flailed until I had an adequate mental model.
In any case, I don't think you need full pathing; just being able to say "Go to the door, then go to this other point."
Or maybe just having the roamers be a different color when they're busy vs. idle...
For a training mode, perhaps a series of optional tiny scenarios? Like-
* Here's you, your rocket, and the opponent's building? Launch the rocket to knock a hole in the wall
* Here's two roamers, get them to the other side of the screen at approximately the same time
* Here's a piece of furniture, pick it up and bring it back

Not certain whether I like that...

Maybe instead a "stupid AI" mode that just builds houses and furnishes them, without bothering to make an AI for combat?
Maybe a little pop-up message during combat mode if a player is standing adjacent to an opponent's door "They've locked the door, I have to use the rocket launcher"?

In Stock, pressing Up goes to "pickup" mode, where you can pick up and move items. How should I make this clearer?


What feedback did you expect?


It's called a "silo", and you can buy more once you save up Ҹ120.


A silo can be used from any of the eight cells surrounding it. What did you mean by "right handed"?


Time consuming for the other player. I could just call the title function again and then set all VRAM dirty, but the other player wants to get back to the game.


There's currently no pause. And there's no start button on the second hardwired controller of a Famicom, which is why I used B+A instead of Select (and B+A instead of Start for join in another NES project five years ago).


Gԙat idea. I think I figured it out how to teach your first and third steps. Start with a bed in player 1's house, a silo in stock, and enough money to buy a chair. Computer-controlled player 2 has a bed and table in the house.

In the first tutorial, something like this appears in player 2's window:


Once the number of chairs that player 1 owns is nonzero, switch the message:


Once inventory is empty, combat begins:


After three missiles connect:


Teaching the player how to patch a wall might be tricky. I've noticed that a few players can't see where the gap is in the wall that they're building. I'll have to find some way to "instrument" the flood fill to find where outside-ness is leaking in.

Maybe adding a little card in the corner? "PICK UP" or such?
It's not that the functionality was particularly non-obvious... it's just that, before I had an adequate model for what was going on, I hit some buttons and went "Wait, what happened to my menu? <bang on some more buttons>"
An animation? The stereotypical cash register sound? Something less subtle than a number incrementing.
I mean "I'm an idiot and I only successfully tried to get it to work from the two lower-right corners."
Well, there's no harm in having select or start mean the same thing as A+B.


Another possibility is just that the timer is keeping people from having the chance to play around and figure out the UI.
Having three separate interleaved games means I can't just sit down and play until I figure out what's going on, because my train of thought keeps on getting derailed.

It's plausible—but don't hold me to this, it might completely ruin the game—that changing the timer to not be a fixed "you get N seconds" for each phase, but instead have people choose when to start the timer:
* Shopping: you get 10 seconds after the other player has said they're done, but a minimum of 30 to prevent griefing.
* Doors: This is probably fine as is; maybe you get 5 seconds after the last time either player places a door/removes a block
* Building: You get N pieces, or 10-20 seconds after the other player has finished playing all of their pieces
* Stealing: You get N rockets, and 30 seconds after the first chunk of wall is destroyed
Oddly, that hasn't thrown me at all.

I've made these changes in my tree:

• Hand truck cursor in pickup (instead of the normal dot/square)
• Battle: Select also switches units (yes, I know it advantages player 1 on an original Famicom)
• Play page turn sound (the one played for switching between Stock and Shop pages) when switching units
• Beep (as if something had been scanned at a supermarket) after buying and when silo has cooled

And I plan to make these changes tonight at the coin laundry:

• After buying, slide furniture sprite up toward the word "Stock". This would also lock out accidental multiple purchases for a quarter second as the animation completes.
• Show lock icon when facing an opponent's team-pass tile (door or fence)

About the timer: I'd probably disable the timer in some of the tutorial missions, just as there's no real timer in the tutorial missions of Animal Crossing.

I've updated it and released source code.

Day 278 (2014-05-15)

• Randomized starting location
• Shop: Beeps and slides item up after buying
• Shop: B leaves
• Pickup: Hand truck cursor
• Battle: Select switches units
• Plays page turn sound when switching units
• Beeps when silo has cooled
• Tolerates vertical mirroring
• Manual is HTML
• Source code is available

Does this improve things?

I know I didn't say this before, but it still fells odd that during the build phase I have to press Up to pick up a item already placed, I keep on wanting to press B to exit the menu.

Also in the manual: "a tower defense video game", really? I do agree it's a Real-time strategy game, but the entire element of building/having towers to snipe at swarms of enemies is distinctly missing.

I guess the TD elements were more in the single-player mode of the game that inspired this game. I'll update things given that neither RHDE nor the 2-player mode of Rampart is very TD.

In any case, my mental model of the furnish phase is that Stock is "home". This is why the player presses B to return from pickup or Shop to Stock. In addition, most of what's available to be picked up is drawn higher on the screen than the Stock window, so Up kind of makes sense at least to me. Here's my conceptual map of the modes of the furnish phase:

How should I better get across that Stock is "home"? Or should I change this mode map entirely?

I'm not too certain that Pickup/Place is cleanly above Stock. For one thing attempting to move the cursor past the bottom of the screen doesn't return to the Stock (first thing I tried after I pressed up as instructed). That would be *very* cumbersome, thus overloading the rotation button was justifiable (it works out). Left and right worked OK for between Stock and Shop because the Shop is a vertically ordered list, and the Stock layout had an acceptable number of columns (4).

For both the Placement and Stock modes all 4 directional buttons are use for cursor movement, so you would first try to use another button to switch modes. We know that at Stock pressing A selects the item and goes to Placement, so I think using B for selecting nothing and going to Placement might be a good counterpart.

As for reimaging the mode map. I would think of Stock/Shop being one cursor and Pickup/Place being another, and B switches between the two.

While working on pick up and drop outside the house, I made some sketches, scanned them in, and came up with this.

I don't mean to be rude, but that MSPaint-like title screen is a big turn off. The text part looks good, but the picture is very uninspired. I think you should go for a more minimalist approach, composed mainly by the bottom half of this picture (i.e. the text). Maybe include some graphical elements, but this scene, as is, is very unrepresentative of what NES games are about. Besides the execution, there's the fact that title screen art usually includes characters posing, not interacting with each other and oblivious to the camera. This looks weird.

Is box art more likely to include characters not posing than a title screen? Is it just that I suck at drawing? Or both?

It was drawn on paper, then scanned and digitally inked and painted. Perhaps the NES's inability to handle colorful scenes without a lot of 16x16 alignment is what's causing the "M$ Paint effect" here.

If the remaining space in PRG ROM isn't enough for all the remaining content, I propose changing the settings for RHDE in the builder to give RHDE CHR ROM and put the title screen in there. Since mapper 28 doesn't have any way to protect CHR, you could just write over it as usual and treat it like RAM after the title screen. If the cart uses a CHR RAM size bigger than 8kb you could use mapper 28's CHR bank switching to preserve the title screen but I think it wouldn't matter if it could only be shown at the start, and even then you could probably do something hackish to relaunch the game and load the CHR ROM again.

I think it's not a bad title screen at all. It gives a better sense of what the game represents.

I feel that the picture would look better if the vanishing point was about 1/3 the way from the top instead of out of the frame.

I think title screens and box art are the same in this regard. Characters don't necessarily have to be posing as if they were taking a picture, a lot of times they are in the middle of an action scene, but they are prominently drawn in the first plane, like someone was trying to get a shot of their faces while the characters themselves didn't care.

Your scene looks kinda like a child's drawing, all the characters are drawn from the side with little to no volume, the perspective on the road and houses is awkward, and the houses can barely be perceived as such. Perhaps you could make the perspective more interesting if you showed both the ground and the sky, with the ground slightly (or even not so slightly) suggesting earth's curvature. Some foliage would help too, everything is too flat. Characters could still be fighting, but they could be more tridimensionally distributed in the scene.

Of course these are just suggestions, if you don't agree with them feel free to ignore them!


Exactly, I miss the sky. This is a very awkward point of view for a title screen.

I'm working on recreating the scene in Blender so I can move the viewpoint down closer to eye level and have more to move and spin the elements.

Interesting. That should help you find a good point of view for this scene.

While I work on figuring out how to model the limbs of a cartoon bipedal canine, you can try what I did get done. Download from the same place.

Day 299 (2014-06-06)

• Shows a lock over tiles that only the opponent can pass
• Sell item in Stock (B+A)
• New title screen
• Can pick up the rug you're standing on
• B: Drop item as leaf (unfinished)

Another update.

Day 309 (2014-06-16)

• Shows each round's winner
• Counts won rounds
• Shows item each unit carries
• B: Pick up dropped item
• After combat, dropped items belong to player on same side of the road
• Made attack and stun frames
• A while holding bat: Swing
• Draws HP meter above stunned unit

So I got done playing around in Blender. Is this title screen even worse?

It's better, IMO.

Thanks.

Anyway, RHDE was the hit of NovaSquirrel's high school graduation party. He brought a half dozen of his classmates to his house, and they ended up ignoring furniture arrangement and theft to fill up on the destructive power of missile silos. They didn't want breaking and entering, just more breaking. They didn't care that when it was my turn, I was winning rounds left and right just by having a single complete set (fridge, oven, trashcan). It reminds me of how people ignored the actual objectives of Infiniminer and Minecraft to focus on building things.

And they found two bugs that I'll try to reproduce if I can.

Games that implement a set of rules but allow players to achieve the goals the way they want are always more fun. I feel like a lot of recent games are designed like interactive movies that must be played exactly like the developers imagined, with little room for improvisation. Back in the old days it was more common to be thrown in a world with well defined rules and goals you were free to play with.

That's a good argument for an option to leave the endless mode the way it is when I add a round limit.

Anyway, I was able to reproduce one of the bugs (failure to remove some garden plants that have become surrounded by walls), and I fixed it in my tree. The other (corruption of the Stock screen's state producing a pile of 255s) I have no idea about, as I only saw it happen once on hardware and wasn't running any sort of video recording, but I've added some bounds checks to make it less visible in case it is what I think it might be.

Another update from the same place. Now the bat actually does something.

Day 317 (2014-06-23)

• Less MS Painty title screen saves 2K of ROM
• Door or fence tile hit 3 times with bat breaks
• Unit hit with bat gets stunned for 2 s and drops carried furni
• B+A skips stunned units
• Unit hit 3 times faints and drops weapon
• Missiles destroy flowers
• Bounds-checks item IDs when drawing Shop and Stock
• Fixed automatic pickup of side-by-side flowers
• Fixed OBO allowing player 2 to cross player 1's door
• Title screen in manual

I keep polishing this t█rd...

Day 327 (2014-07-03)

• Added menu to title screen
• Removed change log from in-game instructions
• Skips furnish phase if neither side has beds
• Item picked up and not placed appears in Stock without having to go to Shop and back
• Left- or right-justifies furnish winner notice
• Grass is greener on winner's side
• Fixed bat's hitbox being too small on the east and south sides
• Goes to title screen after 5 or 10 wins if not endless

It's getting very close to "done", at least in 256 kbit form.

Day 342 (2014-07-19)

• Easier for units to pick up bat or rug near wall
• Code size micro-optimizations begin
• "DRAW!" is centered
• Press Start to pause any timed round

So what features would you like to see in the 512 kbit branch? My testers came up with these suggestions:

• Single-player scripted tutorial
• Add handheld rocket launcher weapon
• Placing garbage bags on the opponent's side to interfere with other player's Build
• More graphics in the help screen
• More families than just 3, one with female units
• Pick each side's color
• Fix certain exploitable tendencies in the house rating algorithm

And now I'm coming closer to what my original MS Paint Job was supposed to represent.

NovaSquirrel and I played a round and recorded it on my DVD recorder.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JeeRViqWafU

This incorporates changes for Double Action 53, as well as JRoatch's Donut image codec.

• Raise cap to to 8 rockets per side
• Replace build phase music
• Switch from PB53 to JRoatch's Donut codec
• Rename audio subroutines and variables to match those of Pently 5
• Switch to normal version numbering