Progress Thread - FamiJammers

I got into NES programming about a month ago, just in time to begin the 2016 competition. I've never done any 6502 or anything for the NES, so I'm glad I can actually contribute something as a NESDev member finally.

I like Windjammers for Neo-Geo a lot, but it's only available legally for hard-to-access hardware (Neo-Geo MVS, AES, and NGCD). I thought it would be fun to make a new game in the spirit of Windjammers, in the way that Overwatch is a game that is done in the spirit of Team Fortress 2. In other words, I don't wish to make a direct clone, but rather try to capture what's fun about Windjammer's game design and mechanics, and make something new.

For several reasons the graphics and sound design will be different from Windjammers. I'm using UNROM/UOROM, with CHR RAM, and I've planned out how much VRAM space each character is alloewd so any two arbitrary character choices may be made without aligning character graphics to CHR ROM banks. I'm writing the whole thing in 6502 assembly, and although I am completely new to it this game isn't particularly complicated with regards to action on-screen, so I think the NES hardware can handle my less-than-stellar 6502 code. Furthermore, the PPU should handle a game like this with little to no flickering.

At the time of writing the game is on Github, though it may go private a little later: https://github.com/mikejmoffitt/6502jam

I am doing the programming, graphics, and sound. A preliminary playfield has been created. Her'es some stuff I've already taken care of:

[list=]
Metasprite mapping format and display routines
Animation engine for player animation scripts
Disc movement, semi-3D (Z axis is limited)
Player movement
Dynamic palette modification for P2
[/list]

I've got a lot to do, but it'll be a fun project and I hope I can make something presentable by the deadline.

Good luck with this, it'll be nice to see a Windjammers-like on another console. It's looking pretty good so far

I'm an insane fan of Windjammers (one of the best Neo-Geo games, IMO), so I'll be watching this thread.

Edit...
Actually, I couldn't help but think about this some more...

You had mentioned in the other thread that #35 may be the only skin tone present in the game?

Looking at your screenshot, I suspect that you might be reluctant to vary skin tones due to limited sprite palettes (I'm counting: Black, Pink, White for flesh and shirt - Black, Red, Pink for P2 skirt - Black, Blue, Pink for P1 skirt - and - Black, Blue, White for puck) But even school girls don't play sports in skirts. It's impractical. They have P.E. clothes, so the need to have two colors of clothing for each character seemed superfluous.

Using tennis, volleyball, or normal schoolyard P.E. uniforms as a basis, you could easily free up unique palettes for both players and also put the girls in something far more socially acceptable for sports.


Here are five skintones, #17, #27, #36, #37, #35. I also put in a few hairstyles as choices (By using shorts for male and female players, you may save some tiles). By mixing and matching uniform palettes, skintones, hairstyles, and gender, you could incorporate a very basic, but pretty robust character creator in the game as well.

No, sorry my wording was unclear. What I meant is $35 is one of many, but that one alone is subject to many interpretations.

The only limitation is that the two players have one shared palette ($35, a white, and a black color) as well as one character-specific palette. For a character to have a different skin tone, it necessitates the use of the character-specific palette. That's fine, but then it kind of limits the whole character to one palette instead of two.

I may think about making the disc only black-and-white, which would then allow each player to have two distinct sprite palettes allocated. That would allow completely arbitrary skin color choices at the whim of the player.

I temporarily back-burnered our NES Windjammers inspired game and just started working on it again last week lol.

Quite different, of course, with the orientation being opposite.

Looks cool so far, Mike

That was pretty much the plan. The top and bottom half of the existing character is separated by palette, so having that be swappable was going to be an easy choice anyway.

The current character is completely a placeholder - it's little more than an edit of the main sprite from Valis, and likely not slated for inclusion. I was thinking of having many more strange characters, but 16x7 tiles per player doesn't leave a ton of room so something simpler like you suggested is probably what's going to end up happening.

That all sounds great. Glad to hear the characters will likely have independent palettes. Even without sacrificing a unique puck sprite, I think it's worth the reduction in different bottoms / tops (Also, then, you don't have to worry about having the waist always divide at a tile intersection.) Anyway, I look forward to seeing what your original players will look like.

A few modifications later and I have it divided such that I can at least offer shoe colors to break out of having just four colors per player. I had your PE uniform mockup visible as a reference when making the modifications here, so I ohpe you don't mind the similarity. I only had to edit my mappings a little, and I solved a mistake I made earlier where the player's leg was 1 pixel thinner than it should be.



Player two is still using the old sprites.

This game appears very tennis-like to me. Women tennis players play in some sort of skirt, right? Perhaps just make the skirt shorter, like that of a tennis uniform.

A videogame doesn't have to be realistic.

I quite like the aspect of this game, and I am also a fan of the original. Looking forward to it!

Your experience may vary with mine, but lots of girls wore skirts in P.E. where I went to school (P.E. uniforms aren't a universal thing), not to mention they might wear whatever they like when playing sports outside of school. Some of the girls team uniforms required skirts, too.

I've seen plenty of top level atheletes wear skirts while playing, too, so I don't think this criticism has a good foundation at all.

Most of those skirts are actually "skorts".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skort

Skorts are yet another option. I'm not trying to say what is "most common", I'm saying that it's really not unusual to find women wearing skirts while playing sports. To say that they don't is blatantly incorrect.

There are plenty of sports teams today that have a skirt uniform (e.g. common in women's field hockey), and shorts aren't universally better than a skirt in every situation. Lots of people prefer to do active stuff in skirts for whatever reason, be it about physical feel, habit, or just fashion sense, or maybe it's after school and they didn't want to go home and change. It's not just a simple no-brainer, and they really aren't particularly impractical either.

Some men's sports are commonly played in skirts too.

(All that said, it's cool to see multiple uniforms implemented. That makes a nice variety.)

Or perhaps a game is set in a culture that has a different sense of modesty from the present-day post-World War II westernized cultures.


Agreed. Anyone who knows me in person would understand.


Such as boys' pillow fighting, which is played in long flannel nightshirts.^[1]


[1] Alcott, L. M. Little Men. Whitman, 1955.

In my initial justification I'd thought of Tennis, where skirted shorts are common. As I've already more or less created a variant with shorts, nothing stops me from offering both as variants. The real challenge I will be facing is fitting all of the animation frames in. I will have to do some very careful re-use of tile data and CHR-tetris to make an individual character fit in a 16x7 tile CHR-RAM slot. That only leaves the top 16x2 rows open for the disc, which eats half, and a few tiny other things (disc shadow, and possibly a dust particle effect).

Fortunately, things like score, etc. are drawn to the nametable so eating all of my sprite space with characters should be fine.

How often does the cel change? If not more than 15 fps for each character, you may be able to do Battletoads instead of Tetris: double buffer the tiles needed for a character's cels in CHR RAM instead of keeping all of them in RAM at once.

@mjm
I wouldn't mind any similarities at all. Those were just quick paintovers is all.

regarding skirts:
I reckon as long as you're classier than Capcom, it'd be fine. Since the outfits are very clearly real-world school uniform-inspired, and when real-world students (who would wear those uniforms) would typically wear a different uniform for playing sports, the decision stood out to me.

Also, if you're not tied to the implication of school-age students, you could take something like American Gladiator contender-uniforms into consideration. (which I think Windjammers was pretty close to, anyway).



Did you have a specific setting in mind?

Are the players representing their countries? (The American Super Dodgeball)
Is it a school-club sport? (The Japanese Super Dodgeball, what I had assumed from the first shot)
Is there a scifi element to it? (Discs of Tron, Base Wars)
Is it a street-sport? (Street Hoop/Slam)
Are they battling for fantasy realms? (Mortal Kombat)

Deciding on this first could inspire the outfits of choice.

Edit: Punctuation/Grammar

Windjammers has much more of a "rough future arena sport" vibe to it with regards to costumes than I was planning. I like how in many fighting games, the characters clearly didn't show up having dressed ready to fight. They are just there, as-is, working with what they have. So, variety in what players are wearing can be justified in that regard. However, I don't think it's a hugely important topic. I don't wish to justify a costume based on strange edge-cases, but basing what characters wear on P.E. uniforms, typical Tennis wear, and other various sporty things is reasonable. Street clothes are certainly accessible given the somewhat ambiguous social situation.

If Windjammers is Soccer/Futbol, then my game is the equivalent of a pick-up game being played on a public court. There will be no long-winded story fleshing out who is playing, why they are playing, and what the stakes are for the game. The characters do not have faces because I would like them to remain abstract representations of a player having inserted himself or herself into the game at most.

In redrawing the character art, I've done some more CHR-RAM packing. For the twelve frames of animation I have now (3 frames x 4 directions) I've still got some space to go in my 16x7 window. I'll need that to fit in some sort of animation for the dash, holding and throwing animations for the disc, and a "powering up" animation.

I can dig that. The informal feel of street sports games has appeal. I loved the aforementioned Street Slam for MVS and have never been able to enjoy a uniformed-team basketball game. For similar spritework, you might want to check out Street Sports Basketball for the C64.



Edit:
Oh, and don't be hesitant to use black-as-clothing as well. It could help break up some of the monotony of shorts and t-shirts.

I put these together yesterday (before you replied about setting), inspired by 90s athletic gameshow contestant fashion (gladiators, guts, etc.).

I'm not suggesting it, just posting it as an example of using black to vary the clothing. Could help keep interest without devoting two sprite palettes per player (could free up a sprite palette for the disc in case you ever wanted it to flash or flame-up or anything.)

On the bus home from work I drew some animations for sliding forward and blocking, and hooked them up to the appropriate triggers. diagonal and up/down sliding just point to other animations for now because it lets me see that the logic works. I also made a few playfield changes, going for asphalt for the first stage. I ran it through the vomit NTSC filter to ensure reasonable visibility too, and am experimenting with alternate ways of displaying the score to respect NTSC safe zones.

I had to search about Neo Windjammers to know what you're trying to achieve. It seems like it's a pretty cool game, I want to see how your take on that game is going to be so please finish it ok?

I like your art overall but the sliding sprite feels off for some reason. Anyway, judging from the "original" game this seems like a pretty fun one, best of luck.

The sliding sprites were drawn on a laptop while on a violently shaking bus, on the way to work. They're somewhat placeholders for now, as I'm not particularly happy with them either.

I know how that can be. I tried to use a netbook to do graphics work on a subway a couple of times, and finally just gave up and now just do pencil work on graph paper while commuting and pixel it out when I get to a PC proper.

I guess I've just been subconsciously planning things such that I end up doing graphics work at home and code work while riding transit.

Following my employer's policy regarding intellectual property rights of projects created by employees during their employment period, this project will be henceforth suspended until August 12th.

Well that's a damn shame. If only someone would come here and post "I have registered here to post that I am taking over development of this project"...

Regardless, I hope you can go back to your project by August... this is a homebrew project that I'm really interested with.

One great thing about the internet is anonymity. Of course I would never suggest you violate any work policies, but my friend Annie McNonymous says it's ok. (Full disclosure, she's not technically a lawyer, or real)

Oh, I thought of another one. What about unintelligible property rights? Are you allowed to produce non-sense and gibberish?

"I'm on vacation from this project for two months." Is that easier to swallow?

Alrighty, worked on a few things:

-Basic fixed-point multiplication to allow for throw strength scaling
-Lookup table-based sine / cosine functions for curving the disc
-D-pad rotation detection for disc curving
-Basic catch/throw mechanic (needs animation and other throw types)