Progress Thread - The Legend of Quackin' Jacks' Gold

I've been working on a big project and so unfortunately haven't had time to progress on my intended compo entry, Psychic Death House, and as I really like the idea and don't want to make a hash of it I've reluctantly shelved it for now.

I'm super keen on getting something in for the compo though, so I'm revising my ludum dare entry, You are Insignificant, in to a second fuller and, hopefully, better game - The Legend of Quacking Jacks Gold.

This will involve completely redoing the physics (as they were a bit rubbish) and making it in to a larger action packed platform-jumping gold-stealing duck-dodging adventure.

As with any project, I've decided to work on the most important aspect first, something completely crucial without which the game would be hobbled. Today, I have been working on.. the title screen.

What do you think?

Excellent, but the font for Team Disposable is terrible.

It looks better if I rescale the title screen using fractional bilinear interpolation: nearest neighbor at an integer ratio no greater than the final size followed by linear interpolation to the final size


But looking at how close the copyright notice is to the edge, I see another problem: NTSC TVs might cut it off. Nintendo's rule was to keep important text out of the top and bottom 24 pixels and the left and right 16 pixels. I follow a looser rule inspired by both my own measurements of SDTVs and the scaled mode of the PocketNES emulator: keep text out of the top 16, bottom 12, and side 8. The red tinted areas are thus the most likely to be cut off.

Ah, thanks for the feedback! I will move the copyright notice, and change its font to something less heinous.

Progress! I've managed to get my ludum dare engine ported over to an unrom with chr-ram, and the basics of a new level loading structure in place using Sumez's excellent level editing tool, however I am having trouble updating chr-ram tiles when in play.

I was hoping to flash over a lava tile with two alternating tiles, for instance, but I think the problem is that I don't have enough time in vblank to do so.

Has anyone managed this successfully (updating a tile in chr-ram with the screen on)? I'm not using any tile compression, and the loading to the PPU starts right after the flag is given for vblank

You realistically have time to upload 128-160 bytes during vblank between one frame and the next using a moderately unrolled loop. This is equivalent to eight to ten tiles. Haunted: Halloween '85 and its sequel The Curse of Possum Hollow sling tiles all over the place, dynamically loading both background and sprite tiles needed for the next part of the level. The background tiles and maps in both games and the sprite tiles in the second game are compressed.

I took the liberty of rearranging your title screen to fit all important parts in the center 224x192 pixels, following the title safe area guideline implicit in Nintendo's background planning sheets.

Wow, thanks Tepples, that's awesome! Thanks for taking the time to show me the edge limits, I've still got some experimenting to do, but this has definitely set me on the right track!

Re: CHR-RAM, clearly I am doing something incorrect then - I will experiment some more.

CHR-ram is now working properly and the engine can now do everything as an UNROM it could do as an NROM.



Next up: Better Physics!

I've got the bulk of the physics working -

Bit shifting has given me some nice floaty jumping, and a while loop makes sure collision detection is happening at the appropriate juncture.

Also:

Cool! Is that for story cards?

You could perhaps use the 'hair' colour to give hands and forearms some shadowing and/or detail.

That's a good idea! My artistic skills aren't up to much, however I did try something similar on the duck which I'm quite pleased with

I've changed the pose to make it a little more dynamic and added shading as you suggested - I think it looks quite a bit better, thanks!



Physics also now completely working, with moving platform collisions.

Horizontal platforms are now also working - cant quite get rid of this "pop" effect where the player pops through a platform if they jump on to it from below...

All moving platforms are a single speed in this gif, but they can be configured individually. They are all currently moving to the same width/height, however I have a plan to fix that.



Next: bugfixing, gold, coins, and level building!

How are you managing collisions? You're probably ejecting the player as if it were going downwards, if you're doing it as I did... try skipping the collision if the player has an upwards movement, maybe? If my assumption is right he should "pop" up only when he reaches the peak of his jumping arch, and it might be less jarring to see (but still forgivable if the player missed the platform by a couple of pixels)

I managed to crack it, thanks - I also redid the physics engine while I was there.

The game now has an overworld connecting the levels together, and pretty much the whole engine (bar two planned boss fights) is built.

Hurrah!



The overland graphics are a work in progress.

My current bug - Famitone will only play one sound effect. Anyone have any ideas why?

Explain more.

You can only play one at a time (simultaneously)... or all calls to play sound fx plays the same sound.

Standard famitone2 ?

In FamiTone, you have to play different sound effects on different tracks. You set X to one value for low priority sound effects and to another value for high priority sound effects.

Hi! I think it was more basic then that - looks like bankswitching was interfering with the registers it wanted. Now fixed!

Thanks!

Now with scrolling and you were eaten by a grue slime

There's also a new protagonist.

Can you see anything special about this NES character?





That's right! He's using 6 colours! I guess when you're using two 8x8 sprites, you can afford to double 'em up.

Any comments/ideas etc gratefully appreciated. It's looking like I might actually finish this in time for the deadline.

Now with dancing trees!

Dancing trees remember me super mario bros 3 just enough to stimulate this "nostalgia vibe" without seeming like plagiarism. It's great!

Ah, crisis!

For some reason, I thought the compo ended on the midnight of the 1st of February - meaning I would have had the whole of Wednesday to finish the game. I have an important job interview on Wednesday, and so will be unlikely to finish the game between now and the end of tomorrow to get it submitted.

As such, I will likely be submitting late - or I may hold off till next year, as I have another project to get back to. I guess we'll see after tomorrow!

Regardless, I've learned plenty, and it has been an excellent experience!

Some further developments:

The Hamster!



The hamster functions as companionship in an otherwise friendless jungle. And as a second hit.



Intro sequences!




Also, a multitude of enemies, including hawks, bears, flying pigs, slimes and, of course, ducks.

VOTING IS NOW ON....

Get your votes in by the 15th of September... See the last post in this thread for more details....

thankyou,

Photo Comp

Spam post aside, i completely missed the second page of this thread and now i hope to see this finished some day. It looks fun! Are you up for this years' competition?