Progress Thread - Wrecking Balls

Health and family issues almost put paid to my plans to participate in this compo, but I've finally got something to show. No idea if I'll be able to finish it in a week but I'll damn well try.

Wrecking Balls is a straightforward four-player versus game based on the legendary Bomberman, squeezed into 16K NROM w/ CHR-RAM. D-pad to move, A button to drop bombs. Blow up walls to get more and bigger bombs, and blow up the other players to win! Credit to WheelInventor for graphics, animations, hardware testing and a whole lot of patience, among other things.

Skull items currently do nothing, and it's fixed to four players no matter how many controllers are connected, but otherwise it's fully playable. It should work with both the Four Score and Famicom expansion ports. It's probably also loaded with bugs, so please bash on it and tell me what breaks.

There is currently no sound or title screen. We're working on it. A level editor is also planned, with battery-backed saving (which obviously won't work on the compo cart even if we do make the deadline).

No ASM was harmed or used in the making of this ROM.

Oh great. I was eventually going to get around to making something similarly named but unrelated. I had a playable prototype and a video. I guess I snooze, I lose.

Is Konami especially litigious in this area?

Rahsennor, I've been thinking about trying to get a handful of new 4-player party games together and released onto a single cart, sort of a "homebrew party" thing.

Right now, all I've got is my Spacey McRacey game that I'm submitting to the compo. So it's not like I have much momentum at this point, but just thought I'd throw that out there in case you have any future interest.

re: party collection
We've talked about it before in passing (and i did recently have a similar discussion with yet another member on the forums), so the idea is not unfamiliar. Right now (speaking only for my part in the project), i feel we're just aiming at getting stuff in place and in good shape for the compo, but then who knows? It's cool that there seems to be some movement towards expanding the more than two players portion of the NES library.

edit: re: name and game
aww, that's a bummer. :/

I just read up on it, they acquired the rights to the original series and name in 2012. Bomberland came out for C64 in 2013. Someone published a game called BomberMan in 2014. I don't get why one would want to choose such a close match of a name. Then there's Bombing Bastards for the Wii U store.

This doesn't seem lke the right topic for such a comment.

I was thinking exactly the same thing myself! Don't want to commit to anything, because life is still throwing me curve balls, but if I get this one done I'd be interested in putting it on a cart.

Might be a good way to get it on hardware if I miss the compo deadline.

Here's a soundtrack that has been proposed as in-game bgm. Any comments are very welcome. If i do any changes, it is easier to do now than after the format conversion.



Restrictions: No FT effects used.
Small filesize is imperative. Shortened pattern length. Heavy reuse of patterns; used in different combinations. The volume column will eventually get instrumentalized to fit Rahsennors' native driver. .ftm song data size 1271; might shrink some in the conversion process. A full loop is ~60s at speed 3 (standard); 80s at speed 4 (heavy).

Not like you have to press trademark suits against each other.

"New" just in the sense of being homebrew, right? I could fix up Quadruple Action Blaster Guys for that, and you could try to get permission for Super PakPak.

I don't think similar names are really that big of a problem, especially when the things are so different.

The idea to include a level editor is really good; I don't think I've actually played a Bomberman game that had one, and it lets you get a lot more out of the game than you would have by only having a set of premade maps.


In the area of Bomberman clones, you mean (since they own the franchise now)? With how ubiquitous they are I really doubt it. A lot of the clones I've seen don't even bother to replace the characters with other ones and they're still around.

Correct. I just saw what happened to In the Groove (another clone of a Konami game), precedent set by what has happened over the past few years to works by fans of other companies' games (particularly Tetris, Metroid, and Pokémon), and whatever else the company has done to earn the #FUCKONAMI hashtag on Twitter.

Absolutely.

Title screen and player select are in. Still no map select/editor, round count/game mode options, win/lose animations or sound. But it's only 8156 bytes so far, more than half of which is tile data, so there's plenty of room.

This is probably the last update I can manage before Feb 1.

...or maybe I can find the time to fix a few bugs. Minor palette tweaks, PRESS START only appears on the player select screen when you can actually press it, spawn locations are randomized and skulls give you ten seconds of autobomb.

Lack of sound notwithstanding, it's a decent little minigame. Should I submit this to the compo? Or is it too unfinished?

Here's an update to the music (which probably won't make it into the ROM submission in time), including another song for the log in screen. Changes to the original song are few and subtle. Critique and comments are welcome.

By all means, do. The game is very beautiful and plays well. And you can always add some extra polish for the multicart.

Given the possibility of using arpeggios, here's another soundtrack update thanks to Rahsennors' tip that arps work for drum/percussion in a similar way to continous envelopes when changed at a per frame basis.

I found that a tri tone with a 2-frame volume envelope (on, then off) still gets audibly affected by the pitch of the arpeggio frame corresponding to the off frame of the volume, making a (nes-relatively speaking) very sharp, snappy snare tone possible, as opposed to the more beefy, tom-like electro sound of a tri tone left on for 2 or more frames. I'm not aware of the exact circumstances of this behaviour, but if it works, it works.

kicks, snare tone, and toms implemented in this alternative version of the two songs.