My entry: The paths of Bridewell

Hi! I've been lurking for a little and noticed this contest going on. So, I've been working on this since around December.

"The paths of Bridewell" is a topdown dungeon/escape type game. This is my first "full" game and I'm sure in parts you can tell it. It's a little bit of a challenge getting correct palettes across all major emulators and also real hardware. So take the colors for what they are. I hope they turned out right. The CRT I used for testing is, a little on the small side. It was tested on real hardware using INL's NROM board. There are a few problems, but nothing that is game breaking. It's been fun, and I'm not too good at talking so here's a couple of screens and a download. I'm going to go celebrate this game being done.

Thanks guys,

zkip

Hi zkip!

That screen refresh is lovely! I look forward to playing this, and congratulations on finishing your first game!

Thanks!

I'm also posting here to say that I got curious (lol) and searched on google to see if anyone was talking about this game and sure enough someone already has a video up of several of the entries. This video brought to my attention that maybe some of you are experiencing music issues. The music isn't supposed to be slow. I'm assuming it's because the author of this video was using some sort of PAL emulation/hardware, but I'll let it be known now that it's programmed for NTSC only. No PAL compatibility has been programmed.

Success!

That's awesome. I'm actually really glad you posted this because I was a little afraid I may have made that boss a little bit too hard.

Finished too, the boss was fine, don't worry

The boss was okay, it seemed to get lodged in narrow places I could attack it from the side, mostly.

The one place I did get kinda stuck was trying to go back across the ice. It took me a while to realize I cold go up from here:

It sort of felt like a solution that was "outside the grid".

Liked this one.

Some notes:
- he moves a bit too slow
- the main menu was slow/unresponsive
- I'd like for the collision hitbox to be shorter, now it looks like his hair pixel stops him from moving right under a block
- was the pushable rock supposed to stop the enemy that moves between two points? He just passed through the rock, no matter where I put it

Thanks for those comments guys. That's originally why I entered the contest, I'd like to see how to improve. I'll try to do something making sure the player knows how to use the ice.

About the speed, I sorta figured this. 2px per frame seemed like too much. Maybe I'll do some subpixeling. Also no, the only things the rocks stop are the player.

Hm, then how were you supposed to get to the bottom without getting hurt? The room was laid out exactly like you were expected to trap the enemy in the top corner using a rock.

Sorry it took so long to get back to you. Call it bad design? lol. The idea is, IIRC, trip it by going in front of it, go to the left so you don't get hurt then hug the wall on the way down. If your sneaky enough and in the right side you can pass directly to the right of those fall down enemys and they won't trip.

I noticed that your game leaves PRG ROM A1E0-DFFF,FD00-FFF9 unused, more than half the PRG ROM. How hard would it be to move things around to fit it in NROM-128?

At the moment- it would take some time, because of various reasons I'm working on changing a lot of things in the game and left a lot strung out(I've changed a lot) and didn't make a backup.

Actually, I'm all for omitting this entry from the cart if you want. If you need the space it wouldn't bother me a bit if you guys want to cut it. I'm sure anyone that wants to play it knows where to find me.

I don't want to cut it.



Make backups.

Or use source control.

I usually do quite often after each "milestone". I, however, got "put in my place" so to speak by the results of the contest and how the game was received. So, I gutted out quite a bit of code to completely redo it and saw no use keeping the old seeing that at that time to me it was worthless.

As soon as I learned about source control, it became a tool I can hardly do without.

In a few cases since where it wasn't an option, I've actually written a batch file to zip up the source code and copy to a backup location with a timestamp in the filename, to make periodic backups manually with a double click. (There are tools like rsync that could do this more effectively, but it was more about what was available already / easy to me at the time.)

What item(s) are acquired after the swimsuit?

EDIT: If anyone other than the OP has the answer, but is reluctant to post spoilers, please PM me.

PM'd. I'm not sure what the second chest item is either; the game doesn't explicitly name it…

Thanks.

I absolutely love the bat sprite in this game. It has so much charm and it's rare to see someone approach such a common trope (bat as minor enemy) in such a unique way. In fact, I included the claw game on the cover art solely to feature that very specific bat.

As much as I can recall, the second item is the ice skates which should have been required to make it past a few rooms containing the ice floors.

Also, thanks M_Tee, that really means a lot. I'm glad at least something of this game could be called interesting.

I thought it was great that you could take the (cool looking) bats by surprise by stabbing or running by when you came from the left, but have to face them when you're backtracing for treasures and trinkets.

In a larger game, they might've had different configurations and mirrored looks to match for different directions of attention, but it worked perfectly in your design.