Discussion - Sinking Feeling

This one was a pleasant surprise, since it never had a thread here. Sinking Feeling by Calima.

Not too complicated. Nice looking. Fun little cutscenes. Good music. Humorous "achievements". A concept very different than the others. I think this is real cool!





I must admit, I don't think I get it. Ha ha. :<

The premise had me laughing while playing It only gets better by the fact that certain newspapers still won't stop writing about it, pretending the whole thing was/is somehow not embarrasing.

And to top it, the coastal guard recently lost track of a drone submarine in the baltic sea. I kind of wish it'll eventually wash ashore in Russia. It'd be a great tourist attraction.

Edit: i don't want to spoil the bonus point hunt, but a summary can be read here.

Thanks folks, I was nervous how it'd be received.

This will sound like a half-compliment, but I enjoyed it much more than I expected to. That was true for most of the games in the compo. Definitely true about Wo Xiang Niao Niao...I thought I would hate it, and ended up having lots of fun.

I really enjoyed this game. It's a nice, simple to grasp one-screen game with pretty solid mechanics. The difficulty ramped up pretty nicely for the most part, too.

I did have two minor nitpicks - first, shots from subs at the very top of the ocean were darn near impossible to dodge - there's almost no time between when they shoot and when they hit. Maybe it's just because I'm getting older, but I couldn't dodge them to save my life. Second, there were two levels with way too many enemies on them towards the end - one with standard gray subs and one with the red mine subs -- those felt insanely hard compared to the rest of the game. I had to use save states to get past the red one. Like I said though, other than those I felt the difficulty increased at a good pace.

Thanks for a fun entry!

Fun game

Today I learned that Sinking Feeling is a CNROM with two CHR ROM banks, but $0A00-$0FFF and $1200-$1FFF of bank 0 are empty, as is $1000-$1FFF of bank 1. This means moving the sprite tiles from $1000-$11FF to $0E00-$0FFF and then moving the used half to $1000-$1FFF of bank 0 would convert it to NROM.

calima: Could you do this for me? It'd simplify the multicart construction.

I won't have the time for that at least for a few weeks, I'm afraid. Is it about the 8kb space, or is there some other issue with CNROM games? When do you need it?

edit: I ask also because my other game would also have been CNROM, and it was mentioned as supported in the rules.
edit 2: There was going to be a larger and nicer title, but my health prevented getting that one up. That would have taken the unused BG tiles.

It's about extending the cartridge board, emulators, and menu software to support CNROM games. If a game severely underuses CNROM, it can be easier to just hack it. But if there's more than one game that makes full use of it, that's a different story.

One of my entries was going to use CNROM, but I decided to put it on hold. As I may keep working on it and maybe make an entry of it next year, what would you prefer? I mean, I can port it to UNROM if it's prefered, And I think so because the multicart is CHR-RAM based.

I'm asking 'cause, while CNROM is listed as supported, I guess it's easier to just adapt a mapper which is already CHR-RAM based such as UNROM.

Currently, UNROM is easier. The existing CNROM support in the builder is there for things like Donkey Kong Classics, which have two games that have the same PRG ROM and different CHR ROM banks. Several NROM-128 entries to the first compo were combined in this way. But if there were a compelling entry that made full use of CNROM, such as using different banks for the status bar and playfield, I'd spend time refactoring the builder and changing the menu to run the CHR RAM loading routine multiple times.

Hm, I guess "different banks for different modes/levels" is not full use?

Solar Wars has different banks for different modes. It was straightforward to convert to UNROM with a slight pause when switching CHR banks, once two other bugs in the game itself were fixed.

Oh, nice that there's a ready script. How long is the pause?

The script as such is specific to Solar Wars but can be adapted to other CNROM games. The pause is enough time to blank the screen and decompress 8192 bytes to CHR RAM. This is about the same duration as starting an NROM game from the main menu, or about a quarter of a second.

For the game I'm thinking about, 0.25s might be too annoying, since the transition happens often.

Needing to have a whole set of new tiles ready immediately might also be considered a good use of CNROM. Fortunately, what I did yesterday will help.

At this point, there are two advantages of porting to NROM:

First, it keeps an Action 53 compilation containing the game playable in the latest version of FCEUX for Windows available on the official download page. CHR bank switching in the Action 53 mapper was fixed in r3339, but as of today, the latest version was r3338.

Second, in theory, it saves 512 bytes because each tile that is blank or same-as-previous currently compresses down to one byte.

The interim link will most likely be updated by then, it sounds like.

Today I learned that KrzysioCart is another reason to keep CHR under 8K if it can be under 8K. As a stand-alone CNROM game, it would still work, as it'd be flashed to the CHR ROM chip. But it wouldn't work when incorporated into a multicart, as the CHR RAM on KrzysioCart is only 8K.

Pretty fun. An achievement list somewhere moderately hidden would be nice.

ed: Got powerpak CHRruption on this too.