Super Homebrew War

Thanks to Glutock, surt, Gradual Games, NovaSquirrel, Sly Dog Studios, Brad Smith, E.B.D Holland, Chris Cacciatore, Julius Riecke, Khan Games, Spoony Bard Productions, Antoine Fantys, Doug Fraker, Toggle Switch, Frakengraphics, Dullahan Software, The Mojon Twins, M-Tee, Lukasz Kur, Orab Games, Pubby, Morphcat games, and Retrotainment Games....

Here's my entry for this year, Super Homebrew War.




1-4 players can use characters from many other NES homebrew games, and will duke it out to see who's the best.

Play on one of 8 different homebrew-inspired arenas.

The game is Mario-style controls:
A to jump
B to dash and to use items
Down+A to jump down through one-way platforms

Jump on heads to kill each other, or get items from ! blocks, and press B to attack with them.


Items:
- Twin Dragons Pepper (lets you breathe fire)
- Mad Wizard Lightning
- Study Hall Paper Airplane
- Bat Puncher Punch
- Nebs n Debs Crystal (lets you do the Nebs n' Debs dash)
- Robo-Ninja slam (press B in the air to slam to the ground quickly)
- Micro Mages Star (swaps positions of all characters)
- Clock (briefly freezes opponents)


Game modes:
- Most kills -- get the most kills to win
- Survival -- you are out after you lose a certain number of lives
- Chicken -- One player is the chicken, and gains points while being a chicken. Kill the chicken to become the new chicken.
- King of the Hill -- a box will appear on-screen. Gain points by being the only player occupying the box.

Characters:
- While most characters play identically, a couple have very different control schemes. (currently just Hekl and Robo-Ninja). These will have a NES controller icon underneath them on the character select screen to remind you. These characters may be significantly harder to use, and completely unbalanced.
- My kids got interested, so they are also in the game, designed by themselves.
- Roster is: Dinky, Nomolos, Nova, Lizard, Hekl, Spaceman (from Spook-o-tron), Capt Roast, Sick Man (from Study Hall), Nebs n Debs, Eskimo Bob, O (from Star Evil), Rekt guy, Honey, Blue, Lala, Micro Mage, Kaylee, Donny, Robo-Ninja, and my 3 kids


CPU:
- I have CPU players so you can play single-player, BUT the CPU is terrible at game modes other than Most Kills. You'll want other humans for those game modes.

I've still got some testing to do, a few bugs to fix, and a few characters to add, but it's pretty close to finished.

Edit: added Lala the Magical, fixed Nova sprite errors.
Edit 10/21: posted a new build with bug tweaks, added Kaylee from Cowlitz Gamers 2nd Adventure, O from Star Evil, a mage from Micro Mages, and 2 new maps (Tailgate Party and Micro Mages)
Edit 11/6: posted a new build with Donny from Haunted Halloween, palette swaps for duplicate characters, and various bug fixes.
Edit 11/21: posted a new build that fixes a bug which caused Hekl to get stuck in the air
Edit 1/4: minor bug fix

Woooow XD this reminds me of an old idea that I had in my mind about a Smash-like NES game, but I couldn't make it because it was too low level for me. I was concerned about the pallettes issue since every character would take one sprite pallette which would ultimately take all 4 spaces. And I was also concerned about the 8 sprites per scanline issue. Like, what if you have 4 players next to each other and one of them fires a projectile? You'll surely get flickering! So how do you manage to fix that?

This is true, and I had to work around that a bit. I had to force some things to be background tiles when I'd rather they were sprites (like not-yet-collected items), to work around palette limitations.



Yeah, the flicker was a big concern of mine. Particularly because a few characters are 3 sprites wide. But it really didn't turn out to be too big of an issue:

First, there's enough vertical motion in the game (and the game design encourages this), that you don't often have 4 players next to each other for very long at a time. Someone is generally either dodging upward or downward, or is dead. You get a few moments where too many sprites are aligned, but not as many as you might think. Unlike traditional fighters where you spend a lot of time standing on the ground attacking each other, players in this game bob and bounce all over the place, since the primary method for killing each other is landing on someone's head.

Second, with OAM cycling, the occasional short bits of flicker just aren't all that bad. At least, that's my hope. It's one of the questions I keep asking to folks who test it, and it hasn't seemed to be enough to bother most people.

Well done! That's great your kids got involved

The "NES Smash" already exists, no? Super Tilt Bro

First response:







Second response:

The AI is a little light on the I, and only ever beat me because it's clearly not playing by the same rules I am. In particular, it successfully made the paper plane the most obnoxiously boring weapon I've seen in a long time. But good on you for including one at all.

Anything else I was going to say has been drowned out by the wondrous sight of Captain Roast meting out boxing-glove-shaped justice once more.

Absolutely. Tilt Bros is a much more accurate attempt of translating the actual gameplay and fighting mechanics of Smash Bros. Roger Bidon did a good job of that, and I'm not even attempting to do that better than he did. Really, I was inspired more by an open-source PC game called Super Mario War, which I took most of the core gameplay mechanics from.




Yeah, the AI is terrible. (Which is why I let it cheat) It's really just there so people without other players around can at least try out how the game is supposed to work.

It's better than nothing, which makes it better than the vast majority of NES games. And it actually does a decent job of avoiding getting stomped, which surprised me. It's just that AI happens to be one of my favourite subjects (and pet peeves about modern games, which have no excuse).

If you have time/room, you could add some simple hints to the map: "if inside this block and falling, go left/right", "if inside this block and running left/right, press jump", etcetera. That should help stop the chain-suicides, at least.


That's exactly what I thought when I saw the thread title, and what I found was exactly what I was hoping for.

Yeah, that was my original plan. Then I was happily surprised that my almost-entirely-random AI was actually moderately playable, and I called that "good enough for now". I may or may not revisit it and improve it. Probably depends on how many other features/characters/bugs end up coming up last minute.



Excellent! It seems most people I mention it to have never heard of it.

Awesome idea. Will play as soon as I can.

Are you the developer who made that GBA homebrew that piko sells?

BTW great idea for a game. I honestly want to make a similar game but will all NES characters ever made. Each one having their own unique abilities from their original games.

Considering that there are around 700 licensed NES games, each of them with several characters, I think this is going to keep you busy for a while.

BTW, haven't had a chance to play this yet, but it looks cool!

Anguna, yup, that's me. (You can get my Atari 2600 port of it from AtariAge also!)

This is amazing... I'm having so much fun! Now I have a fun game to play with my friends and which isn't a copyright issue like Super Mario War for example.

However, it might be a copyright issue since Nova the Squirrel NES game is licensed under the GPL license while some other game characters might be under an incompatible license. I suggest you ask the characters' owners so that we all negotiate the license. If I ever make an NES ROM with my characters, I'd never allow it to be under some viral copyleft license like ShareAlike or GPL because that would legally allow people to make cringy impure things of my characters. So I suggest that your game is licensed under a permissive license if it's going to be open-source at all. It's commonly known among the "OC do not steal" kind of culture to use BSD-like licenses. Also, GPL'd games, if Let's Played, will infect (GPL-ify) the Let's Play videos. No way am I gonna release my own voice in GPL so that people manipulate it with legal permission against me. I might be paranoid, but I'm just extrapolating from the history which repeats if it's not extrapolated from as well as the Murphy's Law.

I have some suggestions for the game:

As I was trying to make games like this where you play tag and stuff, I'd love it if you could add the Tag feature. Whoever has the tag, they have "IT" above their head so that it's known that they're it. And if the time expires, an OVER9000 lbs crate falls onto their head XD which was an inside joke between me and a friend of mine from 2009 when we were making such games. Kinda like in Crash Bash.

You could also add the feature to modify the rules slightly. For example, you could make it so that you get negative points if you kill yourself by falling onto a hazard or by getting hit by your own weapon. Or a life counting mode where you steal lives from others. If you kill someone, they lose a life and you get that life. Everyone starts with 10 and the game ends when only one player is left with more than 0 lives.

One thing that was funny is how I'd respawn from the air and hit someone on the head XD I think that that's a bit more based on luck rather than on skill. Someone could be dying like that constantly and only get points by doing that.

The CPU plays kinda good, but it's hillarious when a CPU player collects a Clock powerup and then doesn't kill anyone except itself by someone's projectile XD you could have a little code modifier that says that if a CPU player has a clock, all of the CPU AI processing power goes only towards that one player and their mission is to avoid projectiles and hazards while jumping on everyone else's heads. That would be the simplest job for an AI since all of the opponents are stationary at the time so there's no need for dynamic recalculation of pathfinding and other complicated things. (sidememe: I wonder if using the Clock powerup would save a console's battery life if this game ran on some portable FPGA-based NES)

Also, I was thinking if this game could be more than just an NES game. What if it was a cross-platform game running on an emulator written in a crossplatform library? Kinda like how Nintendo uses Virtual Console except that your game would not even look like if it was run by an emulator; instead, your game's ROM will communicate with the emulator by using fictional registers that don't exist on the actual NES hardware. That way it interfaces with the emulator where you can choose how to set up the keyboard/touchscreen/joystick settings as well as the video settings and filters for the emulator, but through the GUI which is inside of the game. That way the game could be portable to any platform!

Thanks for the feedback!



Yeah, it's important to me that people are happy with their characters being the game. I've contacted each character's owner in advance before including them. There's been a couple characters I wanted to use, but haven't heard back from, so I won't use them until then.




I thought about doing a tag mode, but it's probably not going to make the cut. The closest thing is the chicken mode.



Really, making intuitive menus for all that stuff is one of the more time-consuming parts of the game. There's "survival" mode which is as close as we'll get to what you're suggesting.



Yeah, that's a problem. I'm going to be posting an updated build soon with a warning to help you avoid that situation. It won't help against the stupid CPU player though.


The hard part is just writing the AI code to traverse the battlefield. It's intuitive for a human to see the layout, and make the right jumps. Making an AI to do that is a lot more work, even if things are stationary.



Hahah, I can barely find time to finish this game as it is

I see. May I do a Let's Play on this game? I would just need that the license isn't GPL or ShareAlike, but that it allows me to have my Let's Play not forced to be open source.

A Let's Play is a video of the game play, right? Of course you may do a video without it being open source.

My guess is that the worry comes from the combination of two things: game publishers like Nintendo sending Content ID or notices of claimed infringement against certain videos of their games on YouTube, and organizations like Software Freedom Law Center and Software Freedom Conservancy filing suit to enforce the letter of the GNU General Public License against those who distribute covered programs to the public in object code form without making source code available. Though SFLC and Conservancy have so far sued over distribution, not public performance, the game publishers' actions show that public performance is also an exclusive right that might get enforced analogously against makers of gameplay videos.

But if each developer has in fact offered a suitable dual license on the characters for use in the present game, there isn't a problem.

I understand what he's talking about, but I categorically reject the idea that a game's copyright would cover public performance, no matter what big corporations have tricked the courts into deciding.

https://opensource.stackexchange.com/qu ... /5192#5192

https://opensource.stackexchange.com/qu ... a-tv-movie

This has been my concern regarding GPL game Let's Plays.

I've posted a new version today, including:

- Added O from Star Evil
- Added Kaylee from The Cowlitz Gamers 2nd Adventure
- Added a Mage from Micro Mages
- Added a new map based on the title screen of Tailgate Party
- Added a new map based on Micro Mages
- Added trampolines (from Micro Mages)
- Added new item, a star from Micro Mages that makes characters swap places
- Added icons to warn where somebody is respawning to cut down on bad luck by dying from falling enemies
- Tweaks to existing maps for balance/playability
- Misc bug fixes

The download (and updates to the thanks/credits list) is available on the first post.

I guess my own NES games don't have "characters" so to speak.

Didn't you have a roly poly demo with a grappling hook?

The Wrecking Ball Boy tech demo was in Python, not for NES. I had planned to port it once I had most of the mechanics in, but I got severe writer's block.

Don't worry, something that you worked on should be coming soon, assuming we can pull it together properly and everyone's happy with the result. </purposeful-vagueness>

This is looking really great!

Plans for alternate character palettes? Some set themselves up for it well: Micro Mages, Lizard, Study Hall, for instance all have 4 or more official palettes.

If alt. palettes were to come in, I'd suggest the following for Kaylee:


#31 (default), #34, #38, #3B

I was just trying to decide whether I was going to implement alternate palettes. This helps for when/if I do!

Actually, storing three additional palettes for each character could take up a lot of space. Automating it might save space. You could possibly set it up so that if a currently selected character is also selected in a lower player slot, the hue nibble of the middle color of that subpalette gets an offset added to it. So, in P2 slot, +3, in P3 slot +6, in P4 slot +9 (looping from #C to #1 to avoid blacks and greys).
(For instance, #26 for p1 would become #29 for p2, #2C for p3, and #23 for p4).
Increments of three would result in the largest hue difference between all four slots.


These slots.


This would result in the following palettes:


Since Star Evil's O only uses two colors, I included what it'd look like to do it for either. Jammin Honey's sprite was the only one I noticed that didn't follow the Dark, Medium, Light color order. Instead, she is Medium, Dark, Light, so it would result in her hair and guitar changing color, which looks fine. For comparison, I included what it'd look like if her color order was changed to result in her dress changing color as well.

The only character that would definitely need her color order changed would be Kaylee, to place her lightest color in the central slot. (Dark, Light, Medium). This could result in odd-looking items that use that subpalette when she's active, but would be worth it, I think.

...but this is all running off the assumption that coding this would take less space than storing alternate palettes, and that's out of my wheelhouse, so take the suggestion with a grain of salt.

Whoa, you did all the hard work for me! I was actually hoping to do it this way....It's probably not a whole lot smaller than storing additional palettes, but it's a lot more fun and less tedious. That said, I thought the tedious part was going to be taking the time to test each character and figure out which palette increments to use. So you can't imagine how tickled I was to see your post where you figured it all out. With that initial work out of the way, it should be pretty straightforward. I've added CHR compression on title and background tiles, so I have a good amount of space to work with again, meaning space won't be an issue.



Good catch. I tried to keep them all dark/med/light so items would be more consistent, but I missed that one.



Or I can just cheat and have a hardcoded exception for her, to change her light-color slot instead. (I've already got a number of small character-specific hacks for various things, like the Stickman changing palettes on the dark levels, so one more wouldn't hurt)

Looks like he'd need an exception for alt. palettes too. I assume the white would change?

Yeah, the method you proposed looked great for almost everyone else, but Donny needed a different treatment. After trying a few things, I ended up hardcoding alternate palettes for him by changing the black to a few other dark-but-not-black colors. (Dark green, dark blue, etc)

New build posted (on the first post), which includes Donny from Haunted Halloween (thank you Retrotainment!), palette swaps for duplicate characters, some character-specific tweaks such as random human skin coloration for Lizard and better centering over her feet for Nova, and various bug fixes.

I only seem to be getting the star from all item boxes. Check to see if you forgot to take out any debug stuff?

Oops! You're right, I was debugging that last night and left that in there. Thanks for noticing! I'll post a fix when I get a chance.

Should be fixed now. I've uploaded the new version.

Just posted a new build on the first post, fixed a bug that caused Hekl to get stuck hovering in the air forever.

Hello. Is there any progress for this game? Also, I'm going to try to run this on an MIT-licensed NES emulator for ESP32 (if one doesn't exist, I'll write or port one according to an MIT licensed tutorial that I found). What license will this game have? And will the game be open-source?

I've also done some Let's Plays on this game and I'm editing them. It's quite fun!

I consider the game finished unless any bug reports appear, so no more progress since what I posted in the thread. As far as license, I haven't officially picked a license (not sure if I will open-source it later, maybe so). I give you permission to play/distribute/perform the game non-commercially. If that's not legal enough for you, you are welcome use it under a CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 license for now.

This game has really bad character design. So many ugly, unoriginal designs. Some even look like they were designed by children.

But the character 'O' - WOW!!! What a wonderful character! I'm sure whoever created that character is the reincarnation of both Michelangelo and Einstein because that is some A+ design.

I'm kidding of course. The game and the characters are great. A nice, fun little multiplayer game.

Personally, I like it best with 4 players. It's not as skillful, but it's most fun that way.

Haha, for a short second I took you seriously and couldn't understand why you were being so mean




Yeah, 4-players is really the true intended way to play. It's all about the chaos. I've brought the game to a few small shows and events, and always get a good reaction if I can get 4 people going at once.

It's rare to see pubby joking that way so at first I had the same reaction until I saw the rest of the message

Hi, I was playing the game today and had a glitch:
Original setting was Survival, 10 lives.
Two CPUs have already lost(on slots 2 and 4).
I had 7 Lives left, 3rd CPU(Donny) had two.
I took a powerup that switches our places on the screen.
When switch was complete, Donny exploded for no reason.
CPU on slot 2(Mage), came back from the dead with 79 LIVES.
Once Donny run out of lives, game ended, despite me still having 5 more lives(and I disappeared the moment Donny died).

Aside from that, the game is vastly different when you play with 4 characters instead of 2. Gonna get my sister tomorrow to play it with me
(to bad there is no "Team" setting).

Whoa, that's crazy. Thanks for reporting it. Were you playing on hardware or on an emulator? (any chance you captured a save state or anything if it was an emulator?)


Yeah, it's really supposed to be a 4-player game. The chaos is completely different with 4.

I was playing with Everdrive and AVS hardware, I didnt use Everdrive save states, so nothing to debug, Im afraid.

Edit: My character was Kaylee, if its important.
Edit 2: And the map was from Eskimo Bob.

Edit 3: I was fishing for it in FceuX and got it, I attached a movie file. I used latest ROM from Fisrt post of this topic.
Glitch in the movie file is a bit different, probably because Mage is on last life, but its same glitch, I think.
Good luck fixing it

Awesome, having a movie to reproduce it will make a huge difference. Thanks.

Ah, thanks, I've found the issue now. The swapping doesn't correctly handle out-of-the-game players on Survival mode. Although I'm so close to full on that rom bank that I'll have to do an optimization pass to free up the 10 or so bytes that I'll need to fix it. Hopefully I'll post a fix soon.

Very good game !!