Starting the next game

Now that Spacey McRacey is done, it's time to move on to the next game: a large adventure game for the NES.

I've had two ideas in mind for awhile, either my Blaster Master-style metroidvania game that I've talked about before, or another Anguna sequel.  After asking around to see if I could find any artists interested in working with me, I found someone that's interested in doing the Blaster Masteresque game.  So that's where we're starting.

First steps involve picking some technology.  On the Atari, unless you were going for some crazy advanced cartridge with a co-processor on board (which was really rare back in the day -- I think Pitfall 2 was the only commercial game that did this), all the cartridges boards are pretty similar, other than ROM size and the exact method of bankswitching to map all that ROM to the limited address space of the Atari.  (Ok, some also had some RAM on board. But still, there wasn't all that much that was different).

NES cartridges are a different story. The NES was designed for the cartridges to have a bit more control, so there's a lot more variance depending on what cartridge hardware you're going to pick.  And certain types of cartridge hardware are more expensive to produce on actual cartridges than others.  So I need to pick a cartridge mapper type.  I've been doing some experimentation -- there's a new one out called the Cheapocabra that's both cheap and powerful.  The only downsides are the fact that not all the emulators support it yet, and it has no expansion RAM.   So I'm still trying to decide for sure.

The other question is whether I stick with pure 6502 assembly, or do a mix of assembly and C.  I've been doing some experiments with writing the core game logic in C, and dropping to assembly for the bits that need to have better performance, and it seems to be working reasonably well, so I think I'm going to start with that.

Next steps are to start thinking about a scrolling engine and internal level data representations.

Testing on hardware

Everytime I title a post like that, it's never good news.

We moved across town, which primarily means that I've spent more time fixing up an old house (to sell) and a new house (to live in) than I have programming for fun.  But I also had space to set up a nice desk space for writing/testing my games, including my NES and Atari attached to an old little tube TV (thanks, Jake!)

After hours of frustrating with faulty Compact Flash cards (remember those?), I finally got my PowerPak working, so now I can test my game on the real Nintendo! (as well as play all my NES games without fighting with dirty contacts every time!)

Well, as usual, it didn't go well at first.  Spacey McRacey was a jumbled mess of flickering as it scrolled. It bounced all over the place.

With some advice from the fine folks at nesdev.com, I had a number of things to try, but none of them worked.  BUT simplifying things by disabling my split-screen scrolling (the status bar at the top is locked into place by having a scroll split at it), and everything worked.

So I went back and tightened up the timing of my split screen scroll.  The NES PPU has some weird quirks, where underlying registers change automatically during rendering, so it's quite possible that I was taking too long, and things changed out from under me in the middle of setting up my split-screen scroll.  So optimizing the timing of the scroll actually ended up solving the issue.  WHEW, that only took about an hour (which is about 4 hours less than the time I've spent so far trying to fix the bad wiring in my house that fried my TV and desktop computer)

There's still one new issue that appeared on hardware that I need to fix, with the title screen getting corrupted, but I think I know what's going on there.

And here I thought I was done. Oops.

NESDev Results and more

Well, Spacey McRacey got 14th place out of 18 games.  Which is really about where it belonged; there were some really high-quality entries for this competition!   They're now in the process of trying to figure out how to build the competition multi-cart, which you'll be able to eventually buy, with all these games on it.

In other news, we're finally getting close to the Atari Age release of Atari Anguna. It's taken awhile to get all the boxes/manuals/etc printed, but it's almost there!

And I've got a partner lined up for my next game, which will hopefully finally be my dream of a Blaster Master-inspired metroidvania for NES.  Well see.

Spacey McRacey done

Well, I've submitted my game to the competition.  I think that means I'm done.  You can download it and try it from http://www.bitethechili.com/spaceymcracey/.

Now that I've already submitted it, my PowerPak arrived in the mail.  So I guess I can go back and test it on hardware now that it's already done.  We'll see what happens.

Now it's time to start planning my next project!

AI

Well, I managed to squeeze in some terrible AI into the game.  So it's actually playable one-playered now.

I've got a week. Time to test thing thing and get it out the door.

Testing time

Well, Spacey McRacey is at that point.

That point where I feel like I'm finished.  But I need to play through the game a hundred more times.  Well, except that to properly test, I need more players.  And time.  The deadline for the development contest is in about a week, but I'm currently in the middle of buying and selling a house.

I really hoped to add AI as well, so you could play the game with 1 player.  Not sure I'll get to that now, at this point.  We'll see what happens.

If anyone wants to download and play with it, let me know.  I'll eventually put it up on my Bite the Chili website, but for now, just email me or comment if you want to give it a try.

Title Screen

What I really need is a title screen.  I don't have tons of graphics rom space left (this game is using the most simple, primitive cartridge setup, with very minimal graphics space), but I'm sure I can come up with something better looking than this.  I just don't have much inspiration, or confidence that I can make something that looks cool, given the limitations I have.

Pay no attention to the green background on the small "press start" subtext.
That's just a palette issue that I haven't fixed yet.

That being said, it's close to being done!   My todo list is down to only minor things: adding a scoreboard between rounds, adding additional music (the single song is going to get pretty annoying!), improving title screen and player-select screen UI, etc.

Oh, and testing, tweaking, and testing, testing, testing.