nesdev.com

Want to download it?
The latest version should be available on my web site.


Nova and I are working on a game that could best be described as a cross between Rampart and Animal Crossing. Nova came up with the ideas and some of the graphics; I'm doing all the programming and the rest of the graphics. This game, which I'm developing for the next compo, will probably be the first NES game not to use a fixed-width font anywhere.

Anticipated spec: NROM-256/BNROM, 32 KiB PRG ROM, 8 KiB CHR RAM (ROM is currently 60% full)


Concept art


Actual screenshots of last night's build taken in FCEUX

Current task: populating the pop-up. Each side can use up to 48 tiles.

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Wow, that looks freakin' great Tepples! The two of you are really setting a high bar for next year's competition!

Looking good!

I like the concept art. The proportinal font gives a nice look too.

Interested to see how the game play turn out. Nice to see Tepples working on another simultaneous multi-player game. That's one of my favorite features of Thwaite.

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If you're gonna play the Game Boy, you gotta learn to play it right. -Kenny Rogers

The font looks really good, at least in a crispy display like this one. Does it look good when transmitted through composite video?

The building and furniture arranging steps kinda remind me of The Sims... It's an interesting concept to see on the NES.

It did when I used it for the Action 53 menu. This screenshot (720 × 480 pixels) uses gray (color $10), but it looks just as sharp with yellow ($38).


Yeah, Animal Crossing is essentially Nintendo's version of The Sims.


EDIT: My camera sucks.

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I'm stupefied at the proportional font. Nevertheless, all I can think about is this game should look like the D-Day scene from Conkers Bad Fur Day on the XBox :p

What comes to my mind is a Spy-vs-Spy element. Traps, anyone?

I missed the picture before. The font looks pretty good! The tiled floor OTOH... You might want to consider something less noisy, or the furniture will be hard to identify.

This is what furniture looks like, both straight out of FCEUX (scaled to match PAR) and run through blargg's NTSC filter. Click to zoom for full-size view. If you have trouble identifying any of the furniture, let me know because I consider that a bug.

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I think I was able to figure out what everything was, but only after staring at it for quite a while and using contextual clues. Like, I recognize the bed OK so I know that the crapper isn't likely to be in the same room. But the crapper looks like a lower-case j. The bookcase blends into the background too much [it's less so on the left than on the right]. The sink/oven/fridge look like robots floating in the kitchen?

Maybe a bland "tiled" kitchen floor [single color with straight lines] and a lower-contrast "carpeted" look for the rest. Or perhaps a linear "wood-grain" for the dining area? I'm not aware of too many houses with the same flooring throughout.

Looks fine to me.

I'm having trouble making some things out. The book case wasn't very obvious, but I eventually got it. The toilet on the other hand, I still can't see. I assume that the "lower case j" is the toilet, but I really don't see it... Oh, I do now, it's facing left, ok. The sink (I assume it's a sink because it's present in the kitchen and in the bathroom) is a tough one too. Kitchen sinks don't usually have columns, but even if the did to top is pretty hard to make out. And what's the thing in the lower right corner of the bathroom? An empty space surrounded by walls?

The heavy dithering on the floor really is an issue IMO, it really isn't helping. I do understand that this is all using a single palette, so if you used solid colors for the floor it would lose a lot of depth, but there must be a better solution than dithering the hell out of it with pixels that "adhere" to the tiny objects and make them even harder to make out.

On a lark, I tried erasing the halftoned carpet and just replacing it with any one of the colors that seem to be in that palette (yellow, red, green, black):
The grey is the mask I used; the original is included for completeness.
The black has problems that would require significantly redrawing the furniture. For the rest, is it any easier to identify what the furniture is? (Trying to decouple "busy floor" from "awkward symbol")

I feel like having explicitly separated the furniture before makes it easier to recognize when back on the carpet.

Thank you for the feedback regarding the indoor art.

The kitchen sink and the bathroom sink are the same item. I plan to have it evaluate the house based on what furniture is near other furniture, and both an oven and a toilet give a bonus for being put near a sink.

The space surrounded by walls is probably the same space surrounded by walls seen at 1:00 in this video or at 1:50 in this video. It happens when four wall tiles in a 2x2 square are present.

There are two problems with having different kinds of flooring in different rooms. First, furniture has the flooring behind it baked into the tiles. Second, how would the player set what flooring applies to a given room? It's not like Animal Crossing, where each room is a separate map and the furniture is ultra-low-poly 3D models. But if you can make a better flooring pattern with 8x8 pixel tiles using black, red, and possibly yellow, I'd like to see it. Aesthetically, I'm kind of liking the solid red, but (as shown in the first set of screenshots) the units wouldn't stand out very well in front of it.


So does seeing the furniture being placed.

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I realized what's bugging me about the toilet, besides that it looks like a "-j" which makes me think "-sqrt(-1)". The line that I think is supposed to be representing the deliniation of *top* in the isomorphic sense (the line that is creating the separation between the body of and the dot of the "j") seems like it is delineating the bowl/tank separation point, but it's too high to be doing that. I think if you tipped the toilet so that the bowl is visible as if you were looking down on it...or otherwise make it somehow more isomorphically obvious that the dot-of-the-j-is-the-top.