Vigilante Ninja (edit)

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dougeff
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Vigilante Ninja (edit)

Post by dougeff »

Hello all,

I'm new here. Just wanted to introduce myself and tell you I finished 2 NES games. Both are available on Romhacking.net under homebrew section...

Paint or Draw, just a simple drawing game. You can choose from any color in the NES palette, and doodle on the screen.
http://www.romhacking.net/homebrew/69/

The other game is an action platformer, with 4 levels and bosses. Pretty simple, but it was my first NES game.
http://www.romhacking.net/homebrew/68/

Also, I just wrote the music and music engine for another (currently unnamed) game, that a friend of mine is programming. It will be a vertical scrolling space shooter.

Hey, if anyone else out there needs someone to write music for their game, send me a message.

Oh, and I wanted to thank everyone who contributed to the informational portions of nesdev - I learned 90% of NES programming from reading stuff on this page, and from reading old threads on this forum. The other 10% was from Nerdy Nights and a few others. I couldn't have done it without you.
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Edit, Oct 10, 2018
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I'm putting the Vigilante Ninja 2 links here as well, to make it easier to search for...

Full Game...

http://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/s/13w2 ... l-revA.nes

3 level demo...
http://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/s/2ipv ... 2-DEMO.nes

MANUAL...
http://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/s/dw5f ... anual4.pdf
Last edited by dougeff on Wed Oct 10, 2018 12:20 pm, edited 7 times in total.
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dougeff
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Re: 2 nes homebrew games finished

Post by dougeff »

Another thought.

What do you think I should do next? I was thinking of making a programmable piano game, kind of like Mario Paint, except for the NES.

I also want to do something big and awesome, kind of like zelda with a sci-fi twist.
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Drew Sebastino
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Re: 2 nes homebrew games finished

Post by Drew Sebastino »

dougeff wrote: I was thinking of making a programmable piano game, kind of like Mario Paint, except for the NES.
You could probably just make it the music composition side, as drawing with 4 different colors isn't exactly exciting... (I didn't even see that you already did something like that. :( ) (One thing I've always wondered: Why didn't Mario Paint use 8bpp mode?)
Last edited by Drew Sebastino on Fri May 08, 2015 8:48 pm, edited 1 time in total.
tepples
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Re: 2 nes homebrew games finished

Post by tepples »

Espozo wrote:One thing I've always wondered: Why didn't Mario Paint use 8bpp mode?
Not enough memory to hold both the background and animation layers in memory, plus the undo buffer and everything else. Besides, there are no modes with two 8bpp layers, so the animation layer has to be 4bpp.
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Drew Sebastino
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Re: 2 nes homebrew games finished

Post by Drew Sebastino »

tepples wrote:Besides, there are no modes with two 8bpp layers, so the animation layer has to be 4bpp.
Why do there have to be two layers for displaying information? Is it for double buffering?
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Re: 2 nes homebrew games finished

Post by 8bitMicroGuy »

Awesome!
I like the painting program. I like it how you implemented the drawn pixels in the nametable.
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Re: 2 nes homebrew games finished

Post by tepples »

Espozo wrote:
tepples wrote:Besides, there are no modes with two 8bpp layers, so the animation layer has to be 4bpp.
Why do there have to be two layers for displaying information? Is it for double buffering?
Mario Paint has a background layer and a 4-, 6-, or 9-frame "animation" layer on top of it.
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benjaminsantiago
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Re: 2 nes homebrew games finished

Post by benjaminsantiago »

I was going through older posts and I just wanted to say I think you should develop the Vigilante game, it's quite nice!

If it had more detailed animation/bg etc I think it would be a really great experience. There are some internal tweaks you could make, for example when you hold down the punch or jump button the character continually jumps or punches.

I'm not sure how exactly it works on NES, but you should check the the user input in a way where you check for the buttons being pressed and see if they are different than the previous frame, this way you can see whether the button was pressed or held.
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dougeff
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Re: 2 nes homebrew games finished

Post by dougeff »

Interesting that you mention that, because I was thinking about redoing the vigilante game with much better graphics and better physics and moving enemies and all that. It could take me a few months. I'm also working on a space-shooter with a guy from the romhacking forum, currently.
Once I finish writing a data compression algorithm that buffers the data on one frame, writes it to the ppu on the next loop, and stores it somewhere in the RAM as collision data (see smb) - I'll start rewriting the core game engine. Also, going to add sprite 0 collision for a split screen at the top, maybe. Lots to do.
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dougeff
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Re: 2 nes homebrew games finished

Post by dougeff »

This took me all week, but I finally have a working engine!!

I know it doesn't look like much, and only the R button works, but this is a functioning scrolling engine that does all these things...

-fetch and uncompress data stream
-load it into RAM, 2 pages reserved for 2 nametables of metatiles (like SMB)
-load 2 columns of metatiles, and convert to 4 columns of tiles, buffer
-convert 2 metatile columns to 1 attribute table column, buffer
-and load the buffer and attributes to the nametable at the start of the next frame (every 8 scrolls R)
-without glitches or slowdown!

And I added a split screen at the top, for more a detailed status bar. I'm not sure yet how I'm going to update the status bar, except maybe freeze the frame, update it with rendering off, and then turn back on. Because, I'm completely out of V-Blank time. In fact I had to unroll the 'load buffer to nametable' loop to get it to fit. I don't know if anyone out there cares to see a VERY EARLY demo of Vigilante Ninja 2...

(LINK REMOVED, OLD)

Note: all the graphics are dummy graphics, just to make sure the scrolling engine works. And I think I'm going to do the jumping like Contra, where if you press down+jump you jump down, and you can jump upwards through a platform without colliding.
Attachments
vigilante2.jpg
Last edited by dougeff on Fri Jul 08, 2016 7:26 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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thefox
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Re: 2 nes homebrew games finished

Post by thefox »

The link doesn't work, the download button is greyed out. The forum's attachment feature is a better choice for longevity.
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Re: 2 nes homebrew games finished

Post by rainwarrior »

You're supposed to click the greyed out link, and then click the option not to sign in. It's terrible user interface, but the download works.

It's better just to create direct links, I dunno why anybody uses this janky interface for dropbox when there's an alternative. I just go to my public folder, right click, choose "copy public link" and I get a plain link to a file that looks like this: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/883 ... k_test.nes
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thefox
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Re: 2 nes homebrew games finished

Post by thefox »

rainwarrior wrote:You're supposed to click the greyed out link, and then click the option not to sign in. It's terrible user interface, but the download works.
Hmmh, I actually did try that earlier, but it didn't start the download for whatever reason. Worked this time.
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Macbee
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Re: 2 nes homebrew games finished

Post by Macbee »

I tried Vigilante right now. It's pretty cool, congratulations!
The only problem is: the floor will not appear on NTSC televisions.
Seems that your game was designed to use NES' full resolution (256 x 240) but people who plays at 256 x 224 won't be able to see the entire stage.

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Re: 2 nes homebrew games finished

Post by tepples »

In my experience, an NTSC TV still in operation may hide up to 8 pixels on each side, 16 on top, and 11 on bottom. Early games, such as Super Mario Bros. and The Legend of Zelda, were designed for 1970s TVs that could hide up to 16 on each side and 24 on top and bottom. For more information, see Overscan.
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