Video of Concentration Room

A place where you can keep others updated about your NES-related projects through screenshots, videos or information in general.

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Celius
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Post by Celius »

Hahaha, I like the new story! It works better than the previous one, and is clever. I don't even know the story about your game "President", so I don't know why the title would be offensive.

If you're not going to work on President, and you don't want criticism for working on something like a puzzle game, why don't you make a game like NESnake 2? That wasn't necessarily what I'd call a puzzle game, and it wasn't really that complex, but that game is DAMN fun. I was really impressed by that when it came out.
tepples
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Post by tepples »

For those just tuning in, President: Another Side Scroller Hosted On a Limited Environment is the title of an unfinished NES scrolling game engine. What do the subtitle's initials spell?
Celius wrote:If you're not going to work on President, and you don't want criticism for working on something like a puzzle game
Concentration Room meets these criteria:
  • I enjoy playing it
  • someone else enjoys playing it
  • it's not too similar to other games I've made (push Tetris clones off the front page)
  • it's not too similar to other NES homebrew (carve a niche on pdroms)
  • it's not radically bigger in scope than another project that I've completed on my own (crawl before walk before run; mayor before governor before president)
With the tasteless content problem out of the way, I can finish this so I can get to President.
why don't you make a game like NESnake 2?
I made the Nibbles demo found on various PD ROM sites, but I never got around to polishing it. And I probably won't because NESnake 2 does the same thing so much better. Gorillas, the other familiar QBasic game, is already done by Chris Covell under the name Solar Wars.
strat
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Post by strat »

What do the subtitle's initials spell?

I noticed that before reading this sentence. *hee hee*
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tokumaru
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Post by tokumaru »

Even if someone finds it offensive to call a president that, this is still just the name of the engine, right? A game made with it doesn't have to carry over anything from this name.
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Bregalad
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Post by Bregalad »

Don't sound more offensive than M.U.S.C.L.E. to me.
Useless, lumbering half-wits don't scare us.
Bananmos
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Post by Bananmos »

Even "President" might be offensive. Its name comes from a pun on the name of a variant of the card game Daihinmin, where it's a tongue-in-cheek acronym for something completely different. (Compare INTERCAL.) But people might think I'm trying to call Barack Obama an asshole.
As a random sidenote, the most common Swedish naming of this card game is "nigger and president". It sure puts yet another twist on the possibility of offense that you mention above... ;)
tepples
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Now I'm running out of ideas

Post by tepples »

So I'm developing an NES project that comes with several dozen 16x16 pixel emblems. I've come up with one game involving these emblems, but I'm starting to think an I Can Remember clone with a plot and an editor is not enough to sell carts. Is there anything other than card matching that would use a bunch of what are essentially favicons? I tried using Google to look up "favicon game", but that just resulted in JavaScript games that play on a canvas inside a web browser's favicon space: interesting in its own way, but not what I want.
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Memblers
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Post by Memblers »

The madlibs type of game has never really been done on NES (except for Tecmo World Wrestling), if there is a way to do that effectively on the NES while also combining it with a random assortment of strange icons, there could be potential for great hilarity. I don't know exactly how that would work, but I can kind of see it.
UncleSporky
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Post by UncleSporky »

It might be helpful to have a list of the icons, just for better brainstorming (from the video):
boy
cherry
shovel
fish
space ship?
triangle
axe
circle
fishing pole
square
watering can
orange
walnut?
beetle
apple
pear
X
net
What can you do with these? Obviously they are most suited to something like a matching game, but there are a lot of possibilities, just not all perfectly fitting. You could use them for all sorts of random minigames: falling block/"Bejeweled" sorts of games, as selectable avatars for a board game like Monopoly, as collectibles in a sidescroller or single screen level-based games such as Lolo.

As far as selling though? I don't know if a lot of people would buy a puzzle game or "classic" game like Concentration, even if packed in with other minigames. I don't mean to be really discouraging but it just doesn't seem like the type of game to make if selling is important to you - I imagine the majority of sales would be specifically to support your work or for collecting purposes.

I suppose I'm not an expert on what would sell on an old game console, but I think people would expect/want a meatier experience, something that makes the NES worth dusting off and not something they could do using a deck of cards. Sidescrollers, top down adventures, RPGs, perhaps shooters, generally something character-based that has maps and stages. And I know those are more difficult to develop, but it seems natural that they would attract more sales, considering that is where nostalgia lies for most people.
tepples
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Post by tepples »

So Nova was playing the crap out of Dian Shi Mali, the "PUSH START TO RICH" game starring the anthropomorphic personification of FORTRAN in a Mario costume. I looked at screenshots and realized I had a chance to finish something that had been brewing in my head since 2000. I started to heavily retouch the slot machine symbols. But once I got to the cherry, I remembered I had redrawn all the Animal Crossing fruits and tools a couple years ago for a different project, and those were far clearer than Dian Shi Mali's fruits, although in less of a stereotypical slot-machine style. Then I had a brainstorming session with a copy of Character Map and a copy of GIMP. I turned to the Miscellaneous Symbols block (aka Wingdings) of GNOME's character map and started sketching furiously.

The video is level 3, which has only half the 36 emblems. Here are all of them:

Dian Shi Mali symbols:
coin, star
Animal Crossing fruits:
apple, cherry, orange, peach (yes, it's badly drawn), pear
Animal Crossing tools:
shovel, watering can, axe, fishing rod, bug net
Other Animal Crossing-inspired emblems:
fish, bug
PlayStation button symbols:
Δ, O, X, ロ
Card suits:
heart, spade, club, diamond
Zoop powerups:
bomb, circular saw blade, splotch, spring
Emblems I drew while looking through Wingdings in Character Map:
boy, girl, sun, cloud, umbrella, snowman, taijitu, peace sign
Emblems related to things in Wingdings in Character Map that didn't make the cut:
Republican elephant, Democratic donkey

The only other video game I know of with such a huge collection of 16x16 pixel favicons is Mario Paint.

As for other genres, I plan to try to make a Mario-style game once I finish this.
UncleSporky
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Post by UncleSporky »

Oh, now there's an idea, slots. Do it up Pokemon style, where more coins means more winning rows or diagonals. You could add a gambling system to Concentration too (at the risk of destroying the premise) and be well on your way to a set of minigames like the ones in Mario 64 DS.

There was one where all the cards are face up, lined up from top to bottom and you match adjacent cards to remove them (horizontally, vertically and diagonally). Every other card slides upwards to fill the empty spaces with more coming up from the bottom, changing the entire layout with each match. That might work with a set of icons like those.
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Dwedit
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Post by Dwedit »

RO is not a square in every font, don't misuse it that way.
Here come the fortune cookies! Here come the fortune cookies! They're wearing paper hats!
tepples
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Post by tepples »

Dwedit wrote:RO is not a square in every font, don't misuse it that way.
Neither is Latin capital letter O a circle in every font. But Katakana RO is the only square-ish letter I know of. Does Sony consistently use a Unicode code point for each of the PlayStation button symbols?

So it appears you suggest something like SameGame, Pokemon Trozei, Krazy Kreatures, etc.
tepples
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Post by tepples »

(ɧ)
Every lab has slip-ups.

In America, GameFAGs review I Can Remember. But in Russia, truth serum does YOU.

-- i can has ravenzburger?
-- no, u can has rom. then u can has pop tarts.
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bigjt_2
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Post by bigjt_2 »

I just went to your site and played it, tepples. Very fun! As soon as my FFXIII addiction sways somewhat, I'll have to play it on powerpak in the NES.
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