Progress Thread - Project Blue

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Re: Progress Thread - Project Blue

Post by toggle switch »

It would be a waste to replicate the entire engine across multiple banks!
well, the reality is, i don't actually need (or want) 16x the amount of data, so it's going to be wasted one way or another.

i'd rather waste it the way that costs me zero development time.
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FrankenGraphics
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Re: Progress Thread - Project Blue

Post by FrankenGraphics »

a quick and rough calculation we made showed us we should definitely be able to do all the levels we want, and maybe a few other things, even with repeated engines.
calima wrote:ld65 does not support pasting a segment to multiple places.
That's good to know, and rules out a dead end. :beer: But just for clarity, it doesn't make the venture impossible with ca/ld as sole tools. Pubby:s example demonstrates that you can .repeat any other command (which includes other directives [1]), so .repeat-ing a .segment (requires generating new names) basically means the assembler will lay down copies of a segment which the linker can then organize at different origins/in different banks.
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Re: Progress Thread - Project Blue

Post by tepples »

pinobatch/bnrom-template is up, demonstrating interbank function calls and interbank NMI using a 256-byte fixed bank.
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Re: Progress Thread - Project Blue

Post by na_th_an »

My GNROM-like adventures consist on myself creating NROMs and then creating the master ROM extracting binaries, pasting them together in the right order, and adding a header. And works great. I can share my humble tools. INL's oversize mapper 11 has 16x32K PRG and 16x8K CHR, which is space aplenty.

If you are replicating the engine, this "multiple NROM" approach works quite right.

For communication, I reserve a small RAM area which I don't clear on startup, plus a simple CRC-like technique to detect a wrong bank paged in (for example, on powerup).
Erockbrox
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Re: Progress Thread - Project Blue

Post by Erockbrox »

I got around to playing your Project Blue demo. I must say I really liked the game!

Here is a video of me playing the game.

Project Blue Video

I like the idea of these puzzle-action like rooms with very precise movements. Please note that there is some cursing in the video though. I couldn't find any glitches or bugs so far.

I do have some suggestions:

- Allow the player to shoot in 8 directions. Up, down, left, right, diagonals.

- Allow shooting on ladders.

- Make the jump just a little higher.

- Put in blocks which are checkpoints so that the player visually can see themselves get to the checkpoints.

- There were a few spots in the game which felt unfair. As if I was forced to take damage.

Thanks for reading.
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Re: Progress Thread - Project Blue

Post by toggle switch »

thanks for your comments, and the video, i appreciate it (though i have not watched the whole thing, it is great to see people interact with the game for the first time!)
- Put in blocks which are checkpoints so that the player visually can see themselves get to the checkpoints.
i'll consider finding a way to make this happen.
- There were a few spots in the game which felt unfair. As if I was forced to take damage.
while i've never beaten the entire level without taking damage, i assure you it's possible to get through every area without being hit! that said, there are certainly many areas where it's difficult not to be hit. we tried to place a lot of hearts to even this out. from the first few minutes of the video you seemed to progressing about at the pace i would hope for a new player.
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FrankenGraphics
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Re: Progress Thread - Project Blue

Post by FrankenGraphics »

Thanks for playing, erickbrox! It's always good to see a video recording. The yield is a bit different from taking notes while others are playing your game. :)

"Action puzzler", like you labeled it in the video, is actually quite adequate as a description, even if the stakes are generally lower than in a true puzzler (ie you don't need to solve every puzzle in order to pass, or may be able to make up for not solving the puzzle with platforming skills and reflexes).

It was quite the nailbiter/release to watch when you solved the room with the mechanism you had initially had forgotten about. :D

Since the acceleration physics has been tightened a bit since the submission to be snappier than mario (a good reference point), i think you'll be happy to know that it is easier to achieve the max jump height when starting to run. Put differently, the sprint stretch you need in order to reach max jump height is considerably shorter (again, shorter than super mario bros).

Oh, and while the rooms are designed around not being able to shoot from ladders, there's actually a secret technique which will allow you to do precisely that. I'll leave it to you to figure it out :)

Tying into the puzzle aspect, every room definitely can be passed without taking damage, but it's as often a puzzle (often with several solutions) to solve as it is about timing or reflexes. The trickiest rooms often require both puzzling, timing and reflexes. I was impressed by how quickly you came up with a method for avoiding the sawblades coming at you in a corridor.

Overall, you seemed to have the difficulty/progression curve we had hoped for.
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Re: Progress Thread - Project Blue

Post by OmegaMax »

This is pretty good,had fun playing it.
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Re: Progress Thread - Project Blue

Post by toggle switch »

thanks to everybody who chimed in on moving to GTROM. i hopped over to BNROM as an interim mapper today and have everything up and running.

at first i thought it would be easier just to duplicate the main engine repeatedly but that turned out not to be the case. so now i have one bank for the main engine, another for the sound engine, two more for loading and holding graphics data, and 12 empty, one of which will eventually contain level data.

i was resistant to this method, but in the end it's quite satisfying! i have about 25k worth of space solely for extra audio data now.

not sure i'm particularly feeling chr-ram at the moment, but it works, so that's okay i guess.
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Re: Progress Thread - Project Blue

Post by FrankenGraphics »

It's post compo so i thought it might be time to show a bit of the concept for the "dystopian wasteland of neo hong kong".
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tokumaru
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Re: Progress Thread - Project Blue

Post by tokumaru »

That looks great! At first I didn't even realize these were NES graphics!
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Re: Progress Thread - Project Blue

Post by FrankenGraphics »

Thanks! Might it be because i'm trying on two of my favourite tricks?

a)tint using 1 or 2 emphasis bits, use lots of grays; grays will now be half-saturated colours which you don't have access to otherwise. Adjust the hue/warmth of all other subpalette entries to match so it doesn't appear as too cool or too warm.

b)dedicate 2 subpalettes to cover the whole brightness spectrum in an identical or near-identical hue-range; in this case:
1c, 10, 20 ;brighter solid foreground
0c, 00, 10 ;darker non-solid backgrund

(a) is also demonstrated here (see below) where i use blue tint to create a weak lavendar tone when the lamps are lit, and all emphasis bits are set when lamps are off. The main point with this one is demonstrating that it is possible to do smooth(er) brightness transitions within a limited range if you use the right emphasis at the right time.
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Re: Progress Thread - Project Blue

Post by Denine »

That project blue screen looks extremely good. Looks more of an early 16bit game rather than NES.
Is this using NTSC palette? Did you try making a PAL palette? (or rather: will you consider redoing some palettes for PAL region?)

2nd picture is very neat. Is this going to be a game?
I think I remember seeing something like this room in some other thread.
I remember briefly talking with Macbee about implementing emphasis bits for palette fades in Lucky Penguin but we decided against it.
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FrankenGraphics
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Re: Progress Thread - Project Blue

Post by FrankenGraphics »

Thanks, denine!
Is this using NTSC palette
I suppose so. It is using NESST:s native palette (with B and G emphasis set) which admittedly i believe is a little off from both NTSC and PAL. But it is still better than FCEUX' standard palette which makes $00 and $2d near indistinguishable when on hardware the brightness difference is quite pronounced. Not that i use $2d here.

2nd picture is very neat. Is this going to be a game?
I just got word that we need to slow down because of IRL reasons but it's Tim/Orab Games' current project, see link here: http://nintendoage.com/forum/messagevie ... did=178323

This is stepping a bit aside from the thread topic, but:
I think the key to successfully doing emphasis-helped fades is keeping the parameters few and progression simple. In that example, the same progression works across all subpalette sets i have constructed so far because i'm only using three states: no emphasis, blue emphasis and all emphases (ie dim). Red and green emphases are messy to animate individually as you know, because they're ntsc/pal dependent so i feel they're better left out from fades for the sake of sanity and tidiness.

It'd be just as tidy using both R and G at the same time though (which has a 'warm', sandy/yellowish/sunsetlike effect because it is really de-emphasized blue).

I think setting either r or g individually from each other is fine, but only if your game knows the difference between NTSC and PAL (so you don't set the wrong bit by mistake on PAL).
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Re: Progress Thread - Project Blue

Post by dougeff »

About the boss fights...

When I fought the first boss, I thought, boy this is hard. Kept dying. Then I stood to the far left, and the boss couldn't hit me and it was too easy.

Then the final boss was really hard, and I hit him a hundred times, and I'm wondering why won't he die...And then I figure out that he isn't injured at the very bottom.

It wasn't clear to me that I wasn't hurting the boss. Probably why the first boss seemed so hard.

Maybe make him blink, or something?
nesdoug.com -- blog/tutorial on programming for the NES
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