Alwa's Awakening - A NES-inspired adventure game

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FiveHundredSurvivors
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Re: Alwa's Awakening - A NES-inspired adventure game

Post by FiveHundredSurvivors »

The graphics look very nice
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rainwarrior
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Re: Alwa's Awakening - A NES-inspired adventure game

Post by rainwarrior »

Yes, WarioWorld their official developer portal, where you get documentation, licensing and support, etc. I used to use it when I did professional Wii development.
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Drew Sebastino
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Re: Alwa's Awakening - A NES-inspired adventure game

Post by Drew Sebastino »

rainwarrior wrote:I used to use it when I did professional Wii development.
You did? What did you do?

Anyway though, do you think you could post a non anti-aliased image of the game? I want to make a show you an example of what it'd look like on the NES. Anyway, if you actually get this game on Wii U, couldn't you just make it run an emulated version of the NES game?
zzo38
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Re: Alwa's Awakening - A NES-inspired adventure game

Post by zzo38 »

Espozo wrote:Anyway, if you actually get this game on Wii U, couldn't you just make it run an emulated version of the NES game?
I don't know how it works, but I expect you probably can but you must provide your own emulator (you can't use Nintendo's emulators (which aren't particularly good enough anyways) unless it is officially released by Nintendo) and you must also agree not to link to download separately the NES ROM image from the Wii shop or something like that; therefore you must use a separate personal/company/whatever webpage for it.

Again I say I don't know but I think I heard something about being like that.
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Re: Alwa's Awakening - A NES-inspired adventure game

Post by tepples »

zzo38 wrote:I expect you probably can but you must provide your own emulator (you can't use Nintendo's emulators (which aren't particularly good enough anyways) unless it is officially released by Nintendo)
Nor can you use any of the popular emulators (Nestopia, Nintendulator, FCEUX) because they're GPL and Nintendo bans GPL code. In #nesdev, koitsu often complains about there being too many NES emulators in development, and my usual response is this situation of needing to provide your own emulator to run your own game in a GPL-hostile environment such as Nintendo, PlayStation, Xbox, or iOS.
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Drew Sebastino
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Re: Alwa's Awakening - A NES-inspired adventure game

Post by Drew Sebastino »

tepples wrote:In #nesdev, koitsu often complains about there being too many NES emulators in development
I've felt the same way. I really don't see the appeal in writing an emulator that's going to be almost exactly the same as all the 100 other ones.
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rainwarrior
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Re: Alwa's Awakening - A NES-inspired adventure game

Post by rainwarrior »

tepples wrote:koitsu often complains about there being too many NES emulators in development, and my usual response is this situation of needing to provide your own emulator to run your own game in a GPL-hostile environment such as Nintendo, PlayStation, Xbox, or iOS.
That accounts for almost none of them. Most people are making them because they think it's a fun and interesting project, and most of them target Windows or Linux.

Aside from Retro City Rampage, is there any example of an embedded NES emulator on a Playstation or XBox platform?
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Re: Alwa's Awakening - A NES-inspired adventure game

Post by Sik »

tepples wrote:In #nesdev, koitsu often complains about there being too many NES emulators in development, and my usual response is this situation of needing to provide your own emulator to run your own game in a GPL-hostile environment such as Nintendo, PlayStation, Xbox, or iOS.
This reminds me of how I can't find a suitable YM2612 emulator (what I can find either is crap or has license compatibility issues). It really sucks having to reinvent the wheel just because of licensing shenanigans.
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Re: Alwa's Awakening - A NES-inspired adventure game

Post by TmEE »

You can write a pretty much perfect YM2612 emulator with around 500 lines of code though.
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Re: Alwa's Awakening - A NES-inspired adventure game

Post by Sik »

Down to the nitpicks, the exact values from the look-up tables, all the different internal register sizes, cycle-exact interactions between different parts, etc. that matter in the corner cases? (and the main reason why SSG-EG tends to break miserably in inaccurate emulators)
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Re: Alwa's Awakening - A NES-inspired adventure game

Post by TmEE »

Including that. YM is simple. I couldn't make heads or tails out of any existing code but that work Nemesis has done was enough for me to create a core that matches real chip in all cases that I tested.
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Drew Sebastino
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Re: Alwa's Awakening - A NES-inspired adventure game

Post by Drew Sebastino »

Well, I made a version of your picture that isn't super blurry, but is missing the sprites and the status bar (I was lazy) and I made a version that is using 4 palettes for the NES. It appears you are using 8x8 attributes on the fence, when unless you have a ton of other things using that, the graphics can be easily worked around not to on the fence. It's technically possible using the MMC5, but it's a big waste for just doing that. (The resolution is 400x240?)

The Original Fixed Version:
AlwasAwakening No Anti-Alising.png
AlwasAwakening No Anti-Alising.png (4.99 KiB) Viewed 3689 times
The "NES" version:
AlwasAwakening NES.png
AlwasAwakening NES.png (4.55 KiB) Viewed 3689 times
I'm just going to say one thing though. Are any of the graphic designers aware of the different limitations the NES's video hardware has? (I'm not trying to be mean or anything, it's just that I noticed the BG was using 3 colors per tile, but that those 3 colors were being pulled out of a "bank", as in there multiple palettes with some of the same colors. I think the background was using 16 colors total, but you cannot "pick and choose" colors for each tile like that. You choose from 4 different palettes that are using 4 colors, one of them being the background color, which appears to be black here.)
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Re: Alwa's Awakening - A NES-inspired adventure game

Post by Sik »

TmEE wrote:Including that. YM is simple. I couldn't make heads or tails out of any existing code but that work Nemesis has done was enough for me to create a core that matches real chip in all cases that I tested.
Data that is spread all over a 40-something pages long forum thread that expects you to read everything in chronological order and also references to other locations... =P

May want to split away this discussion.
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Re: Alwa's Awakening - A NES-inspired adventure game

Post by Drag »

Sik wrote:
TmEE wrote:Including that. YM is simple. I couldn't make heads or tails out of any existing code but that work Nemesis has done was enough for me to create a core that matches real chip in all cases that I tested.
Data that is spread all over a 40-something pages long forum thread that expects you to read everything in chronological order and also references to other locations... =P

May want to split away this discussion.
Seconded, I'm interested in this discussion too since I'm also writing my own YM-style FM core.


Back on topic, I was trying not to be a nitpicker regarding the NES's graphical limitations (pretty big difference from how I usually am, huh? :P), since the mockups looked good enough to be pretty much a "real-plus" version of NES graphics; graphics faithful to the overall feel without going crazy with rule-breaking. The player's sprite has one color too many, but considering that they're the main character, I think it's OK to let that slide, especially since the other sprites have the correct amount of colors. Certain MSX1 games did something similar where the player sprite was multicolored where all the other sprites were single-color (MSX1's sprites are 1bpp only, multicolored sprites are actually multiple overlayed sprites, which all contribute to the sprite/scanline limit of 4 sprites).

Plus, the graphics look good. A lot of indie games feature "retro" graphics where the pixels aren't even all the same size, plus pixel stick figure syndrome, minus any kind of palette limitations. Meanwhile, here you have an NES-style game that has graphics that look faithful to the NES, plus some minor rule bending that I didn't even notice (aside from the player sprite). That's pretty commendable, all you need to do is keep SFXR out of the equation, and you'll get The Official Drag Seal Of Approval™. ;)
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Re: Alwa's Awakening - A NES-inspired adventure game

Post by BG Pixlarn »

Hello. I'm the graphics guy in this project.

Thank you for the pointers, Espozo. I'm already quite familiar with the palette rules of the NES, but I appreciate your concern. I mean, you even took the time to edit that picture. That's some dedication! :D

While Alwa started out as an actual NES homebrew, that is sadly no longer the case. Back at the start I followed those rules very strictly, planning out what could be the best use of each palette and such. I love working under those strict conditions. Makes a pretty picture all the more impressive if you know the limitations of the system.

The switch to Unity meant a lot of changes though. I pretty much redid all graphics from scratch and somewhere along the road I decided to cheat some of the restrictions in favor of a better looking game. I already had an extra color too much on the main character, so why not? I still TRY to maintain the 4 colors per tile rule, and reuse the same palette for multiple objects though. I want it to feel like a NES game to your average gamer.

And thank you for the kind words, Drag. You pretty much nailed what I was trying to explain here. :)
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