Progress Thread - Brick Breaker (formerly Brix Battle)

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Punch
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Re: Progress Thread - Mini Brix Battle (SUBMITTED)

Post by Punch »

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=04854XqcfCY


Game released with an hour to spare! Bet you thought I wouldn't make it, huh? :beer:
I'm too tired right now to properly comment so I'll give my post mortem tomorrow (today in my timezone). For now I ask, if you manage to find a bug please report it to me here, if you have an emulator recording file, even better.

I've finally completed a game. This is awesome but I'm too tired to celebrate. :lol:

edit: by the way the ROM is in the first post. Thanks!
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rainwarrior
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Re: Progress Thread - Mini Brix Battle (SUBMITTED)

Post by rainwarrior »

I really like the title screen. I don't know why but it gives me an early Atari ST feel.
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Punch
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Re: Progress Thread - 'Brix Battle' Returns

Post by Punch »

FrankenGraphics wrote:I really like that jello! Both actually :D The aiming is a great addition. Things being at different angles feels commonly accepted for this sort of style. It might even actually add something to the soup, now when i think about it. A little whacky perspectives can go a long way to catch interest. European medieval, baroque and traditional japanese art styles (which i know terribly little about) does this in varying forms all the time, not to mention cubism. I wouldn't worry about it too much.
I thought that the "damaged/crushed" tiles were ok and not in a different style.
I'm sorry, i could have been a lot more specific. I think most of them are! The one that stands out to me is the one for the bricks, which feels like a representation of crushed brick, but perhaps not a direct derivate of the bricks that were there in prior to crushing.

Here's a quick mockup (though in a somewhat different style)
bricks.bmp
To the upper right is simply a metatile of crushed bricks. I made them from hacking away pixels from the original structure and moving them into a disarray. I also attempted to move them so that they'd break the tile grid somewhat, to signal the dissaray of a pile. To the upper left is some metatile variations made from the same four tiles. To the lower left they are put next to each other. Randomizing metatile content could perhaps work well.

I used the same technique when doing the brick walls and power ups blowing up animations for wrecking balls (there were some compromises and decisions, all frames didn't make it into the submission and others got changed. I just lazily took a snapshot that happened to be sitting on my desktop):
animationsequences.bmp
Deteriorating things that explode/destruct frame by frame feels easier to me, even if, say, only a few or even one selected frame would be used.

In the mockup above in the post, i made an interim frame between 'cracked' and 'destroyed' which would be redundant to the game logic, but helping in the process getting there.
You're too kind about my pixel art. :)
I think that's an excellent method of doing explosions/destruction. Some variation would also help too, yeah. Your example is very good and while it's unrelated it also has some nice edge embossing to make them distinct when adjacent with one another, something that I wanted to do on my metatile but didn't have time to. I'll see if I can update the art following your tips for the multicart version, thanks a lot.
rainwarrior wrote:I really like the title screen. I don't know why but it gives me an early Atari ST feel.
Isn't bouncy stuff a recurrent theme in PC scene demos? Maybe you're familiar with one of those.
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Punch
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Re: Progress Thread - Mini Brix Battle (SUBMITTED)

Post by Punch »

I've just released the source code for my game! It's not pretty but it's there, under the MIT license.

https://gitlab.com/aleff/BrixBattle

Edit: aha! I think I got why the paddle-ball collision felt so weird! There's two reasons, first of all my threshold to decide whether to use the left, center or right corner of the ball was too small, making it difficult to "aim".

Secondly, due to the way the paddle graphics are presented, one would expect the ball to merely invert its Y direction when the ball hits the center of the umbrella, since it's a flat surface (and all other flat surfaces i.e. bricks behave that way), but sometimes it reflects on X too due to how the paddle works in this game (sectioned into parts, each giving the ball a fixed movement vector, disregarding the ball's current one).

The second one is not much of a problem and it's easy to adapt to it, but the first issue made the second one confusing. I'm in the process of improving the game and that was taken care of and it makes a lot of difference. Check git for the update.
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tepples
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Re: Progress Thread - Mini Brix Battle (SUBMITTED)

Post by tepples »

How much more do you plan to add to the game over the next few weeks? I ask because I notice that you left 9E40-9FFF,AD60-DFFF,EE40-FFF9 in the PRG ROM unused. That's over 21 KiB. If you aren't going to add more than 5 KiB of stuff, building it as an NROM-128 would help other things fit on the multicart.
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Re: Progress Thread - Mini Brix Battle (SUBMITTED)

Post by Punch »

tepples wrote:How much more do you plan to add to the game over the next few weeks? I ask because I notice that you left 9E40-9FFF,AD60-DFFF,EE40-FFF9 in the PRG ROM unused. That's over 21 KiB. If you aren't going to add more than 5 KiB of stuff, building it as an NROM-128 would help other things fit on the multicart.
I'm adding a couple of levels and doing some tweaks so > 5 KiB is unlikely. I'll rebuild it as NROM-128 for multicart inclusion. By the way, since my game's title lost all meaning and without context it is also gramatically wrong ("Bricks" Battle ???), I've changed the title for another one (Brick Breaker). Is that a problem?

Image

I like the simple look of the new title screen so don't make me revert to the old one :lol:

edit: Tepples, I'm uploading the updated version to the 1st post. I'm not sure if I'll add anything else at this point. edit2: hold on, a minor bug just appeared from thin air when I made the jump to NROM-128.
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Re: Progress Thread - Brick Breaker (formerly Brix Battle)

Post by tepples »

The RESERVED_MULTICART part is actually unused, right?
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Re: Progress Thread - Brick Breaker (formerly Brix Battle)

Post by Punch »

GitLab is being dumb, somehow no one can clone my PUBLIC repository, so here's an alternative place to download the game's source:

https://github.com/AleffCorrea/BrickBreaker
tepples wrote:The RESERVED_MULTICART part is actually unused, right?
Yep. Just added some junk text for fun. Feel free to add the A53 redirection code in it. It's a Donkey Kong (Arcade) reference.
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Re: Progress Thread - Brick Breaker (formerly Brix Battle)

Post by infiniteneslives »

Testing on real hardware there appears to be an issue on the very first boot screen being full of garbage tiles which get scrolled off screen when the title screen shows up. My guess is that the nametable isn't being initialized and the rom assumes it's clear which it isn't. It would be nice to remedy this for the action53 cartridge for a bit more polish. Let me know if you're able to work on this, or if you need more details about the problem.
If you're gonna play the Game Boy, you gotta learn to play it right. -Kenny Rogers
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Punch
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Re: Progress Thread - Brick Breaker (formerly Brix Battle)

Post by Punch »

infiniteneslives wrote:Testing on real hardware there appears to be an issue on the very first boot screen being full of garbage tiles which get scrolled off screen when the title screen shows up. My guess is that the nametable isn't being initialized and the rom assumes it's clear which it isn't. It would be nice to remedy this for the action53 cartridge for a bit more polish. Let me know if you're able to work on this, or if you need more details about the problem.
I'll be honest and say that I was just lazy with the game :lol: . I'll see if I can add code to properly do full screen updates and send you the updated ROM tomorrow, thanks.
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Re: Progress Thread - Brick Breaker (formerly Brix Battle)

Post by infiniteneslives »

Here’s a photo of the initial display after selecting the game in the menu.

And a video of the whole thing, if you look closely you can see it takes a couple frames for the left half of the title screen to get its proper color as well, but maybe that’s intentional.?

brick breaker title video
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Punch
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Re: Progress Thread - Brick Breaker (formerly Brix Battle)

Post by Punch »

Thanks, but as I said this was just laziness. I just didn't want to do it for some reason at the time, which is hilarious because I fixed it and polished the game in less than an hour, literally. :lol:

The final NROM 16k build of the game is available here: https://github.com/AleffCorrea/BrickBre ... r/brix.nes

Now with less ugly visible screen updates, Level 2 completely purged (the #1 reason people didn't care for my game was this unreasonably boring and hard level, I'm sure of it) and levels slightly adjusted and reordered to make for a better experience overall.

INL: can you do a quick test on hardware to see if I'm mistiming PPU on/offs? IIRC the screen jumps if you turn the PPU on outside of vblank, I'm almost sure my game does this correctly but it never hurts to ask someone with real hardware to test it.
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Re: Progress Thread - Brick Breaker (formerly Brix Battle)

Post by infiniteneslives »

Sorry for the delay, got a chance to test the new build out just now and all looks great. Thanks for taking the time to do this!
If you're gonna play the Game Boy, you gotta learn to play it right. -Kenny Rogers
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