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FWIW I feel uniqueness should be judged against all games prior to the compo, not against entries in that compo. Pulling off decent 3D on the NES is exceptionally unique regardless of how many entires coincidentally pulled it off in that year's compo.

It's also about the game play in general, 2-3 different games which happen to use 3D can be completely unique from each other. Just as platformers can be very unique from each other as we saw last compo.

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calling dibs on developing a 4D NES game.

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Heh, thanks!
I was inspired by the visuals in "Hired Guns", on the Amiga, and wanted to take a stab at wall height variation.

Uh... It's been a while, but I seem to recall slightly tweaking the brick patterns to tile better at some point, and getting it down to 180-something tiles, more than enough room left for a basic interface (font + frame). Unfortunately, after finally upgrading to a new computer, I'm not really sure where the "NES improved" version of the CHR ever went.


This is a fair point. My own game was going to have dungeons built out of large cubes, allowing me to take advantage of the height variation, to create interesting environments, and Dungeon Master-like puzzles, with more obvious solutions (pushing walls to make bridges, anyone?). I haven't touched the project since I got the basic map parser working, though.

The game would have had "real-time" combat, in a similar fashion to Dungeon Master.

I was actually going to make a 3d game and a dungeon crawling game too. Fuck.

The amount of dungeon crawlers on the NES are far too few. I certainly wouldn't complain if a compilation came out that just happened to have a few new ones on it.

Also, game looks great so far, and I dig the CGA color mode option as well.

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In my opinion, a "Swords and Serpents"-style dungeon crawler and a "Wolfenstein 3D"-raycasting game are different enough, so that this doesn't seem redundant. After all, it's totally different techniques and a different gameplay feeling.
I personally would really like to see a full raycasting game on the NES.

(By the way, what is the third 3D game?)

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Available now: My game "City Trouble".
Website: https://megacatstudios.com/products/city-trouble
Trailer: https://youtu.be/IYXpP59qSxA
Gameplay: https://youtu.be/Eee0yurkIW4
German Retro Gamer article: http://i67.tinypic.com/345o108.jpg

Alp's.

O.k.
I didn't understand his post as an indicator that he is actually planning to do such a game for the competition, only that he did something like that once.

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Available now: My game "City Trouble".
Website: https://megacatstudios.com/products/city-trouble
Trailer: https://youtu.be/IYXpP59qSxA
Gameplay: https://youtu.be/Eee0yurkIW4
German Retro Gamer article: http://i67.tinypic.com/345o108.jpg

8-bit dungeon crawling? It'd probably sound something like…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=erbRR9igsOQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7XlWOOZ-O7E

I meant to post this last week, and forgot, oops.
For those curious on how to make a dungeon crawler with depth, here's a quick demonstration.

First, measure a floor grid as usual, drawing lines to a vanishing point.


Drawing the walls is easy, just draw a vertical line at the edge of each cell, like this.


For simplicity, I've done all the measurements, and here's the final result, for a standard wallset.


Now, to add depth, just rotate the guidelines by 90 degrees, and lay it over the regular walls.


You now have a cubic wall grid!


For this example, I recreated one of my old screens, using this method.


Once the guidelines are removed, this example only uses 57 tiles!


I could see somebody clever managing a Gold Box-like game within NROM limitations, and still having decent visuals.

Oh wow, thanks for posting that! I'll use it as a guideline... had no time to work on it to be quite honest but that should change soon.

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Update!

Thanks to Alp I managed to pin down the 1 point perspective for my game.



Wireframe dungeon with columns that I came up with when experimenting. It looks cool, I'll probably use a wireframe dungeon for something in my game.



Probably final Pattern ROM + palette configuration. I was trying to have each floor square have their own unique color but the transitions complicated everything, I could have had two distinctly colored floors but the UI would have had to reuse a color from the dungeon screen. Eww no. Right now I can have 6 different wall colors, a sky and ground (one of them is black), so it's all good.

The far left/right walls occupy a lot of pattern ROM space so I decided to only have walls with entry #1 as their color... if the walls follow the "Black; Dark tone; Light tone; Sky" rule for their palettes it's ok, but if I really need to have all 6 colors to be dramatically different from each other I can just eat the pattern ROM cost and duplicate their wall tiles with the second color. For double tall blocks I'll just cheat and do a "shadow" transition with black to go around attribute clash, don't want to create yet another set of tiles.

By the way, the far side walls look like fences because that was an failed attempt at dithering to make the wall look darker.


Guess I have the screen arrangements well defined, time to start coding.

edit: I can't believe I didn't mention this yet... for those who are wondering, the sample text is not something I came up with, I just used my favorite videogame quote: http://68.media.tumblr.com/502770bc588f ... o1_500.gif

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The wireframe with columns does indeed look really cool!

Man, this looks awesome. Great job!

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The wireframe dungeon made me think indoor scene, where the vertical elements are poles, pillars, or whatever holding up the ceiling of an abandoned warehouse, parking garage, or whatever.