Work-thread of a Volume of Action 53 with 53 Games

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tepples
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Re: Action 53 Master Version Work-thread

Post by tepples »

Thwaite
Might want to bump that blue crosshair to the left a pixel so it shows up entirely in one 8x8 area.

RHDE: Furniture Fight
I can tell player 1 won that round, as player 1's grass is greener. The full black pixels spaced 8 pixels apart on player 2 are a bit distracting though.

Concentration Room
It looks like one palette is brown and blue, and the other is brown and red. Could the turned-over cards be manipulated to make best use of those palettes? Also the card borders are a bit fuzzy and not the same across cards for some reason.

Pogo Cats
Not a lot of contrast here. I think my screenshot from the first volume made the cars slightly darker so that the viewer could see what's going on in the game.

Forehead Block Guy
Sort of hard to tell what's going on here too. Like Pogo Cats, it might benefit from some sharpening.
JRoatch
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Re: Action 53 Master Version Work-thread

Post by JRoatch »

I think I fixed up those screenshot a bit from your critique. Thanks.


After some investigation about adding Award Icons.
The suggestion from NovaSquirrel to simply just use the unused palette won't work, as bits of black dots from previous lines will show up.

It could work if the light gray color was the background color instead, and drawing the text in 1 bits on top of 0 (instead of 0 on top of 1). Would a light gray color in the overscan area be too much of a distraction? Look at "Musical Controller" from Volume 3 as it uses the same trick.

The alternative would be to draw the icons in black. Would this be better or worse then light gray in overscan?
JRoatch
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Re: Action 53 Master Version Work-thread

Post by JRoatch »

Through September and October progress was made with getting some of the large data sets compacted down.
I apologize for disappearing through November, I'm horrible with communication. My day job is kicking my butt due to all the end of year sale events, and it doesn't help that there's a general increase of drama due to things like weather, US elections, and said sale events. It's a dreadfully ironic thing that people are at their most thanklessness during Thanksgiving.

So I've had some thought about where I'm going with Action 53.
First I'm definitely moving up the planed release date to April 1st 2020. In general I think people will be more optimistic and happy at this time of the year.
Because of the timing of the compo cycle, it would make sense to merge this idea (53 games with tech tools) with the idea of being the 5th nesdev compo volume.
As a consequence I'm not going to fret to much more over ROM size (maybe even just increase ROM capacity if things are a bit tight) or optimal structure and instead focus on getting features in. There was a kind of secret plan of mine to get some sort of super animated demoscene level intro made up, but I have no time for that.
I also hope that I can get a entry in for the 2018 compo. We'll see how that goes.

Again I'm horrible with communication and I feel might need guidance and help throughout 2019 in getting things together.

I've also quit Twitter and only keeping it around to talk to some people about this project.
JRoatch
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Re: Work-thread of a Volume of Action 53 with 53 Games

Post by JRoatch »

Wow, I've let time slip by me at an unacceptable rate lately. I really have nothing much to show.
My attempt at a compo entry failed to meet it's deadline, then I got distracted with programing traditional C programs.

Last month I wanted to get back on track by compiling a focused list of games, so that I can gather data about where each of the music routines are. This is the first step to my most wanted feature of Action 53, the Music Player. Assuming a sort of director role was also due to this planed feature. That got delayed as I had to pack and move my room.

While compiling that list I had a discussion with M_Tee and it became apparent that getting to 53 games is easier (and less duplicative) by combining the last two compos rather to have to search and contact many authors for extra permission of older games. I had already requested 4MByte roms from Infiniteneslives for what was going the combination of 2018 compo and some 30 games, so maybe the larger ROMs might be available to use for a combined 2017 compo, 2018 compo, and a handful of classics.

In consideration of the possible time line being moved up even further, and me being generally unable to put in the hours, I'm going to seriously scale back my goal here.

My main tasks *in order* are:
- Implement Music Player. (if I only make this by release, I would be satisfied)
- Make a CHR editor for the self flashable multipule chr bank board of Action 53.
- Only after those two, maybe help improve some of the rerun games.

Things that I will stop thinking about doing, due to there being no time:
- A53 Menu Rewrite. (I'll instead continue to work from the current codebase)
- My 2018 compo entry. (Chase/Mega Mountain combination rewrite with extra levels)
- About Pages, Award icons, export game signal, and other new features in the A53 Menu. (part of the Menu Rewrite)
- Russian Roulette A53 port. (I already apologized about it in the Volume 3 Easter Egg)
- Solar Wars with combined Nametable and CHR compression and reworked aiming.
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