[So speak up interwebs!]

I would like to hear some more opinions first though - So speak up interwebs! - thanks!

[edit] I think my website just crashed =D

I saw this thread earlier before your website died - really liked the look of the screenshots and you had my interest, but that interest evaporated as soon as I'd scrolled down to your "Cover Art" graphic.

There's a lot of games out there that I've not played yet... more games than I've got time to play... so is there any reason why I should risk wasting my time finding out if your game design decisions are as bad as your character design decisions?

For NES audio limitations spending some time checking out FamiTracker will give you a good understanding of the NES's 2A03 sound chip's capaibilties.

Make sure your .WAV files are 16-bit and not 32-bit audio. Also ensure that you're saving them as uncompressed PCM and not compressed ACM format.

I checked it out.

Firstly, the download is a bit big. 260MB which unzips to over half a gigabyte! This is ridiculous for a game like this (unless there's a huge amount of content later in the game which I didn't see). Is the music uncompressed .wav?

Controls don't work properly with my 360 controller - left stick movement is OK, but moving the right stick left and right shoots up and down respectively and I can't shoot left or right.

As for the gameplay - it feels pretty solid and I can see the potential, but in its current form I got bored pretty quickly. The monsters drift around randomly so it's easy to just strafe at the sides of the screen and mop up some hearts every now and then. Without any kind of homing behaviour or basic AI it doesn't feel like there's much in the way of challenge.

Staying alive by refilling the energy is a really nice idea - but the UI should communicate my current energy level more clearly, like with a big bar along the top or bottom of the screen, or use a bigger font to display the value and change the text colour through yellow/orange/red as it decreases.

Graphics for the player, monsters and items are all great, but the background could do with a little bit of colour and variation.

If you want to consult about designing games - you should have a few good examples under your belt.

Yeah - 200€ up-front for a day of emailing an anonymous person, who doesn't appear to have actually made any games, about "Hardcore Game Design" isn't a very compelling offer.

Here's a bundle of 256 short Famicom 2A03 samples I made when I was producing the sound effects for Chompston:

http://www.contralogic.com/256-nes-samples/

They might be useful if you need some 8-bit sound effects for a game or if you're making chiptune-style beats etc.

[AudioOutputBufferSize]

OK, I've updated the download with a couple of adjustments which might go some way to fixing the audio problems.

Also I've exposed a couple of parameters in the settings.ini file which you can try tweaking:

AudioOutputBufferSize - I increased the default from 50ms to 64ms. Bigger sizes will hopefully fix most issues with stuttering sound, but at the expense of a bigger delay between onscreen events and the corresponding sound effects.

AudioUpdatePeriod - Controls the frequency of how often my sound mixing function is called by the BASS audio library. I'm not really sure what the optimum default value should be... so if anyone who is having audio problems could experiment a bit with this value while leaving the ouput buffer at the default 64ms let me know if it fixes things.

Hm... what's your OS and system specs? I'm wondering if this is common and it's just not being reported to me.

Uploaded a video to YouTube :

Thanks for checking it out!

As for the early levels - yeah, I wanted the levels to progress from simple to more complex, but the generator can sometimes produce a layout that's a bit unfair.

Actually it's more of a challenge balancing the difficulty than I'd anticipated - I tried giving the monsters pretty good homing AI but it seemed to make the game quite a bit less fun.

OK, It's done for now - link is in the first post.

There's still only one tune at the moment - maybe I'll add more in the future but I feel like working on other stuffs for a while first. Also I added a toggle in the options to disable music so you can play with just basic sound effects.

Am I the only person frustrated by games without any volume control option?

Still using XP - so no volume control per application like in Windows 7 - and I like to play games whilst chatting on Skype. Lots of indie games where this isn't viable because the game sound drowns out Skype

A name! and a title screen of sorts:



Not great, but it'll suffice.

Still a couple of little bugs to fix but mainly I just need to make some more music. Not sure whether to keep everything chiptune sounding or not?

Thanks, guys - that's cleared up my confusion a lot! 

This is awesome! I've always used Shiru's VGM Music Maker tracker when I wanted authentic Mega Drive sounds - but it's really nice to have this as VST.

Is there any chance of a 2x option for the interface, though? It's a bit small on my 1920x1200 display.

[samplebufb]

Happy about fixing something after many hours of head scratching, but grumpy because I don't quite understand precisely why it's fixed

Converting an array bytes representing 16 bit audio data into an array of shorts in Java - this doesn't work:

Code:

samplebuf[i] = (short)( samplebufb[2*i] | (samplebufb[2*i + 1]<<8));

This works:

Code:

samplebuf[i] = (short)( (samplebufb[2*i] & 0xFF) | (samplebufb[2*i + 1]<<8));

I sort of get that it's something to do with signed vs. unsigned bytes but I don't really see what's happening... samplebufb is byte[] array, so why does masking with & 0xFF make a difference?

Awesome let me know how it works out

Seems to work pretty well - I like that it adds a bit of variety to the gameplay.



Added some power-ups (extra bomb, increase bomb range, extra heart, increase maximum hearts) and have been adding a few other little details like indicators to mark where a monster will spawn.

I'm at that point where I find it hard to maintain motivation once all the fun of figuring out and implementing new ideas is over - now it's really just a matter of working through a to-do list of fairly simple stuff.

As for the passable bombs an idea could be to have it so certain enemies, such as the ghosts, can pass them and others can't, so a mix of the two

Yes! I really like this idea I'll try it out.

Added some monsters. Took some time experimenting with different styles but I couldn't really make them look good and fit with the style of the player with my limited pixelling skills, so resorted to making them blocks as well:



Pretty much all of the game logic is now in place and monsters move in the way I'd planned -  ie. keep going if in a corridor, don't double back on themselves at a junction.

Still not 100% sure if I wan't the bombs to be unpassable (like in Bomberman) or not. Either way is a massive change to the gameplay and I'm not sure which I prefer.

Regarding coding - I often find myself tinkering around with little 'optimizations', usually at the expense of readability. For example, I decided to bake the available exits from a tile into my collision map (a two-dimensional array) instead of just having '1' where there's a wall and '0' where there isn't.

So instead of this:

Code:

11111
10001
10111
11111

I'm doing this:

Code:

00000
06A80
01000
00000

Where the first bit means I can move up, the second right, etc. Any possible performance benefits of this system are completely inconsequential for this type of game because there's never going to be many checks per game loop - but maybe I'll have a use for the idea in the future?

As for music - I'm not sure what's the best way to incorporate different tunes into the game. For the time being I'll probably go with an Outrun-style song selection at the start of a game, then just stick with the same tune throughout.

Nothing new to show in terms of gameplay yet, but I've done a bit more work on audio stuff - the timing of sounds wasn't satisfactory so I coded a software mixer to ensure everything syncs up perfectly. Also I made a little tool for editing sample groups and previewing them with a background music:



Here's a video showing a test music and sound effects: