Lizard for NES

Ahora casi todo va por Kickstarter , que pena

He estado jugando a la demo y no me he enterado mucho por aquello de que puedes ir para casi cualquier lado (tipo Metroid) luego jugaré un rato más.

Me ha sorprendido que el nivel gráfico pase de bastante bueno (fondos y escenarios de varios colores) a bastante miserable (fondos totalmente negros con 2 plataformas de un solo color).

Skullomartin escribió:He estado jugando a la demo y no me he enterado mucho por aquello de que puedes ir para casi cualquier lado (tipo Metroid) luego jugaré un rato más.

Me ha sorprendido que el nivel gráfico pase de bastante bueno (fondos y escenarios de varios colores) a bastante miserable (fondos totalmente negros con 2 plataformas de un solo color).

Eso mismo pensaba viendo el video, entiendo que pronto lo mejorará ...

Actualmente esta en desarrollo, en breve se iniciará la fase de beta testing.

Resulta curioso el juego. A ver como es el producto final.

No me llama nada, es otro juego mas, idéntico a otro montón de juegos idénticos en nes.
La gracia está en hacer juegos que se atrevan con lo que no se atrevían las desarrolladoras en su momento comercial.

Algunas novedades .....

This has been on my mind lately: it is hard to show what the scope of my game is supposed to be. I'm the only person who really knows what I intend. I offered a map of the demo, with some sketches and notes in an earlier update, but I started to think I should give a better picture of it.

When I was working on the print manual, writing about the game makes certain things final. I had to be very careful to make sure what I wrote will match the finished game, and this ended up finalizing quite a lot of design decisions which were still in the air. I ended up making this map of the game:

Lizard's in-game map.

I hope this gives a better idea of the size of the game. It's not precisely proportioned or very detailed, but I want it to show the player early on how many major areas there are, where they are, roughly, and how to get around. It should help give an idea of what there is to do in this game.

With the doubled ROM size, the planned size of the world has doubled too. There should be about four times as much space to explore as you could find in the demo.

At this point the demo world has been scoured from the game, and the pieces of it that I wanted to keep have been refitted into the new double-wide world. Most of the areas that were in the demo will feel very similar, but everything is more spacious now, and there will be new details too.

Project Update #

In previous updates, I talked about how I doubled the ROM size and I've tried to describe the consequences of this. Today I'd like to show you what it means with a picture.

Here is a comparison of the Marsh and Water zones, as they appeared in the demo, and now redone with the new target data size.



I'm very happy with what the bigger ROM size is letting me do. This looks and feels a lot more like what I had in mind when I was initially planning the game. There's more space to explore, and a lot of places that I felt were crowded can now be relaxed.

NES Tiling
Backgrounds on the NES are made of a grid of 8x8 pixel tiles, but using a 16x16 pixel grid of colours. Several systems of the time separated colour and detail, but the size disparity between these two things on the NES is a rather unusual feature of the machine.

The colour grid, known as the "attribute" table, allows you to select 1 of 4 palettes to use in each 16x16 region of the screen. Each of these regions requires 2 bits of data, so it packs groups of 4 of them into a single 8-bit byte representing a 32x32 pixel region of the screen. Various NES developers took a different approach to organizing their map data for the hardware.



Legacy of the Wizard builds its levels entirely with 16x16 pixel blocks. Basically, the 8x8 level of detail is foregone in solidarity with the colour selection. Most NES games are organized in a similar way.



Battletoads uses larger 32x32 pixel blocks. In this way it seems to be organized around whole attribute bytes, rather than the highest level of colour detail. The larger block size also helps create larger maps with less data. Because Battletoads scrolls in all directions and has large character sprites, this seems a sensible choice.



Lizard uses an 8x8 pixel level of detail, and I have to carefully tiptoe around the 16x16 colour grid while I'm laying out the tiles. A consequence of this is that my maps potentially take 4 times as much information as ones using 16x16 blocks. This is why doubling the ROM size has made such a difference; I wanted small characters and a high level of visual detail, and this has a significant data cost!



Sometimes I am at the mercy of the hardware, however, especially in areas which require an extra colour in the palette for the sky. Some places in Lizard have a blockier 16x16 look, where I am unable to work around the limitations.


Nekketsu! Street Basket: Ganbare Dunk Heroes

Well made NES backgrounds often involve art that is drawn in ways that hide the 16x16 boundaries. I think this one from Nekketsu! Street Basket: Ganbare Dunk Heroes is particularly well crafted, though it does have the luxury of being merely a backdrop, not bound by functional constraints like maps in a platform game would be.

My primary goal is to release the digital game through itch.io, and cartridges at infiniteneslives.com, and all of that will happen first before I begin preparing for Steam. The Steam release should follow not too long after, though, and I hope to be able to offer a steam key to backers who want one

Vertical Space
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PmseO8R98ro

Octopus
https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=23&v=DfKak1V_9TA

Soundtrack
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TtGwKq76qM0

Supongo que la foto del cartucho y estos videos es que el juego esta terminado

¿alguien que lo haya comprado se anima a hacer un breve comentario sobre el resultado final?

Lizard is an original game currently in development for the Nintendo Entertainment System, but also playable on a PC, Mac, or emulator.

The finished game will be coming in Fall 2015, but a playable demo is available below!

No esta terminado aún, los vídeos son demos.

Saludos

Me despistó la foto del cartucho