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Old School NES fan? You might like what I'm making


Del_Duio
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Hello again TRFers!

 

You may remember me as the guy who made "Neil Peart- Mission: The Camera Eye". Or as the guy who posts The Booger Myers Band music here. Or maybe not remember me at all! XD

 

I'm in the process of making a new game called "Weebish Mines" that is very retro and has a nice NES feel to it. The game is heavily influenced by my personal favorite NES game, "Legacy of the Wizard" but is unique as well.

 

The objective is to help a family of 4 go to the local mines and raise enough cash to help save their sick pets by taking them to the vet. Each character has their own quirks and specialities and you'll be able to play as any one of them and swap them out during the adventure as many times as you want.

 

There's Del, who specializes in nunchucks, his girlfriend P.P. who packs a deadly whallop with a single punch, and Ness and Bubs who though being only children wreak havoc in the forms of flying pencils and aluminum baseball bats.

 

You'll find CASH MONEY in the mines, sure, but also be on the lookout for other gems like rubies, sapphires, and emeralds. Why? Because all the special items and weapons you'll find require these gems in order to use them. Smash dirt walls with the pickaxe, blow up monsters or walls with bombs, heal lifeforce with potions, turn invisible with the ghost sheet, and many more items will help you on your quest to save the pets!

 

It's still early in development, however I have the main engine down which is most of the work I believe. Here's a new short YouTube video showing a bit of what I have so far. (NOTE: The orange and purple tiled squares are areas in the dungeon I've not made yet. I use those squares as the guidelines in which to build new sections upon.)

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0m2m1y4VrqY

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Sounds very nice.

 

I wasn't a big fan of Legacy of the Wizard, but it sure did have nice music at its item-select screen.

 

Totally agreed. Actually, all of the music for LotW is really awesome!

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Looks excellent- I remember "Neil Peart- Mission: The Camera Eye", still have it on my hard drive too! I loved it. :)

 

Thanks Bluefunk! Though Weebish Mines doens't have any members of Rush in it, I think the gameplay on this is much more solid so far. Here's another short video I just put up that shows some of the new items (emergency ladder, shield, torch) and the new ninja enemies and their hideout.

 

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I put up some new videos for the game, this is one showing the 4th playable character "Bubs" and how the item storage / mass inventory back at your house works.

 

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No new videos, just a quick update list:

 

*I have about 75% of the world map done

*Slightly altered plot- now the pets are lost in the mine and you have to go find them all to win

*A better-looking interface and HUD

*A lot more enemies and etc. since the last post including another boss

*More than just barrels to break in this build for variety's sake (jars, totems, treasure chests)

*Better collision detection between player vs. targets (more leeway than before)

*2 of the 3 gem warp portals are completed

*Restructured gem / item system

*New day / night system

*More graphical polish to some places like the shop and your house

*A new pause screen that displays progress to either day or night

*New blocks that are solid during one phase of the day and you're able to walk through them for the other

*New experience point / and a shared level system with instant & random rewards upon leveling up

*New "X" rdrop ewards which grant instant XP without having to kill enemies

*Whole LOTTA' bug fixes

*One of the pets can be rescued (my pet rabbit)

*A partridge in a pear tree

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Did you create this from scratch? Looks good...just like an early NES game to me.

 

I've downloaded an ASCII editor and some NES roms to modify, but just text editting (added Tiger Woods to PGA Tour golf, change the rosters on the sega NHL roms, etc). Was this build in ASCII? I would love to change the layout of some golf courses, or edit more than just text but I don't understand the language enough really.

 

Amazes me how small in size those early games are...the roms are like 2mb....I guess space was a premium since the code is just one string in most roms.

 

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Did you create this from scratch? Looks good...just like an early NES game to me.

 

I've downloaded an ASCII editor and some NES roms to modify, but just text editting (added Tiger Woods to PGA Tour golf, change the rosters on the sega NHL roms, etc). Was this build in ASCII? I would love to change the layout of some golf courses, or edit more than just text but I don't understand the language enough really.

 

Amazes me how small in size those early games are...the roms are like 2mb....I guess space was a premium since the code is just one string in most roms.

 

Thank you! It's made using Multimedia Fusion 2 but otherwise you have to draw the graphics, code, add the objects and all that stuff yourself. I like it a lot, it's a powerful tool. It's sort of like GameMaker I guess if you've heard of that program.

 

I think for NES games you'd have to do Hex editing but from what I've heard it's very tough. There were a few people on the GameFAQs Final Fantasy boards who made very good edits to the game to either rebalance, fix the old bugs and flaws, or straight up change everything around. THAT stuff is very impressive to me, especially being a giant fan of the original NES FF1.

 

2MB is small, but you should see some of the size limits they had for Atari stuff. We're talking tiny KB limitations, it's amazing. Adventure, Pitfall, even all 80 or whatever modes of Combat.. I have no idea how they did it. Those are the real programming heroes IMO.

 

PC-wise, there's a very good yet incredibly tough old game called Deathlord which came out for the Apple ][e . Made by 2 guys, the game is MASSIVE in scope- something like 16 continents huge. Think Ultima meets Japanese mythos and then ramp up the difficulty by a factor of 10 at least. They were able to fit this huge game on 2 discs (might have been one 2-sided disc I actually forget right now) by some sort of ingenious map compression.

 

So say where other games may have stored map data like this "OOOOOO.........O..O" they'd do something like this "O6.9O1.2O1". Like the 1st part of the string is the character / map tile followed immediately by how many of those tiles to place and so forth. A long time ago when I did BASIC programming I came up with something similar but not nearly as efficient and I spent a LOT of nights manually inputting text strings while reading off my graph paper. And boy was that a tedious suckfest to say the least! Ah the old days!

 

Here's the link to Deathlord's Wikipedia entry though it's not too detailed:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deathlord

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Thanks for the info. Yes, Hex editor..I have that also...maybe the NES and sega are different programs...haven't done it in a while. I mostly learn by trail and error. Was able to teach myself VB, ASP, SQL, etc because it was all logical and in English...But some of those old NES games are just numbers with footnotes in Japanese...add the compression and I'm lost on some games. :)

 

Keep up the nice work...very cool.

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Bumping this old-ass topic for some new-ass news:

 

The 2017 update of Weebish Mines!

 

Does that mean it is now super HD or even 1 half D? Nope, graphically it's mostly the same though there is now some shading under the platforms which help things look better.

 

The main improvements are a save game system (much needed!), recompiled with hardware acceleration for better performance, different randomized spots for the pets to run off to, improved controls (the special items are now activated by a separate keypress / button), the ability to use your default weapon while these special items are currently active, full screen option, and so on.

 

I've put the game up on Steam Greenlight for Vote-o-rama as well. If it goes through that'll be my 3rd title up on the service which is pretty neat.

 

Steam Greenlight page:

http://steamcommunit...s/?id=849688710

 

Update Video:

Edited by Del_Duio
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