OHR Multicart Compilation

Thanks for the feedback and encouragement. Yeah, there's nothing to do yet, it's in a pre-alpha stage but I plan on adding actual objectives (also secondary weapons/tools) next as I also do more map design.

I'm going for an offensively bright, ugly early NES aesthetic on purpose (think Milon's Secret Castle) that's visually disorienting, but if it has serious negative effects on peoples' ability to play through it I may tweak the map tiles at some point down the road.

So, when devs were making games for the NES, they would sometimes record actual sound effects and then compress them for use in the game, correct? For certain sounds, I feel like this method would be easier than playing around with an 8-bit sound effect generator until I get what I want. I don't know how that would work, though. Is there any way to compress a sound effect to make it capable of being used by the NES system, or at least sound like it?

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My pronouns are they/them
Ps. I love my wife

The NES's audio system was based on a few simple waveforms. Here's an excellent article on the specifics of the sound hardware: http://famitracker.com/wiki/index.php?title=Sound_hardware

Not sure how you'd compress audio down to simple channels like that though. Could just try crunching it with Audacity until it sounds good enough™ ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

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In Maces Wild, I recorded myself saying a couple things in a staccato and then applied a couple of its default filters (forget what order but I'm pretty sure Wahwah was one of them) and that's why TOBMAC has a couple of voice clips. I considered it good enough.

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Remeber: God made you special and he loves you very much. Bye!

There should be a way to convert small .WAV files to a PCM channel sound file in FamiTracker, though I haven't tried it yet. A lot of NES composers used things like kick drum or timpani in the PCM channel.

I'll try FamiTracker first,I'm familiar with that.

@Taco_Bot: Thanks, that'll be super helpful

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My pronouns are they/them
Ps. I love my wife

I created some portrait text boxes for the game's "Xeno Catalog" (which is like a PokeDex), and the character selection screen. I basically just scaled the 20x20 walkabouts to 50x50 portrait graphics. The results look good though.

Quiet thread lately. Hope everyone is doing well.

I'm at an uncertain point in development, where I'm not sure how to pare down the game to where it'll still be fun to play but not overloaded with half baked ideas that don't work and aren't fun to implement. Even though I'm garbage at coding, yet again I seem to have successfully coded most of the features I wanted well ahead of designing the actual game.

If need be, I'll pare the game way the hell down so I can ensure it'll be a finished product by March.

I feel hopelessly lost but I have real-world issues taking priority and really I feel this way about any project I can't hammer out in a single evening.

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Remeber: God made you special and he loves you very much. Bye!

I have also been busy with real-life stuff, and haven't been making much headway with Star Dartle 2000

Is anyone interested in collaborating?

Things I need the most help with:

*Artwork
*Music and sound effects
*Ideas for enemy movement patterns and weapon upgrades

Yeah, I been busy too. Usual holiday rush + busiest time of the year at my mom's work + family being sick and it's just been awful. Trying to keep up, I'd really love to release some kinda stupid game before the end of the year but it ain't lookin promising.

Wish I could collaborate James, but I don't think I'm the right artist for the job and my headphones are broken so I can't hear doodly. But I can give you advice on enemy patterns!

Golgo 13's helicopter sequence has a bunch of good ideas to rip off. There's planes that approach stacked on top of each other, so it looks like one and then they split into two or three at the last second. There's enemies who stay still on the vertical plane but shoot aimed shots as they move past. Some of these enemies are tricky and approach from behind, making them loiter on screen even longer as their relative velocity is lower. My favorite enemy is at about the 7:35 mark. It's a blimp that moves slowly and takes a lot of punishment, it's got these four fireball things that orbit around the central point. Shooting one down is really tense because it takes up so much of the screen, you've gotta be in front of it to shoot and it closes the distance so slowly.

As for weapon upgrades, one of my favorite games in that department was TaleSpin. It didn't have a lot of fancy double-shot, triple-shot stuff, but it made good use of a basic mechanic. You know how in older games you can only have one shot on the screen at a time? And if you miss, you gotta wait for that shot to leave the screen before you can fire another one? Where if you get right on top of the enemy you can shoot a ton of shots at once because they hit almost immediately? TaleSpin does that, but you can use the money you collected to upgrade how many shots you can have on the screen at once. At two or three shots, you don't need to be right on top to maintain a high rate of fire, so the offensive upgrade is also in many ways a defensive upgrade, allowing you to play more conservatively.

Aerofighters also did this cool thing where at a certain point your basic shot quit upgrading, but you got secondary shots that fired alongside, like little missiles or ninja stars or lasers. And those secondaery shots didn't last forever, which meant you still had an incentive to risk it all to get another powerup.

EDIT: Another thing I thought of. Lots of games think it's "unfair" to have enemies come from behind. Best solution I've seen to that is to have them either in the foreground or background, come across the field of play right to left, uninteractable, and THEN have them pop up from behind in the proper field of play having had warnin they'd be back there.

Things never seem to work out according to plan, especially with everyone going out of their way to distract you at this time of year!

I haven't even started on our game yet, but RMZ did, briefly drawing a bunch of graphics. We agreed to start on the game after the new year, although actually I'm running rather behind with other things, so can't start immediately (plus I will be away for another week in early January). I still expect to have it done in the next two months, though. On the other hand... RMZ thinks it's ambitious but I don't, but all my ideas turn out overambitious, so he's probably right!

Some of these are currently in Nathan's Quest but they might be replaced. Also the engine doesn't seem to like music files under a certain length?

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Remeber: God made you special and he loves you very much. Bye!

This is news to me. How short? What happens?

Generally the sound import screen will keep returning to the menu and going back in my experience. If I'm lucky I can time an Escape key to cancel the whole thing, but then I'm left with a corrupted sound file I need to delete.

Also, importing very long WAV files as sound effects in order to convert them into OGGs.

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Remeber: God made you special and he loves you very much. Bye!