OHR Multicart Compilation

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Willy Elektrix
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OHR Multicart Compilation

Post by Willy Elektrix »

This is the work-in-progress thread for the OHR Multicart. The Multicart is a community collaboration project. Members of the community will create simple games in the NES style. These games will be assembled into one big compilation game. The goal is create compilation of games imitating an NES Multicart.

Everyone in the community is welcome and encouraged to participate (regardless of skill and experience). Here are some guidelines to help you as you work on your game.

O The games must be in NES style. Their graphics should loosely imitate those of the NES. It is okay to take some liberties here (i.e. more than 4 colors per sprite is okay). 8 bit music and sound effects are preferred.

O The game must be fun and bug free. Spend time testing your game to make sure that it works and is enjoyable. Members of this community (myself included) would love to help you with this process.

O Any genre of game is fine (action, adventure, RPG, puzzle, or whatever).

O This must be a brand new game made specifically for this compilation. Please do not submit old games that you have already completed. Also, do not make clones of other games unless you are also adding features of your own. For instance, you could remake Tetris if you added a new scoring system, or power-ups, or mini-games, or etc.

O The game should use keyboard controls. These can be any keys you want, but those keys should be described on the title screen or shortly thereafter. There is a good chance that many of the games will use different control schemes. It is important to inform the player of that immediately.

O Your game or games must be complete by March 1st 2017. This does not mean that you should start on February 15th. Take the extra time to polish your game or make multiple games.

O Use this thread to keep everyone posted as to the develop of your game. Public development is highly encouraged on this project to keep people from making games that are too similar.

O If you have any questions about your game or this project, let me know and I'll be happy to help!
Last edited by Willy Elektrix on Tue Nov 08, 2016 3:24 am, edited 2 times in total.
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Willy Elektrix
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Post by Willy Elektrix »

Here's who has to agreed to participate and what they are working on. It is okay to make a game in a similar style to someone else, but a variety would be nice!

Gizmog: the all-important game selection screen

Bob the Hamster: horizontal scrolling space shooter

Willy Elektrix: collect-em-up adventure game called Xeno Safari

Foxley: Zelda-like adventure game or a platformer

TMC & RMZ: castle defense game

Newbie Newtype: shooter

kylekrack: strategy RPG similar to Fire Emblem

KF Harlock: one-screen platformer similar to Bubble Bobble by way of Castlequest

RM Sephy: Arkanoid-like

Nathan Karr: classic fantasy JRPG

MorpheusKitami: haunted house game like "Monster Squad meets the Running Man"

If anyone else has a concrete idea, I'll add it to the list.
Last edited by Willy Elektrix on Thu Jan 12, 2017 3:49 am, edited 5 times in total.
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Gizmog
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Post by Gizmog »

Really excited about this and the rules look great. I expect to have a first draft finished by tonight. Of course, everything takes me 5 times longer than it should so maybe Friday. We'll see!
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Post by KF Harlock »

I'd like to participate as well, hopefully. I want to make something like... a one-screen platformer in the vein of Bubble Bobble but more by way of Castlequest.
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Post by kylekrack »

Could you clear up the palette guidelines, if there are any? There was an NES palette posted in the other thread but I don't know if that was made clear or not.
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Gizmog
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Post by Gizmog »

The hell with Friday, here's the first rough draft. Up and down change the menu item, Enter displays the transition from menu to game.
Known Issues:
-Doesn't load a game yet because there aren't any.

-Game names replaced with Van Halen songs because there aren't any games yet

-No sound effects or music

-Matrix theme is kind of dark and might not fit the tone of the finished games

-Text looks a little weird when going behind the menu. Going in front might be preferable but could make the menu less readable.

-Only enter "chooses" a game. Future version will allow any "use" key to do it.

-Selected game should maybe flicker rather than just being brighter than non-selected counterparts.

-Font is ripped from Shin Megami Tensei and stealing isn't very cool

-None of the slices are ever deleted so the longer it runs the slower/uglier it gets.
Any thoughts, comments, critiques or suggestions are more than welcomed. Could it look cooler? Is the basic idea rubbish? Got a better idea you'd like to see happen? BRING IT ONNNNNNNNN
Last edited by Gizmog on Tue Nov 08, 2016 6:32 am, edited 3 times in total.
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kylekrack
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Post by kylekrack »

Main thing I have to say is that the menu items are already unreadable. The words are all the same color, so regardless of in front or behind, it's going to be hard to read.

I think the idea is cool, and the execution looks great overall, but I'm not sure I get it. What's with the Matrix theme? Is there some explanation that's gone over my head?
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Gizmog
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Post by Gizmog »

I don't know either, it's just the first thing I thought of that would look cool. "A Matrix of OHR Games" was what I was thinking of as the concept. It's weird that the words are all the same color, one of them should be brighter as the active choice. If it's not, that's some kind of a bug.
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Post by TMC »

Hey, that actually looks really nice. I like that fact that you used all the OHR icons, and the fade in/out is neat. Not exactly the NES palette (hey, Willy didn't specify it), but actually it IS pretty retro, just imagine you're watching it on a CRT with long persistence. You could possibly even add some other effects to help give that impression (if only the OHR had a scanline filter...).
What if you made the falling letters line up exactly with the letters of the menu, so that it looks like the whole thing is a single grid of letters? (Bonus if the letters don't overlap, but that sounds like a lot of trouble only to make it look worse.) I guess that would look more like a real text-mode selection menu, which is pretty much what you would expect for a game selection menu of the era (just not on the NES).

Oh, also: RMZ and I are doing a castle defense game.

I guess people can post progress in the Finish Your Damn Game thread if they hope to be done by Jan 31st!
Last edited by TMC on Tue Nov 08, 2016 12:40 pm, edited 2 times in total.
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Gizmog
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Post by Gizmog »

TMC wrote:(if only the OHR had a scanline filter...).

What if you made the falling letters line up exactly with the letters of the menu, so that it looks like the whole thing is a single grid of letters?
Damn! I knew I forgot something. It actually does make the letters line up vertically, just not horizontally! Relatively easy to fix.

(I've actually thought of ways to emulate that. It's a lot easier with backdrops/sprites and a crapload of containers. The poor man's version (A screen-width rectangle every other line) doesn't look bad on the background text though!)
TMC wrote:I guess that would look more like a real text-mode selection menu, which is pretty much what you would expect for a game selection menu of the era (just not on the NES).
Gotta admit, I'm not sure what the hell I was thinking with this concept and I can see how it doesn't line up with a lot of the stuff we talked about. I just thought it might look cool and made it to see whether or not it actually did. I've got a few other ideas I'm going to test (I never did get to use that fireworks script for Santa vs. The Devil) and maybe one (or more!) of them will be good enough.
Other Concepts

-Fireworks

-A wheel (Like the first random review picker... HOLY slime THE NEXT REVIEW PICKER CAN ACTUALLY MAKE YOU PLAY THE GAMES)

-A wheel, only more 3D

-Some kinda Space Harrier style thing. This is the least likely to actually get done

-Other stuff I'm sure I could think of if I wasn't distracted by breakfast and anything suggestionwise that catches my fancy
EDIT: Latest version here.
Attachments
The poor-man's scanlines don't work well when applied to the whole thing, unfortunately
The poor-man's scanlines don't work well when applied to the whole thing, unfortunately
Menu0010022.bmp (63.55 KiB) Viewed 8850 times
Bit more readable! Hadn't locked them down horizontal yet (since fixed. Update after breakfast)
Bit more readable! Hadn't locked them down horizontal yet (since fixed. Update after breakfast)
Menu0010019.bmp (63.55 KiB) Viewed 8851 times
Last edited by Gizmog on Tue Nov 08, 2016 2:45 pm, edited 1 time in total.
TMC
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Post by TMC »

Well, you know, a scanline filter is not exactly hard to implement, so...

But there's a near-infinite number variants of it. First I tried just dimming every second line to half, but that's a somewhat subtle effect (see first screenshot); I think your slice-based scanlines may have looked better. I played around a bit, screwed up the math a bit, and got some rather interesting results (that colour shifting was *not* intentional). The problem is that especially nice looking effects might create a serious mess on other graphics.
All these are screenshots of your first demo, to avoid the scripted scanlines.

So I guess it would be nice if the scanline parameters were tunable rather than having a single fixed filter. Something to go in the Window Settings menu.

(Edit: removed a couple screenshots to keep the size down)
Attachments
3x zoom with 2/3s of lines dimmed and 1/3 brightened. This looks pretty good, aside from turning light green into white
3x zoom with 2/3s of lines dimmed and 1/3 brightened. This looks pretty good, aside from turning light green into white
matrix_z3_badmath2.png (77.4 KiB) Viewed 8830 times
I think this is the same algorithm as the previous screenshot, but changing the zoom level changes the effect...
I think this is the same algorithm as the previous screenshot, but changing the zoom level changes the effect...
matrix_z3_badmath.png (51.97 KiB) Viewed 8830 times
Throw in some unprincipled bit-ops for blur...
Throw in some unprincipled bit-ops for blur...
matrix_z2_badmath.png (68.04 KiB) Viewed 8830 times
Basic dimming of every other line
Basic dimming of every other line
matrix_z2_simple.png (22.04 KiB) Viewed 8830 times
Last edited by TMC on Tue Nov 08, 2016 4:48 pm, edited 5 times in total.
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Foxley
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Post by Foxley »

I should be able to figure out how to make Zelda 1 style scrolling scripts on my own. As far as hit detection for attacks goes, I'm a bit clueless. Are there any scripts I could look at for reference that involve hitboxes?
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Post by RMSephy »

This sounds pretty fun. I could try and make an arkanoid-style game for this.
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Post by Bob the Hamster »

There are a lot of different ways you could do hit detection.

For a zelda-like game, I am going to say that you probably want to have just one main script looping every tick.

When you press the attack button, you would be creating a sword npc in front of the hero.

Then you would want to loop through all the NPCs on the map, and check if any of them were colliding with the sword. The code might look something like this:

Code: Select all


script, check for sword collision, sword, begin
  # The sword argument is an NPC reference to your sword NPC
  # This script loops through all other NPCs, and checks if the
  # sword hit any of them
  variable&#40;i&#41;
  # NPC references are negative numbers in the range of -1 to -300
  for&#40;ref, -300, -1&#41; do&#40;
    # Make sure this is actually a valid NPC for this map
    if&#40;get NPC ID&#40;ref&#41; >= 0&#41; then&#40;
      # Don't let the sword collide with itself
      if&#40;ref <> sword&#41; then&#40;
        # Check if the sword and NPC collide
        if&#40;slice collide&#40;get npc slice&#40;sword&#41;, get npc slice&#40;ref&#41;&#41;&#41; then&#40;
          #The sword hits this NPC, run a script
          damage NPC with sword&#40;ref&#41;
        &#41;
      &#41;
    &#41;
  &#41;
end
The "damage NPC with sword" script could reduce the enemy's hit-points (which you could store in one of the NPC extra data slots)

Also, I think there is a typo in the title of this thread. Should be "Multicart" rather than "Multcart"
Last edited by Bob the Hamster on Tue Nov 08, 2016 6:35 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by Spoonweaver »

My tech demo "some kinda ninja" is a Zelda like with open script and you're free to reuse any part of it.
I'm open to questions or advise in regards to it.
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