Dimension Shift

[fjamesfernandez]

Congrats Mugi! Man, you are pushing it to the max. This is so exciting to watch being developed. I have so much to do Can't wait to see the new update.

 

[Bucket Mouse]

How'd you make the digitized headphone photo? I know you've told us before in the past what program you used, but...I forgot.

 

[Mugi]

you can do that with more or less any competent paint program really.
it involves taking a picture and reducing it's color density until it can either be used as-is or manually cleaned up for nes' restrictions.
for best results in pictures such as the headphones there, a monochromatic 256-color image generally gives best results.

Images using more color will have to be very calefully cleaned up for that (see my titlescreen that uses 3 different palettes to draw the girl.)
Dealing with palette changes on such images is extremely dedious work if you want it to look nice.

 

[red moon]

Very cool, I used to love these when the option was there in NES carts.

 

[Mugi]

So, we've been talking about the story of this game really vaguely so far, mostly because while the basic idea was down, we never actually fleshed anything out properly.
that changed today with the inclusion of the cutscene engine, which has been completely written from scratch, including our own text routines.

this engine is capable of displaying 1024 unique tiles at once on screen (full screen graphics) and the text engine has no arbitrary text group limitations or whatever else. it prints 4 lines of text, 26 symbols per line, and
has a function to pause the text for desired amount of frames at any given point in the text.

edit: added function to speed up text input by holding down B

so here's the first look at dimension shift's plot, and the story of Mari.

https://youtu.be/ZITEMO0fB68

 

[Bucket Mouse]

So, we've been talking about the story of this game really vaguely so far, mostly because while the basic idea was down, we never actually fleshed anything out properly.
that changed today with the inclusion of the cutscene engine, which has been completely written from scratch, including our own text routines.

this engine is capable of displaying 1024 unique tiles at once on screen (full screen graphics) and the text engine has no arbitrary text group limitations or whatever else. it prints 4 lines of text, 26 symbols per line, and
has a function to pause the text for desired amount of frames at any given point in the text.

Wait, I thought full screen graphics on the NES were impossible -- you had to repeat tiles somewhere because there simply wasn't enough memory. How'd you pull this off?

 

[Mugi]

Wait, I thought full screen graphics on the NES were impossible -- you had to repeat tiles somewhere because there simply wasn't enough memory. How'd you pull this off?

that's the power of midscreen changes. Mapper 30 has 4 banks of chr ram (4x256 tiles) we just change to a new one halfway during screen rendering.
the image shown on the demo video uses 512 tiles, and the font is a separate entity from that.

 

[fjamesfernandez]

ha! i wish.

this late endeavor of getting the path tiles and hud tiles in normal use will greatly assist in the visual side of the project though.
but i still have lots of work with mechanics and whatnot. There's no need for a pretty game with no content.
its all learning for me at this point.

Still, great style. Whats the point of content if your game looks like chicken scratch? Both goes hand in hand like it does here. It helps if the person can do both spriting/animation and coding.

 

[Mugi]

well there's not much point on a pretty game either if there's nothing to do in it, you stare at it for 10 seconds and you good, onto the next game.

 

[fjamesfernandez]

well there's not much point on a pretty game either if there's nothing to do in it, you stare at it for 10 seconds and you good, onto the next game.

LMAO! Both content and pretty need to go hand in hand Thats why the community has you

 

[Mugi]

well there's not much point on a pretty game either if there's nothing to do in it, you stare at it for 10 seconds and you good, onto the next game.

LMAO! Both content and pretty need to go hand in hand Thats why the community has you

except that i have basically no content on the game so far lol

 

[fjamesfernandez]

well there's not much point on a pretty game either if there's nothing to do in it, you stare at it for 10 seconds and you good, onto the next game.

LMAO! Both content and pretty need to go hand in hand Thats why the community has you

except that i have basically no content on the game so far lol

Don't worry, you and I are in the same boat right now. I have almost a completed Sewer with no content in it. We have to fill out world. But think of everything you had to fix. To of had the content in it, it would had made the problem even bigger when you had to fix things. Last thing we want to do is start over.

 

[Mugi]

well, so far it's been mostly rewriting instead of fixing to be honest. the things we set out to "fix" turned out 95% rewritten in a lot of cases
but yeah, the plan from the start was to get the entire engine done, and build the screens while at it, and then just drop the gameplay in place. As such, there are literally no mechanics in place atm.

we have protagonist on her basic form with basic attack, and we just fixed up item boxes. that's literally all the mechanics that are in place so far what comes to gameplay.
the weapon system and whatnot have been designed but none of the code is written yet, and entities or projectiles dont work at all.
nesmaker's entity system is still in place, but the vertical scrolling messed it up so the entities dont really knwo what nametables they belong to anymore and just dissappear or randomly spawn in wrong places

 

[fjamesfernandez]

Aye, If its not one thing its another right? I, myself, cant design those types of things so I have to work with what I have and make the best out of it. I know yourll hit that mark that you want. Even just the demo itself was good with the little it had. I'm sure there is more to come. (Back to redesigning a monster ><)

 

[Mugi]

we'll see what the furuter holds.
monster design etc will be our stepping stone here too, since im really terrible at that (my graphics style is not quite suitable for designing simple mosnters heh.)

 

[fjamesfernandez]

we'll see what the furuter holds.
monster design etc will be our stepping stone here too, since im really terrible at that (my graphics style is not quite suitable for designing simple mosnters heh.)

I'm here if you need any assistance graphic wise. And trust me... I had to really imagine simple >< even a simple bat design became a problem so... I had to go even smaller ><

 

[Mugi]

hey boys, a long time ago (in march, before the byte-off) i wrote this post: http://nesmakers.com/viewtopic.php?f=51&t=1820&start=80#p14837
detailing some future plans of the game and what we've been thinking... there's a specific feature on the list that we buried off our heads for a long while, Until yesterday to be exact

so yeah, here you go, in-game menu with stage maps and player tracking (heal, shop, boss locations will be purchaseable powerup)
also some other screenshots from additional things added lately:
"dev logo", equalizer for soundtest, cutscene engine, stage clear markers for cleared stages, and ofcourse, the new pause menu screen with a ing-game map



edit: added a video too because a screenshot doesnt really say this or that about an ingame map

https://youtu.be/50wZdlj-0f0

 

[fjamesfernandez]

So far so good. Everything is coming together truly inspirational .

 

[red moon]

This is fantastic, I imagine implementing the map feature took considerable time. Well done!

 

[Mugi]

the map took a day to make, most of the time spent on trying to design the screen itself, and creating a piece of code to load an entirely different screen during gameplay, without messing up the gameplay itself.

The menu screen is an interesting piece of code that opens up the "menu" which' graphics are actually stored where the player normally is in VRAM.
a backup of the current gameplay screen and all variables related to it are simply copied into an unused portion of the VRAM, and restored when the menu closes.
Its one of those weird crazy ideas of FIX94, and it works beautifully.