Lost Souls Intial Test

red moon

Member
Hello everyone, I wanted to share the Lost Souls demo I created for my 1st NesMaker test
I want to thank those of you that gave me some advice last week and that helped me greatly Raft, Dale and Mugi!
I do have some issues with music cutting out that i'm looking into ...

I hope you all enjoy, I had a blast working on it with my daughter for the last two weeks. If you spot anything buggy, please let me know!

INSTRUCTIONS:
"GATHER THE REMAINS OF THE DEAD TO GIVE THESE RESTLESS SPIRITS THE ETERNAL SLEEP THEY SO DESPERATELY SEEK."

You play as a Priest who gathers the bones of the dead. Each screen contains a varying number of skulls, rib cages and old coins. When all collectibles are found the player advances to the next screen. Spirits can harm the player if the player and spirits come into contact with one another. Only a holy cross can burn the spirits, temporarily driving them back. in order to gather all skeletal remains, the player must explore dungeons, cemeteries and dark catacombs before they can return to The Chapel of Lost Souls.


https://drive.google.com/open?id=15jv0VLLxG1EKe3Si8G7qRWZ10B-K8NJl
 

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red moon

Member
Do let me know if it works! There are 12 levels and a final 13th level where you head to the object to forces the end screen
 

Dirk

Member
I just finished. I loved the burning corpses, really nice touch!
I had occasional slow downs and as you mentioned walked through a wall on the right side, other than that it worked well.
 

red moon

Member
Hey Dirk, thanks for taking the time to play thought and thank you, I had fun making those guys burn! You do experience some slowdown, especially when you run into 3 at one time and they catch fire!
And I did fix the collision issue simply by drawing over the tile again with the same game object. Its seems to be fine now!
I updated the ROM above to include the fix.
 

Woogz

Member
Just finished the demo a few minutes ago. Like I said in your Introduce Yourself thread, the games aesthetics look fantastic. Great use of color, good pixel art, and I love the theme of the game.

The demo shows a lot of promise :) Kinda like a mix of the game play of a maze game like Pac-Man, and the graphics of a Ghosts N Goblins and Castlevania 3 hybrid. Besides the occasional slowdown that Dirk had mentioned, the only minor nitpick I have is that the games simplicity could potentially get repetitive in a longer leveled full game. Do you have any plans to expand on the current Pac-Man type maze formula in future levels? Whether it be challenge wise, different enemies/enemy AI, or things like that?
 

red moon

Member
thank you Woogz! Its great that you made it all the way through. I had never done pixel art before this NES test and I really enjoyed the limitation and restrictions of the NES. I had to approach art in a different way then I am used to for sure.

For Lost Souls in the short term, I will be adjusting the AI to make things more difficult; its really easy at the moment to make it through to the 13th level without much issue. After that I'm going to add animated sprites for the enemies for moving up, left and right (the down sprite is what the ghoul enemy uses now) Finally, I want to figure out how to not get stuck in the "standing_down" sprite for the player when the power-up is activated.

For the future of Lost Souls, I want more exploration and adventure, so I think I will move it into the realm of top down screen to screen action-adventure with combat, special weapons and pickups.

When I started Lost Souls, I wanted to see what I could create in 2 weeks time and limit the scope to a hand full of levels to make sure I understand some of basic tools. I wanted to make sure i had a basic understanding to build a more substantial game in the future!
 

Woogz

Member
Pretty damn good for 2 weeks worth of work! What you've got planned for it sounds exciting. Can't wait to see what comes of this project :)
 

dale_coop

Moderator
Staff member
Lost-Souls-nesmaker-2019-08-21-00-45-06.png


Oh, yeah! IT was fun. Completely reminds me Pac-man... I enjoyed it. Can't wait to see the monster facing correctly and animated. It was a great challenge.
Definitely a game I'd put in my Arcade cabinet!
 

red moon

Member
thanks Woogz! I did most of the art on my phone during my lunches using 8 bit painter and worked on getting all the pieces in at night. I will be switching over to photoshop moving forward since it so much faster than tapping pixels on the phone with your finger!
 

red moon

Member
Hey Dale, thanks for playing through to the end! I did drop the ball on that end screen for sure! I will make something better once i fix this enemy animation and the invulnerability issue with only moving one direction. My sheet for the enemies is ready to go. I may squeeze something bigger in the empty space.
 

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Dirk

Member
I don't know if you aware, but you can save a lot of space by getting rid of redundancies and contemplating if you'd like to combine two sprites that only differ in one or two pixels into one sprite.
I changed your sprite sheet to show what I mean. I also deleted the fifth and sixth sprite in the second row, because they look similar to the first one in the second row.


enemysheet_small.png


You might not need this for your game, since you have enough space and already know it, but I thought I'd mention it.
 

red moon

Member
wow, I should have thought about that since many of the lower torso areas are the same. That's great advice Dirk, thank you!
 

red moon

Member
Hey, I wanted to let everyone know that I updated the spirits with 4 way animation and set the power up animation to work with the 4 way animated walk as well. It was really straightforward, I thought it would have taken longer!
Its way better.
 

Raftronaut

Member
I'm really looking forward to checking this out over the weekend. I am very impressed by the visuals. Your progress looks exciting :)
 

red moon

Member
thank you, Bentpaw
i really appreciate it! Check out Lost Souls sometime and let me know what you think, i’m still tweaking things at this point!
 
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