MOMOC - mine/build/sabotage/survive

[Goaterby]

======RECIPIENT OF THE BYTEOFF 2019 WOMBAT AWARD======

GAMEPLAY
In MOMOC, you play a combat engineer in a fantasy Meiji era Japan. Gather materials, build structures, avoid incoming enemy fire, tunnel, and lay fuse with the goal of detonating powder kegs planted beneath fortifications.

[apologies in advance, I managed to leave my mouse cursor in nearly every gif. Whups. Was in a hurry, unfortunately and didn't notice until after uploading]

Simple mining / material gathering.

Basic building. There are four main types of blocks available to build. I originally had many more, but cutting them down made the gameplay work much better, and focused the level design.

Fuse costs nothing, and is used to connect your flint and steel to powder kegs. Once you get back to your flint/steel, you can light the fuse by hitting downward with your pick!
(note that the slowdown you see was actually my computer, not the game. Fuses can be used on screen with 4 enemies and not usually cause slowdown)

You are going to have to use everything at your disposal to get through all the screens.

There are snipers across many of the battlefields. Their rifles are fast and their aim is true. Be wary.

Showcasing one of the unique enemy types. Cannon shells can destroy blocks, including anything you build!


Built over the past 5 weeks, the game incorporates several elements of gameplay I hadn't yet seen in an NES game, but very much wanted to see. Primary inspiration stems from THD's King Arthur's Gold for the PC, and Argonaut's King Arthur's World for the SNES.

I had to get rid of textbox scripts and a couple of other things to fit all the enemy behaviors / effects along with all the subroutines needed for mining / building etc. I could take out some more engine pieces to fit more, but all of the core gameplay is there.

MUSIC / SFX
There is no music, but there are many sounds, many of which are important for survival, like hearing a gunshot before you see it. Others are more for fun, but I tried to be innovative with them. For instance: your footsteps sound different depending on what sort of material you are walking on.


CONTROLS

NORMAL MODE (buildmode off)
============================================
DPAD -- moves in / faces the given direction. If you press left or right on a ladder while idle, you will fall off in that direction.
B -- swing your pick. Holding it swings it continuously. You can mine while holding onto ladders.
A -- jump. If you are on a ladder you jump upwards, releasing your grip.
SELECT -- turns buildmode on / off
START -- (does nothing as of build 31219, but in the future it will pause the game. In the Byteoff demo, it resets the screen)

BUILD MODE
============================================
DPAD -- faces the given direction. A briefly flashing reticule shows you where the block will be placed. It shows an X if it cannot be.
B -- swap the type of block you have in your hand
A -- places the given block. You can also build while on ladders.
--------------------------------------------------------------



VERSION LOG
===========================================
byte-off demo-- originally playable through the ByteOff2019 contest site, it has color problems and a couple of serious bugs. Avoid if possible.

build 31219--
+colors fixed so it is now suitable for CRT viewing
+fixed the X register bug (mining while certain projectiles created smoke led to weird object duplication and general game breaking things)
+fixed the blocked exit bug (sometimes screens didn't trigger right after keg detonation)

build 7619-- DOWNLOADABLE BELOW
+added death animation
+added title / instruction screen (yay for clarity on how to trigger kegs!)
+fixed some random erroneous palette swapped metatiles
+fixed spike-based death animation/sound
+changed font in the end screen to make room for campfire

 

[Mugi]

impressive. VERY impressive.
I'll definitely give this one a go. Totally out of the box mechanics definitely indicate the amount of work put into this.

 

[Lother]

Wow. That's original and it looks amazing!

As for the uploading problems, verify on your profile if you don't have too much downloadable attachment tied to you. The problem might come from that.

 

[dale_coop]

Wow! It's mind blowing... this screens and the mechanics show you did here a LOT of work! Congrats and thanks for sharing.
Can't wait to play (I bring it up to the top of my playlist... really need to try asap).

 

[Goaterby]

impressive. VERY impressive.
I'll definitely give this one a go. Totally out of the box mechanics definitely indicate the amount of work put into this.

Thanks Mugi! Definitely stretched the tool in odd ways. I had to keep a list of all the rules I had to follow to not have it do strange things (for instance, only 1s and even numbered screens work properly in the overworld grid). It is in 4.1.0 at present, and doesn't work right in any of the other versions, interestingly enough, even when built from scratch / imported properly. this has a bit to do with changes they have made to tile macros, among other things.

Wow. That's original and it looks amazing!
As for the uploading problems, verify on your profile if you don't have too much downloadable attachment tied to you. The problem might come from that.

Thanks Lother! Glad you think so! It means a lot, especially with how little time I had to cobble it together.

I have only uploaded several small images in the past, so it is a mystery to me. I will update if I figure something out.

--UPDATE-- AH. I had a lot of duplicate images in my attachments that were filling things up. Fixed and uploaded to the original post. Thanks for the tip!

Wow! It's mind blowing... this screens and the mechanics show you did here a LOT of work! Congrats and thanks for sharing.
Can't wait to play (I bring it up to the top of my playlist... really need to try asap).

Thanks Dale! I will have it up soon. As a side note, your enthusiasm for helping the tool chug along and all the assistance you have given to everyone here is truly wonderful.

 

[Redherring32]

This is absolutely amazing!!!
It's a gameplay mechanic I had been puzzling about, glad to see you pulled it off.
I definitely will play this very very soon, congrats!

 

[functionalform]

I've been having a blast playing this now that i know what the controls are.

this is a seriously creative and fun game.

 

[Bucket Mouse]

If this had actually come out back in the day, it would've been a hit. There would've been a Captain N episode based around an inaccurate interpretation of it!

Do you really have to give up all text to have it though?

 

[Goaterby]

This is absolutely amazing!!!
It's a gameplay mechanic I had been puzzling about, glad to see you pulled it off.
I definitely will play this very very soon, congrats!

Thanks Redherring! I knew how to do tile swapping for a while, and even have a couple of gifs up here already demonstrating an entirely tile-based demo (search for the word 'Strategy' in this forum and you will find an old thread in the archive, though bear in mind much of the code there is filled with erroneous things). These sort of mechanics are fairly self explanatory in the macros / scripts available, though it definitely took a lot of code to make it work in a user-friendly manner. In addition to that, the vast majority of my time was spent figuring out the tool's quirks...

I've been having a blast playing this now that i know what the controls are.
this is a seriously creative and fun game.

Thank you functionalform! It is wonderful to hear! I originally had the controls displayed on the bare-bones title screen, but I took it off because I thought manuals would be available with the game on download, or that they would be bundled for testing somehow. Definitely my bad-- I should've left the controls on the main screen. I tried to design the levels in such a way that you are forced to learn each of the mechanics in turn, if only by trial and error, so hopefully that helps to some degree. This being said, I am pretty worried that the control scheme for the arcade site being the horizontally inverted: arrow keys / ZX / SHIFT instead of the slightly more friendly WASD / KL / G.

If this had actually come out back in the day, it would've been a hit. There would've been a Captain N episode based around an inaccurate interpretation of it!
Do you really have to give up all text to have it though?

Hah! Thank you Bucket Mouse! Yea it is interesting to think about these mechanics in another time. Many NES games were capable of having a screen full of destructable tiles (see Zelda 2, Blaster Master, Mario Bros 3, Castlevania 3, Vice Project Doom, etc.), but it seems that mechanics were just never dreamed up to match that sort of level design in a manner that is conducive to making an entire game that is not in the arcade style (see Soloman's Key, very similar mechanic, but different era / philosophy of design). We would have to wait for that magic progression of Dwarf Fortress (2006) / Infiniminer (2009) / King Arthur's Gold (early 2011) / Minecraft (late 2011) before the exploratory sandbox mechanics for such a thing became obvious, I suppose.

In regards to text, I could probably optimize things to fit some of it back in now, but it definitely had to go for the sake of the demo. The main part I took out was the box drawing routine, which is a huge script that I just wasn't using. The original plan was to have a branching path / multiwarp series of maps (Spring path, Summer path, Autumn path, Winter Path, etc.) so you could go on several different adventures, that which I thought (at the time) I needed the text box routines for (see Dale_Coops single screen multiwarp post), but in the time I had, it just wasn't going to happen. The game has a fatal lack of polish and explanation as it was (and still is), so it was cut to speed up last-minute mechanics / behavior development.

The main component that put it over the edge was Assassin behavior, I think. They actively find the player, and have routines to jump over walls and even over some gaps, and the amount of tile checks / logic that had to go into such a thing at the last minute was too much to handle.

 

[BentPawGames]

This is cool!

 

[AllDarnDavey]

Such a simple tile swap mechanic, and yet so brilliant and well executed. I love the emergent gameplay as there is no "one way" to get past any challenge. I kinda wish that I could stand on top of the ladders like you can usually, but that might make ladders to over-powered.

The gameplay loop has a very nice human centered design (Dan Norman would be proud). Wood for building wood ladders and wooden blocks, stone for stone blocks, just like you'd expect, and pretty much everything made of wood or rock can be harvested. The icons for each are also super obvious. The only exception might be the fuse, it's a little less inherently obvious, and the not needing resources for them feels good gameplay-wise, but kinda messes with established expectations. Having wooden object be flammable would be more elegant, but maybe a little too hard to pull off currently in NESmaker.

Overall though, amazing. Not only have you made a nice NES game, you've made one that feels really fresh and unique.

 

[justadude]

I LOVE IT!!!

 

[Goaterby]

This is cool!

Thank you BentPawGames! Glad you like it.

Such a simple tile swap mechanic, and yet so brilliant and well executed. I love the emergent gameplay as there is no "one way" to get past any challenge. I kinda wish that I could stand on top of the ladders like you can usually, but that might make ladders to over-powered.

The gameplay loop has a very nice human centered design (Dan Norman would be proud). Wood for building wood ladders and wooden blocks, stone for stone blocks, just like you'd expect, and pretty much everything made of wood or rock can be harvested. The icons for each are also super obvious. The only exception might be the fuse, it's a little less inherently obvious, and the not needing resources for them feels good gameplay-wise, but kinda messes with established expectations. Having wooden object be flammable would be more elegant, but maybe a little too hard to pull off currently in NESmaker.

Overall though, amazing. Not only have you made a nice NES game, you've made one that feels really fresh and unique.

Thank you so much AllDarnDavey! High praise indeed. I love and greatly appreciate all the feedback-- I will add to it and explain some of that:

The ladder mechanics in place are mostly there to make them precarious. While it is not the best idea to make something scary to use purely from a mechanical standpoint (as it can obviously lead to frustration if someone messes up on them), I hoped to use them to modulate tension a tiny bit, and to separate them from other solids: when you are reaching a ladder that is hanging off of an edge, you have to deliberately 'grasp' it by pressing up or down as you take a step off. If you are running across a floor that has a ladder in it, you have to jump it to avoid it. This might become more difficult to juggle if you are under other stresses (i.e. cannon / rifleman firing at your back, or an assassin sprinting towards you), so in small way, it could be slightly more exciting or suspenseful to keep in mind that a ladder is not the equivalent of a floor, and must be handled carefully. It might not be the best tweak (especially given how snappy the physics are set up), but I think, based upon how I see people playing the game at present, that it might have been the right decision. If I end up making more levels / finish a larger game with this, level design and puzzles may dictate a different approach.

In regards to human-centric design, I definitely focused on making it as self-explanatory as I could, given the graphical/mechanical constraints, but it didn't really come together until the fuse mechanic focused the scope of the game. I do sorta regret having to take out background block tile collisions, as in early builds everything except dirt background was harvestable, and you had to build background tiles to support solid floor tiles, or have them cantilevered from the side. Whether muddling or intuitive, it certainly changed things a lot. The only thing stopping this from being expanded was a lack of a good 'tile drop' loop that actually made tiles fall if they were not supported. I understood what to do and how, but I didn't have the time to do it, especially after adding the fuse mechanic, which ate another tile collision type, and a lot of time and code space. The fuse mechanic shifted the focus of the game and condensed it. No longer was it about long-form building of stable structures to get over things / avoid enemies, now it was a series of puzzle rooms that went much quicker. It was definitely easier to design for once everything was in its own little room to explore, with only a couple of clear goals (i.e. arrow pointing to an exit, or a keg).

Yeah the fuse icon was difficult. Representing what a fuse is in an 8x8px tile is a challenge for me. I would have easily been able to do it in a 16x16px space, but I had so many problems getting the HUD to work and update normally at all (hence the odd: 'killed by enemy, return with nothin in inventory, killed by falling, get a stone and a wood' quirk), so I had to stick with the simple setup in the current build. Maybe with time and help I can get the HUD working with larger icons in the future.

Fuse originally cost 1 wood to build, but this really limited what I could do on screen, and was forcing me to put lots of wood blocks / trees where I didn't want to. This being said, it also limited where / how much fuse the player could build, which is great from a level design perspective, bad from the player freedom perspective; It meshed perfectly with the rest of the game mechanics (i.e. need stone for stone, wood for wood, got to go get it etc.), but the tedious reality of carrying wood around to make what is sometimes a really long fuse in addition to the stuff you had already built just led me to make it free.

Wooden objects would actually be really easy to make flammable in the current build! Got plenty of space for fire graphics too. The fuse behavior I have is modular enough that I could just say 'find wooden tiles', and a fire object would burn them up eventually if they were connected, or set fuses off if they touched them. It is a really interesting suggestion to consider.

I LOVE IT!!!

I am very glad, justadude! It means a lot to hear that.

 

[justadude]

I WILL PAY MONEY FOR THE BOX AND CART!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

 

[Goaterby]

I WILL PAY MONEY FOR THE BOX AND CART!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I will make sure to post here once it is done and flashed!

Working on a couple of other long-term games on other platforms at the moment, so it will likely be a couple months before serious progress is made making a full-length version of Momoc. I will leave a list of potential additions and changes here in the meantime, so feel free to add suggestions and criticisms:

-optimizations across the board
-distinct worlds / biomes (forest, desert, mountain, underworld/cave or something etc. Got a lot of graphic space left at present)
-maybe one or two new enemy types (optimization dependent, really tight fit at the mo, but I think it's doable)
-branching path system, or several distinct paths from a central hub (custom multiwarps stored in NPC text space could work without textbox drawing to my knowledge)
-a proper title screen-- ADDED 7/6/19
-better / more consistent death animation-- ADDED 7/6/19
-bounding on block destruction so that cannons can't blow up the HUD anymore, and so that you can't mine it, as silly and endearing as I find this to be.
-fix/exception for the ladder bug whereby you are always snapped to a ladder when mining, even on the ground.

 

[Lother]

The snipers AI is really impressive, how did you manage to make them shoot only when they can hit you ?

 

[Goaterby]

The snipers AI is really impressive, how did you manage to make them shoot only when they can hit you ?

Thanks Lother!


It essentially works like this:

1. The sniper, every once in a while, checks its Y against the player Y.

2. If the player's Y is equal to (snapped to the nearest metatile), or less than their own (i.e. the player is level with or above them on screen), they should take aim and fire, regardless of line of sight.

3. If the player's Y is greater than theirs (i.e. the player is below them on screen), it subtracts the player's x position from their own, and takes the absolute value of the result.

4. This result is compared to a value in horizontal distance that, in combination with the Y check above, should prevent firing downward at most angles that are too steep / guaranteed misses.


The cannon unit also does this, though it uses a greater distance buffer for its downward angle, so as to not destroy its own platform!

 

[Chasersgaming]

Just played your game from the Byte off, i'm still actually playing it.

I am absolutely blown away by your game, a massive congratulations on your work here, it is something quite special, i would expect this to do well in the compo. Great stuff.

 

[Goaterby]

Just played your game from the Byte off, i'm still actually playing it.

I am absolutely blown away by your game, a massive congratulations on your work here, it is something quite special, i would expect this to do well in the compo. Great stuff.

Thanks for the kind words Chasersgaming! And good luck beating it! The last level is a doozy.

Hopefully the presence of a manual helped it. Without it, and with my rushed / sparse title screen and lack of direct tutorials, I am really glad some folks have still managed to play it and figure it out. This whole experience thus far has been an eye-opening series of mistakes on my part. Best way to learn!

 

[Chasersgaming]

I don't have a manual, i just figured it out myself, through chopping back and forth here on the forums. I have to say, this forum absolutely canes my bandwidth and makes my internet so slow, they should think about fixing that, wouldn't be a bad idea to scale down the images posted, sorry, ranting on your thread.
downloading from the website doesn't give you those sort of files, only the ROM, but i could just download everyones files from their threads but that would honestly take all day and i don't have time for that, there is a lot of games to play.

your game is an 'eye opener' and is a credit to you and the NESmaker brand.