Project DART

CutterCross

Active member
Project DART is now finished and ready for release!

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I made this game to try and see what new mechanics and developments I could pull off in NESmaker 4.1.5. Needless to say, I've implemented things I never would have thought possible a few months ago. It's been a wild ride, and I've learned a lot about NESmaker's codebase and NES hardware in general.

First of all, I have to give a special thanks to Dale Coop, Jorotroid, Kasumi, and FrankenGraphics for their scripts on the forum and helping me through some of the more advanced mechanics I've implemented.



FEATURES:

This game makes use of the following features (Advanced / uncommon for NESmaker):

- Horizontal mirroring
- FAST vertical and horizontal "scrolling" (PPU window movement and 2nd nametable loading)
- Infinite screen-wrapping
- Parallax scrolling (using palette cycling)
- Palette fades
- Randomly generated object spawns
- Simultaneous 2 player co-op
- Player jumping with depth
- Custom special screens / menus / options
- High score tracker
- Character selection
- Moving status bars (using sprite-0 detection)
- Color palette options
- Looping DPCM sample playback (used for melodic sustained DPCM bass)
- Raw 7bit PCM sample playback (used for voice samples)



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GAMEPLAY:

Project DART is a simple arcade-style game where you attempt to rack up a high score by avoiding as many incoming walls as possible. Select your character and hit the road! You can perform wheelies on your motorcycle to further increase your score, but you cannot move vertically when holding one. A 2nd player can join in to compete for the highest score, and both your high scores are shown after a game over.

There are also some fun extras in the options menu, such as a sound test, palette change options, and a multi-directional scrolling test.

There's not much to this game, but it was a fun exercise to see what I could pull off in NESmaker 4.1.5. I hope you all enjoy playing it!



DOWNLOADS:

Version 1.0:
https://cuttercross.itch.io/project-dart
 
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Woogz

Member
Wow. The amount of features you managed to cram into such a small amount of space is very impressive. The walls making different sounds to indicate which type it is was a really nice touch.
 

CutterCross

Active member
Woogz said:
Wow. The amount of features you managed to cram into such a small amount of space is very impressive. The walls making different sounds to indicate which type it is was a really nice touch.

I got that idea from a couple beta testers talking about doing blindfolded runs, so I added the wall SFX option in the options menu for that, hahaha.
 

TurtleRescueNES

Active member
This is some crazy good professional-grade work! Great followup to Tower of Turmoil.
You've got an awesome track record! :)
 

CutterCross

Active member
jsherman said:
This is some crazy good professional-grade work! Great followup to Tower of Turmoil.
You've got an awesome track record! :)

Well there was that one thing I did with the clock and first person maze movement, but we don't talk about that one, haha.
 

Riyan

New member
Very nice game! Here's how it looks like on the NES, I had to change the color palette because the I felt like the red colors were hard to see especially when playing on a CRT. Or it could just be me, I don't know.
Good job nonetheless!
[media]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aT4WJpJjV8I[/media]
 

mouse spirit

Well-known member
Really great. The voice scared me so much the first time i heard it! Very cool stuff cutter.Solid project.Great music.The game was great.
Are the walls forever randomized? Or is there a pattern? I got to 10,000 points and decided that was it but i really appreciate the endlessness also.Very cool.
 

CutterCross

Active member
mouse spirit said:
Really great. The voice scared me so much the first time i heard it! Very cool stuff cutter.Solid project.Great music.The game was great.
Are the walls forever randomized? Or is there a pattern? I got to 10,000 points and decided that was it but i really appreciate the endlessness also.Very cool.

The walls are indeed randomized. There's an routine that randomly selects what kind of wall to spawn. Upper wall, Lower wall, Short long wall, or nothing. There's a bunch of extra logic in that routine so the spawns don't end up being impossible to maneuver around, but that's the main gist of it. And yes, the game is endless (until both players die).

And thanks, this was fun to work on and mess with new stuff!
 

mouse spirit

Well-known member
Is there a faster version? I love a challenge. Or is this like the limit because of stuff. Also could the speed constantly ramp until the fastest speed bearable!?
Lastly, what does the other button do? Is it for fun or maybe a 2 player mechanic? The button that's not jump.
 

CutterCross

Active member
mouse spirit said:
Is there a faster version? I love a challenge. Or is this like the limit because of stuff. Also could the speed constantly ramp until the fastest speed bearable!?
Lastly, what does the other button do? Is it for fun or maybe a 2 player mechanic? The button that's not jump.

The stage scrolling could be faster, there's no real limit on how fast it can scroll since it only updates the position of the PPU window. (So in reality it's not ACTUALLY scrolling in the traditional sense. No nametable / attribute table / collision updates.) The only real limit is when it's scrolling so fast it looks like it slows down and scrolls backwards. But the way I handled the wall movement was the real limiting factor, since they're completely independent from the background. Their max speed is already set to 255. I COULD have probably made a system where their position only becomes dependent from the background when they become solid, but I felt that the current speed was fine.

I thought about having a system where the speed slowly ramps up but that would have been tricky to implement given how full my static bank is. If I had space like that to spare I would have also tried to implement screen fade-ins, haha.

B button is for wheelies, holding a wheelie builds up additional score.
 

mouse spirit

Well-known member
Understood.Wheelies should definitely give me more points, only makes sense. I understand the speed now too.Thanks for explaining it all. And yeah when stuff goes too fast it can look like it's going the other way,gotchya. It is exciting when 3 walls come out right after eachother too_Only happens sometimes.
 

Jonny

Well-known member
Just got around to trying this out. Wow!

I enjoyed mostly the music and how well the different compositions fit together. Haven't played many games where I find myself watching only the enemys (or walls) and not looking at the player character at all. Totally brilliant. Also, I was expecting the obsticles to some faster and faster until it was impossible. I'm glad that doesn't happen, its more of an endurance thing, lose consentration and you're done!
 

Basty

Active member
Funny how I had missed this one.
Anyways, it's pretty well done. I just wish backgrounds would have some variety time to time and having goals like stage changing every 10,000 points or so couldn't hurt either.
Now it's sorta distracting how everything is in monochrome colors but other than that. As a proof of concept, it's pretty solid game.

Graphics in general are great and music is really epic.

And this is how far I got in my third run.
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