Moving and pushing blocks

Force2

New member
Hi there,

I’m writing a puzzle game and part of it works in a similar way to Boxxle/Boxy Boy in that the player pushes boxes one tile at a time. I was thinking that I’d do this with animated tiles.

My first question - is moving smoothly from tile to tile possible? And secondly, with this module is it possible to dynamically animate the tiles in this way? I know how I could do it in C (by checking surrounding tiles) but nothing stands out in NESmaker. For this sort of stuff would I need to delve into ASM?

Any help appreciated!
 

MistSonata

Moderator
You're not going to be able to make the boxes move around smoothly as background tiles. In order to move graphics around smoothly (without any scrolling tricks or the like), the simplest way is going to be to use sprites instead, which can be easily animated in NESmaker, however you can't have too many of them on screen at one time, and if too many are on a horizontal line, you will need to implement flickering or else sprites will just disappear.

Now, there are relatively common tricks to get around this that are way more complicated tasks that require a lot of ASM that isn't there yet, such as having the blocks as background tiles until interacted with, then using a sprite to mask the change in the nametable data. For instance, the reason SMB can have so many blocks on screen is that they're background tiles that turn into sprites when hit by Mario, momentarily making a sprite appear to do the bounce animation while it changes the graphic (or doesn't in some cases). This is also how the obnoxiously loud death beams from Quickman's stage in Megaman create the effect of a long beam moving across the screen, two sprites with the same beam graphic scroll across, masking the transition of background tiles from regular background to the beam graphic, otherwise it would look like the beam was just popping into existence in 16x16 pixel chunks.

So, short answer is that having a block puzzle game like Boxxle would definitely be do-able, and so long as you don't have too many boxes on screen you really only have to worry about programming the movement script to allow your player to interact with the boxes.
 

Force2

New member
I thought that might be the case. I might be able to get away with sprites. I'll just have to be careful with how many I line up.
As for the movement I'll brush up on ASM so I can write a script. I think I know how to handle that.
Thanks for your response!
 
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