Dimension Shift

Im not going to post much about the stage layouts anymore at this point in development to try and avoid some excessive spoilers regarding whatever it is we're doing, but since i havent really documented literally anything from
the game and it's evolution (literally no concept art or early sprite/tile work exists, i just overwrote everything heh.), i thought this would be a neat thing to see.

this is the first few rooms from "Stage D" showing how the room evolved from a template into an actual part of the stage.
some poeple asked me way back about my processes of doing desing and pixel art work and i though it's a cool thing to see nonetheless.


the template:


starting to add some detail and shape:


polishing up stupid design choices and putting little backdrops in place:

hello overkill.

we added a mode to switch cutscne dialog font between Normal text and CAPS TEXT.
mostly because of the fact that the lowercase font is so small that it might have readability issues on smaller CRT's and/or when using RF on the console...
also, because why not heh.

Oh, this feature is really nice!

dale_coop said:

Oh, this feature is really nice!

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thanks.
I actually remembered one of the photos you posted somewhere (facebook maybe) showing a little handheld for playing nes games, and I can imagine for such a small screen this could be usefull too, especially
in our case since the lowercase font is really small.

You're right, I play nes games on the go (now my GPi Case, powered by a RaspberryPi) and texts are sometimes difficult to read. So thank you for that.

now this is pretty neat.
Digit2600 is spitting out awesome tracks for DS's soundtrack like no tomorrow and we're not huge fans of recycling music, but yeah... 16KB bleh... so little space, so many tracks. x_x

here's a bankswitching capable GGsound playing music from 2 different banks.

https://youtu.be/jZ_YCZF9uqI

well this took a while x_x
I wanted to do something a little overkill for the game over screen so i came up with this, but now looking back at it, i might just use it somewhere else, or atleast reuse it for something heh.

This animated screen is very cool!

This whole game is ridiculously impressive.

Yes, this looks fantastic, I know you don't want to give too much away, but I love the layouts and overall color palettes and execution of the structures in pixel form.

thanks guys.
we're still trying really hard here, polishing lots of things, and currently working on getting the music and sound effects to a better state.
we've been digging through the audio driver for couple days now and it's a whole beast of it's own really. Added bonus though, now that we actually managed to make it use 2 banks, we have 32KB of audio data space instead of 16KB,
which will greatly help with that good old-fashioned variety.

the gameover screen will be implemented soon and with that the lives system, checkpoints and whatnots related things will be also added.

as far as world building goes, I'm currently building up Stage D (renamed to Factory) and after that i still have no idea hehe.... we'll see.

Wow congrats, great work.
I know some members that would love to know how you did that

dale_coop said:

Wow congrats, great work.
I know some members that would love to know how you did that

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I'll let people know when i manage to get that working in nesmaker

Cool, thank you Mugi <3

it's a little bit of a trap becuase including 2 banks of music means that you have to dupe the engine assembly, and the sound effect data (depends on usage but generally you need sfx everywhere.)
so you'll get the obvious "label already defined" errors everywhere, for labels that you obviously can't just change.

this gets tricky at the part where you have to pre-compile the second music bank and instead of compiling 2 music banks to the game, you compile one as normal, and you include the second as a precompiled binary.
after that you have to set a designator for the engine to know when to bankswitch. In DS, we have 7 songs in the main music bank, so it is hardcoded to bankswitch when track 8 is requested.
at backswitch, the driver has to be then reinitialized to refresh the bgm and SFX offsets.

lastly, you will have to start managing audio data defines by hand because you will not have a file to import into nesmaker anymore that would allow you to list music and sound effects or define their label constants.

it's again one of those things that isn't particularly complicated to set up, but will absolutely not work in nesmaker's UI. Opening the music menu from the hierarchy is either empty or crashes if you try to force it to list contents of 2 banks.

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10am and i need sleep but here's a quick weekend update before i slumber

we're about finished with this whole "its not real parallax" joke now and the elevator is more or less done, give or take minor polish/changes.
full 3 layer parallax movement, acceleration / deceleration for movement, full gameplay during use, sounds added blah blah. it's about as good as it gets with this mapper and the limited functionality regarding screensplits.

sans that, we are finally digging into objects a little, coins are now implemented and for once they actually work. That's the first time DS has had objects that are not player working since the byte-off demo
also a random sneak peek on the potential of the factory tileset, it's quite a flexible beast and im having a blast designing the stage (seen version is highly wip.)

more stuff coming in the future i guess... not really sure what to write on these updates anymore heh.

https://youtu.be/h-St3tYPYXQ

This is looking very good. Nice coins

Oh my god this game looks and sounds so phenomenal ! i remember playing the byte off version the new updated version is bound to be an NES hit!!

abstractlion said:

Oh my god this game looks and sounds so phenomenal ! i remember playing the byte off version the new updated version is bound to be an NES hit!!

Click to expand...

thanks. We're working on it, although it's been slow lately due to personal reasons.
we're currently working on making the weaponsystem work a bit more robust by having reloadable graphics for each weapon, along with making the menu system to actually work.
aside that we also started poking at recreating a working object system that is a little less bloated than the nesmaker one (for one thing, our own object system reduced the size of the 5 objects used in the stage selection from 4 KB down to 400 bytes.)

Oh nice, small update, thanks Mugi...
Btw, Happy New Yew to you <3 I wish you all the success you deserve for Dimension Shift!

It's coming along really nicely, the sound and fx compliment the visuals really well and are nicely balanced. I like how the music feels beneath the sound fx.