Ramen Adventure (WIP)

pit.baldriz

New member
UPDATE (March 2020):

The final DEMO version for my NES game Ramen Adventure is almost ready! I´ll be uploading it soon for everybody to give it a try. I´m very happy, this is a dream come true. But also I´m very thankful for all the help I´ve received from the NESmaker community:

I want to thank @Raftronaut for creating such an amazing soundtrack for my game. And also @dale_coop for all the help with the code. You guys rock!

[media]https://youtu.be/lPQCS6lHQl8[/media]

UPDATE (February 2020):

After a big pause, I could resume the development of my NES game Ramen Adventure! I´m so happy!! I´m working on adding music and sound effects. This is so hard! If you are a musician and want to help me, I´m more than happy to hire some talented one. Here is an update of the work in progress:

[media]https://youtu.be/y0fdNA3xL84[/media]

The music is created by shiru8bit and is a placeholder. You can find it here:
Code:
https://opengameart.org/content/8-bit-chiptune-spring-thing


UPDATE (June 2019):

I´ve changed the name of the game to just "Ramen Adventure" as is much easy to remember. Lots of updates in this version thanks to all the help of this community! I´m still missing the sound but is the next milestone.

Hope you like it! Love to hear your feedback.

[media]https://youtu.be/97PlTdyWV9Y[/media]


UPDATE (April 2019):

[media]https://youtu.be/DFYO85HSdo0[/media]


Hello guys!

I´ve been working on my first NES game, a platformer that has a cute lucky cat as the hero. I´m thinking of calling the game "Manekineko´s Ramen Adventure", as the little cat should try to find who stole his favorite ramen.

I just started following the scroller platform tutorial. Still has a lot to improve, but I´m quite proud of the results (don´t know how to code!). Here you can take a look:

manekineko01.png
manekineko02.png

manekineko03.png
manekineko04.png


Maybe someone can help me with some doubts I have:

  • I want to animate the items the hero collects (yellow coins). But I can´t figure it how.
  • Used the default clouds path just to try it. It worked OK on the first screens, but then it broke and only shows a simple 1 tile cloud. On the 2nd image is quite clear, at the left the path is working and in the right is broken. Any ideas?

Thanks a lot for your help!
 

Bucket Mouse

Active member
The problem is that the coins are tiles, and there's no way to animate tiles yet. It may come in a future update, but that could take a while.

There's a glitch in the current build with scrolling not displaying paths properly. Someone posted a solution elsewhere in the forums, search for it.
 

pit.baldriz

New member
Bucket Mouse said:
The problem is that the coins are tiles, and there's no way to animate tiles yet. It may come in a future update, but that could take a while.

There's a glitch in the current build with scrolling not displaying paths properly. Someone posted a solution elsewhere in the forums, search for it.

Thanks for your help. I´ll search for the solution for the glitch paths. As for the animated tiles, I can see on some demos that people figure it out a way to do it. Maybe they are animating something else in order to emulate that behavior?
 

Mugi

Member
animated tiles can be done but it requires quite a lot of code and that's not yet implemented in nesmaker, i believe my game is currently the only one doing actual tile animations via chr ram bankswitching.
another way is to simply use animated sprite objects in place of tiles to obtain animations, but this has several things that need to be taken into consideration.

1) slowdowns.
-- you can only have so many objects on screen before the game starts slowing down significantly. I believe the vanilla engine can handle around 5 objects or so before that happens.

2) sprite limit.
-- you have a maximum of 64 sprite tiles on screen at once, and only 8 at once on the save horizontal row before flickering starts to happen.

taking those into consideration while looking at your screenshots, you can pretty much rule out using objects for your coins, as there are simply too many of them.
 

pit.baldriz

New member
Mugi said:
animated tiles can be done but it requires quite a lot of code and that's not yet implemented in nesmaker, i believe my game is currently the only one doing actual tile animations via chr ram bankswitching.
another way is to simply use animated sprite objects in place of tiles to obtain animations, but this has several things that need to be taken into consideration.

1) slowdowns.
-- you can only have so many objects on screen before the game starts slowing down significantly. I believe the vanilla engine can handle around 5 objects or so before that happens.

2) sprite limit.
-- you have a maximum of 64 sprite tiles on screen at once, and only 8 at once on the save horizontal row before flickering starts to happen.

taking those into consideration while looking at your screenshots, you can pretty much rule out using objects for your coins, as there are simply too many of them.

Thanks for all the explanation! It helps a lot to understand a little bit more on how NesMaker works. I´ll leave the coins fixed then :)
 

dale_coop

Moderator
Staff member
Here's jorotroid fix for the paths in the scrolling module: http://nesmakers.com/viewtopic.php?f=35&t=2174&p=13127#p13127
 

vince94

New member
Do you need someone to do music? I haven't contributed to a project on here before and I'd love to try!
 

pit.baldriz

New member
Hi vince94!

Yesp, I need music and sounds for my game. I´m trying to get my hands on Famitraker, but is really hard. I know how to use BeepBox, but is not compatible with NESmaker. Do you know how to compose music and SFX?
 

vince94

New member
Yeah! I'm somewhat familiar with Famitracker and the converter needed to make it work with NESmaker projects. How many songs do you think you'll eventually need?
 

Raftronaut

Member
I love the heavy black outlines you're using on the background tile set. The dithering under the solid blocks is a cool effect with the color palette you've chosen. I like the Art direction overall quite a bit!
 

pit.baldriz

New member
Raftronaut said:
I love the heavy black outlines you're using on the background tile set. The dithering under the solid blocks is a cool effect with the color palette you've chosen. I like the Art direction overall quite a bit!

Thanks a lot! I’m an Illustrator and Graphic Designer, so that you say that makes me happy! This game is a total challenge for me, but I’m having so much fun! Sometimes you need to move a little from the comfort zone.
 

pit.baldriz

New member
vince94 said:
Yeah! I'm somewhat familiar with Famitracker and the converter needed to make it work with NESmaker projects. How many songs do you think you'll eventually need?

I think I’m needing some SFXs for jumping, collecting an item, killing an enemy, check point and end of stage. Then some BG music for the intro/ end and for the main stage.
 

Dirk

Member
pit.baldriz said:
I’m an Illustrator and Graphic Designer

This really shows! Your game looks great! Lovely art style. It reminds of a game I used to play: Zookeeper.
 

Raftronaut

Member
pit.baldriz said:
Raftronaut said:
I love the heavy black outlines you're using on the background tile set. The dithering under the solid blocks is a cool effect with the color palette you've chosen. I like the Art direction overall quite a bit!

Thanks a lot! I’m an Illustrator and Graphic Designer, so that you say that makes me happy! This game is a total challenge for me, but I’m having so much fun! Sometimes you need to move a little from the comfort zone.

Yes, I think most people are challenged by the NES and comfort zone gets thrown out the window while learning about the limitations. I'm primarily a musician though I do a little visual art here and there, Outside of learning how to make chiptunes, learning to develop graphics for the NES really put my focus back into visual art and design which has been very inspiring. The limitations actually make the visual art side of NES DEV less intimidating to me, and also gives me a much greater appreciation for people who are able to create great pixel art.

Great work, I look forward to following where this project goes!
 

Dirk

Member
Raftronaut said:
The limitations actually make the visual art side of NES DEV less intimidating to me

I have the same experience. Just imagine making graphics for an SNES game would already be too much for me.
The limitations on the NES are so strict they undercut my artistic potential ^^
 

Mugi

Member
i actually think that the limitations imposed are greatly inspirational, as they force you to think of ways to express things in your graphics in ways you would never othervise consider.
 

Raftronaut

Member
Mugi said:
i actually think that the limitations imposed are greatly inspirational, as they force you to think of ways to express things in your graphics in ways you would never othervise consider.

I wholeheartedly agree

Even the most stunning NES graphics can be dissected quickly to understand how certain things are drawn to be used as examples. Though, the PPU is flexible enough to allow for so many different variations of style to develop. That to me is what makes the NES so great visually, it's the flexibility of the limitations.
 

Mugi

Member
it's all about the balance of limitations vs the fidelity of graphics.
like... my own graphics are a good example of this, for instance, i tend to design stage graphics with full backgrounds (no solid black areas on the walls) which looks really good,
but this imposes a very important limitation when designing sprites for these stages, which is the fact that you more or less permanently lose a color.
using the transparent color to your advantage in sprite design is completely out of the question because you would just see the background through your sprites, which in my case is good in the temple with the blobs, which are supposed to be see-thorugh, but for example, in the new facility stage, where enemies will primarily be machine types, i will have to add a solid black into the sprite palette, and thus far, cut actual draw colors from 3 to 2.
to me personally, this is one of the most brutal limitations there is at the moment.
 

Raftronaut

Member
Mugi said:
it's all about the balance of limitations vs the fidelity of graphics.
like... my own graphics are a good example of this, for instance, i tend to design stage graphics with full backgrounds (no solid black areas on the walls) which looks really good,
but this imposes a very important limitation when designing sprites for these stages, which is the fact that you more or less permanently lose a color.
using the transparent color to your advantage in sprite design is completely out of the question because you would just see the background through your sprites, which in my case is good in the temple with the blobs, which are supposed to be see-thorugh, but for example, in the new facility stage, where enemies will primarily be machine types, i will have to add a solid black into the sprite palette, and thus far, cut actual draw colors from 3 to 2.
to me personally, this is one of the most brutal limitations there is at the moment.

Ahhhh yes. This sounds familiar. In the "night-drive" level of space raft I had to really experiment with the way my sprite looked against a black background rather than the gray road. Black was also the color of my projectile, I decided to alternate the projectile Black/Orange so that it would be clearly visible over dark and light backgrounds. I was very pleased with the result and would not have though to do that had I had one extra color to do an outline with..
 
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