Doors to Darkness

Mihoshi20

Member
MHO_ProjectDarkDoor0_09B.gif

Welp, didn't finish it in time for Halloween as I'd hoped but it still was a fun little exercise in coding and design.

Things I'd add if I port this to NESmaker 5.0... Animations for the doors opening and monster's appearing along with suspenseful pauses between You opening the door and then the appearance of the next room or monster apperance flavor text. Also more rooms. 8 are planned while this conceptual demo only contains 4 rooms. The game also does a simple jump to reset after a gameover instead of jumping only to the title and skipping the first two logos, the ability to skip the logos with a button press is planned but not implemented in the demo.

Still, all in all, I hope the demo is enjoyable to play despite being a very simple game.

View attachment MHO_Doors_to_Darkness 0_09B.zip
 

dale_coop

Moderator
Staff member
Oh wow, Mihoshi, awesome! This game looks very fun... I'll take some time this weekend to test that. Really interesting.
 

Mihoshi20

Member
dale_coop said:
Oh wow, Mihoshi, awesome! This game looks very fun... I'll take some time this weekend to test that. Really interesting.

Be interesting to see what you think of it once you get a chance to play it. :)
 

CutterCross

Active member
Dang it, you beat me to creating a proper Point and Click game!

Haha in all seriousness, nice job! Glad to see you got fades working on the intro logos. If 5.0 doesn't have pallete fades like those by default I'll have to ask you more about it.

Keep up the good work man.
 

Mugi

Member
CutterCross said:
If 5.0 doesn't have pallete fades like those by default I'll have to ask you more about it.

5.0 is supposed to have a fader (day / night cycle will be a thing)
but that said, i did share the fixed version of the trollburner palette fader in the tutorial forum: http://nesmakers.com/viewtopic.php?f=36&t=2480&start=10#p15730
 

Mihoshi20

Member
CutterCross said:
Dang it, you beat me to creating a proper Point and Click game!

Haha in all seriousness, nice job! Glad to see you got fades working on the intro logos. If 5.0 doesn't have pallete fades like those by default I'll have to ask you more about it.

Keep up the good work man.

Back in the early beta days the first game I originally wanted to make was a point and click adventure game called The Glass Ring. http://nesmakers.com/viewtopic.php?f=51&t=132 I'd developed Mermay's Den as an alternative to get familiar with NESmaker and working with the NES in general and with each passing version of NESmaker challenged myself with creating a new game concept using each version but The Glass Ring always stuck in the back of my mind. In the meantime between 4.1.5 and 5.0 I wanted a new challenge, writing a game from scratch but I needed a simple idea thus Project Dark Doors was born.

The game doesn't use Joe's engine, instead I used NESmaker to play with ideas/experiment with concepts and also to align sprites, generate name and attribute tables. Aside from the bank switch routine which was pulled from Joe's engine as I really liked how it worked, the code is pretty much my own novice and amateur design. It was a fun experiment and taught me a lot. Though because of this, it's probably the slimmest bank $1F you'll ever see in a NESmaker game LOL. Also try and spot which banks the rooms are in. Spoiler warning, 8 rooms were planned but only 4 made it into the demo. :lol:

DoorsToDarknessBanks.png
 

dale_coop

Moderator
Staff member
Oh wow, yeah, those banks are beautifully... empty ;) Great work. Will you release it as a NESmaker core / module ?
 

Mihoshi20

Member
dale_coop said:
Oh wow, yeah, those banks are beautifully... empty ;) Great work. Will you release it as a NESmaker core / module ?

I might. I'm waiting to see what 5.0 looks like both as the tool and under the hood with the default engine. Next I plan on playing around with menus and inventories and if all goes well might build a simple point and click adventure engine/module. I'd already experimented with map screens in an unreleased game I'd made for the byte-off competition but didn't have time to finish that I may also port over to 5.0 and refine.
 

Dirk

Member
Cool, cool, cool, cool! I love point'n'click adventures! I'm very curious in what direction you will take this in the future.
 

Mihoshi20

Member
Dirk said:
Cool, cool, cool, cool! I love point'n'click adventures! I'm very curious in what direction you will take this in the future.

Something that is like Shadowgate or The uninvited comes to mind though I'd like to make it more open ended like Maniac Mansion but we'll see how it goes. All 3 are major influences.
 

Dirk

Member
I just admit I haven't played those games, only watched a play through for Shadowgate and stopped paying Maniac Mansion, because the timed events stressed me out. It's definitely on my must play list though.
 

Mihoshi20

Member
Dirk said:
I just admit I haven't played those games, only watched a play through for Shadowgate and stopped paying Maniac Mansion, because the timed events stressed me out. It's definitely on my must play list though.

Maniac Mansion is one of my fav NES games and I play it routinely. Probably the NES game I play the most aside from SMB2us, SMB3, and Zelda II and I often try and see how quickly I can get to a particular ending. Usually the Manuscript ending. It's a major inspiration for me though I find simpler Point and Click adventure games like Shadowgate, Deja'vu 1&2, The Uninvited, and even Princess Tomato to be better suited to the NES and it's capabilities as far as a novice programmer for the system is concerned or at least that's the approach I took. I have much bigger ambitions in mind later but I must crawl before I can walk but NESmaker by far helped launch me from crawling at a snails pace to at least a toddler and for that I am thankful.
 

Raftronaut

Member
Maniac Mansion is also one of my biggest influences, Mainly the music and the humor, Similarly to Dirk I was turned off by the timed mechanics at first, and honestly could not figure out the sequence of events needed to do some things... Anyway, I followed a guide and got some of the basics down, like escaping from the Dungeon or making the demo tape, Once I got the feel for it I really really learned to love actually playing that game....
 

Mihoshi20

Member
Raftronaut said:
Maniac Mansion is also one of my biggest influences, Mainly the music and the humor, Similarly to Dirk I was turned off by the timed mechanics at first, and honestly could not figure out the sequence of events needed to do some things... Anyway, I followed a guide and got some of the basics down, like escaping from the Dungeon or making the demo tape, Once I got the feel for it I really really learned to love actually playing that game....

Yeah, that's like with the original Sam & Max Hit the Road where I got stuck on a few puzzles for a bit and a couple I just broke down and looked up.
 

Dirk

Member
I still need to finish Sam & Max Hit the Road ^^
I remember how I got stuck on my first p'n'c adventure Monkey Island 1 and paused for half a year. After that I could finish it with "no" problems. Maybe I should give Sam and Max a try.
I have a strict no-guide-policy, but I'm tempted to break it. On the other hand I'm always really disappointed when I look up the solution.
 

Mihoshi20

Member
Dirk said:
I still need to finish Sam & Max Hit the Road ^^
I remember how I got stuck on my first p'n'c adventure Monkey Island 1 and paused for half a year. After that I could finish it with "no" problems. Maybe I should give Sam and Max a try.
I have a strict no-guide-policy, but I'm tempted to break it. On the other hand I'm always really disappointed when I look up the solution.

I only played Monkey Island 1 earlier this year for the first time, but I streaming it for a friend and they were walking me through it. I have to say that the grog mug melting part is so annoying, but overall I really had fun with the game. I also played Kevin and the Infernal Machine this year too and it was fun if short and really easy to any point and click veteran. Only point and click game I ever used a guide on was Riven, mostly because my PC at the time couldn't run it properly so I was baffled by some events I just wasn't being shown.
 
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