MOMOC - mine/build/sabotage/survive

8bitmatt

New member
I just cast my vote for the competition and it went to MOMOC. :D

I spent the past two weeks playing through every submission on real hardware (via a PowerPak cart) and I just keep coming back to this game.

The theme/setting is great. I love the enemy designs and behaviors. The level progression already feels good.
Most importantly the crafting/building is fun, and I think the level design is excellent. No screens have ever made me feel like there's only one solution, I got to play around and really think through things.

There was some initial confusion for me with the fuse and powder kegs, but looking through a manual would have probably cleared that up easily.
I think my only suggestion is to bring the HUD down further into the "safe zone". With real systems (and especially on a crt) the HUD is cutoff pretty bad.

I'm looking forward to seeing this game in its final form. The level of polish in this demo is impressive.
 

codingkid01

Member
Wow, The new minecraft update looks great! lol jk keep up the great work! honestly it reminds me more of an indie game with a pixel art style that would be made today! (not necessarily minecraft)! reallly good graphics for nes
 

Goaterby

Member
8bitmatt said:
I just cast my vote for the competition and it went to MOMOC. :D

I spent the past two weeks playing through every submission on real hardware (via a PowerPak cart) and I just keep coming back to this game.

The theme/setting is great. I love the enemy designs and behaviors. The level progression already feels good.
Most importantly the crafting/building is fun, and I think the level design is excellent. No screens have ever made me feel like there's only one solution, I got to play around and really think through things.

There was some initial confusion for me with the fuse and powder kegs, but looking through a manual would have probably cleared that up easily.
I think my only suggestion is to bring the HUD down further into the "safe zone". With real systems (and especially on a crt) the HUD is cutoff pretty bad.

I'm looking forward to seeing this game in its final form. The level of polish in this demo is impressive.

Thank you so much 8bitmatt! I am flattered you considered it worthy of a vote. It means a lot.

In regards to the kegs, it is certainly my bad-- originally the title screen had an explanation, but I had cut it to try and make a better title screen, and I thought the manuals would be uploaded with the roms. Alternatively, I may add little signs in the first mechanical encounters to help out, like a wooden sign showing a pick with a down arrow over the flint/steel or something.

Is the cutoff on your CRT still as bad with the 32119 build I posted on the first page? I have only tested it on one CRT (a JVC TM-A13OSU) thus far.



marp said:
Damn that's ambitious. Looks so cool! =D
Will try it out as asap.

Thanks marp! Yea give it a go! It gets tough, but it ramps slowly for the most part and tries to teach everything in advance. Let me know how you do, and if it lives up to your expectations!



codingkid01 said:
Wow, The new minecraft update looks great! lol jk keep up the great work! honestly it reminds me more of an indie game with a pixel art style that would be made today! (not necessarily minecraft)! reallly good graphics for nes

Hah! Thank you codingkid01! My idea / art direction for this actually came from a project I started for PC, but never did anything with. After much refinement and experimentation I got to what it is now.
 

mongolianmisfit

New member
I'm mind blown. This is extremely impressive on a technical level. I would love to read or watch a dev blog on this project. Truly amazing stuff.
 

F8Sean

New member
I like the ambition here a lot, it's definitely a unique sort of game (my favorite genre) and there isn't a lot to compare it to. When I tried it, the controls weren't immediately intuitive so I fumbled through only the first few screens. It took me a few days to realize this, but after looking at your GIFs I realize that your closest analogue is Fire N' Ice (see also Solomon's Key). That used the same button to place or remove your resource without the Select button to change between gather and build modes. If you did something like that, it would free Select up to be the resource selection button, and you would always have a jump button. It would speed up the pace of play, unless that's something you deliberately wanted to be a little slower and less Minecraft-y.
 

Goaterby

Member
mongolianmisfit said:
I'm mind blown. This is extremely impressive on a technical level. I would love to read or watch a dev blog on this project. Truly amazing stuff.

Thank you mongolianmisfit! There is not actually that much going on behind the scenes here. My usersubroutines are basically just crammed with 'checkleftblock', 'checkupblock', 'swapblock', etc. based on existing macros, and since all blocks are a different collision type, it is easy to tell what to replace them with if they are being mined. Mining is just based on a timer, so if you are holding the B button, it runs the swap routine every 15ish frames or whatever.

The sneaky / hacky part that stands out to me (that I find a little embarrassing) is the HUD block selector. I replaced the numbers 0-4 in the HUD sprite sheet with the icons, and had the HUD element simply show the variable that represents the currently selected block, that which is cycled from 0 through 4! Simple and good enough for Momoc, as I had no need for number tiles in the HUD.

F8Sean said:
I like the ambition here a lot, it's definitely a unique sort of game (my favorite genre) and there isn't a lot to compare it to. When I tried it, the controls weren't immediately intuitive so I fumbled through only the first few screens. It took me a few days to realize this, but after looking at your GIFs I realize that your closest analogue is Fire N' Ice (see also Solomon's Key). That used the same button to place or remove your resource without the Select button to change between gather and build modes. If you did something like that, it would free Select up to be the resource selection button, and you would always have a jump button. It would speed up the pace of play, unless that's something you deliberately wanted to be a little slower and less Minecraft-y.

Thanks F8Sean!

I really enjoy Fire N' Ice, and definitely drew some level design inspiration from it. In response to your suggestion (a very good one, as you will see below, I actually started the design with controls like that!):

While I would like the building to be a bit quicker in some ways, it is not possible to assign mining and building to a single button without making a very complicated method of managing states, as you need to be unable to move at all while placing blocks, plus or minus several frames of buffer. The primary reason for this is that you can jam yourself into collisions and cause all sorts of warping mayhem through the bottom / top of the screen. Secondly, defining when it is appropriate to show the building reticule / how it works in interface, and how this in turn works on ladders, on edges, etc. while maintaining relative movement / placement options gets real hairy real fast. Finally, it greatly encourages the use of blocks as a weapon to clip enemies through terrain, which negates many challenges.

I actually originally had it as a one-button-build setup, but even making sure the player wasn't moving (state check + hspeed/vspeed check) before placing blocks didn't completely prevent them from being able to propel themselves forward immediately afterward into the block while it was still technically non-solid sometimes. Thus, I figured out a sort of wait buffer to make sure they couldn't move for a period after placing things, but this got complicated and unintuitive enough to manage with all the other states that it was way easier to just make sure the player can't move at all until at least a button has been released. This in turn led the game in a different direction entirely, and allowed me to express my own design infuences, as I will detail below.

The current set up, at the cost of speed, gives the player way more freedom of placement, as they can move the reticule / direction for mining and building without moving themselves, which is much preferable in precarious situations, and potentially much more dangerous in screens when you are exposed while building. Both of these caveats are more mechanically rich in level design potential (a nice push-pull between more control vs. more danger), and while you can certainly make a game around the opposite (i.e. Solomon's Key-- twitchy block placing / dodging), it has already been done. What hadn't been done is something closer to King Arthur's Gold, which is what I wanted to emulate as best as possible: trying to keep a clear head and methodically build viable structures while being pelted by enemy fire in the midst of a melee. Whether or not I succeeded in this regard is certainly up the player to decide.
 

Atarath

Member
This is pretty amazing. Do you ever wonder where you might be today if you could have made something like this back in the 80s?
 

Goaterby

Member
Elarath said:
This is pretty amazing. Do you ever wonder where you might be today if you could have made something like this back in the 80s?

Thanks Elarath!-- Not really. I suspect I would be in the same boat: penniless and doing it as a hobby wishing I could do it as a full-time job. It takes an insane amount of PR / community management prowess to get games out there, whether in the 80s/90s from lack of connectivity and cheap access to dev kits / computers, or today when no one really sees your projects due to them being buried by the multitude of other things being released. I suppose the best response is to just keep making things and hope something sticks!
 

Dirk

Member
This game really spoke to the Minecraft part of my heart. I also love how sometimes it's just the best to circumvent an enemy in contra-st to other games, where you run around and shoot everybody.
 

Goaterby

Member
RicePixel said:
The gameplay looks sick!

Thank you RicePixel! The recent improvements have hopefully made it even more playable / cohesive.


Dirk said:
This game really spoke to the Minecraft part of my heart. I also love how sometimes it's just the best to circumvent an enemy in contra-st to other games, where you run around and shoot everybody.

Thanks for the kind words Dirk! I am very glad. That was the idea-- I adore the cozy feelings you get as a player when you avoid / outsmart foes.
 

Dirk

Member
I was wondering -- and maybe I already asked you this and forgot -- if you plan to develop this to a full game and maybe make a kickstarter?

*crossing fingers*
 
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