Lost Souls

red moon

Member
Hello everyone,
This is my first NESmaker game!

I wanted to build a demo that captures the essence of the game in a set number of levels (in this case 13) so I could get a better understanding of the NES maker tool so I can tackle something more substantial in the coming months!
Lost Souls represents a week watching videos, a week making sprites and a week implementing. I am not a pixel artist (this is my first time doing pixel art) and do not have any experience programming, so this tool is awesome!

Please let me know what you all think about enemy speed and behavior, I would love to increase the difficulty, but its hard to know without feedback in that regard.

INSTRUCTIONS:
"GATHER THE REMAINS OF THE DEAD TO GIVE THESE RESTLESS SPIRITS THE ETERNAL SLEEP THEY SO DESPERATELY SEEK."


You play as a Priest who gathers the bones of the dead. Each area contains a varying number of skulls, rib cages and old coins. When all collectibles are found the player advances to the next area. Lost spirits can harm the player if the player and spirit come into contact with one another. Only a holy cross can cleanse these wayward souls, temporarily driving them back. in order to gather all skeletal remains, the player must explore dungeons, cemeteries and dark catacombs before they can return to The Chapel of Lost Souls and free the spirits trapped in a perpetual state of torment.

At this point, I'm going to start shifting to an adventure style of room to room action and bone collecting for Lost Souls as it expands to be something more meaningful. I will implement changes based on everyone's feedback. The games's final goal being a top down action adventure with a visual tone and style similar to Castlevania...closer to Simon's Quest since that's the easy one!

https://drive.google.com/open?id=15jv0VLLxG1EKe3Si8G7qRWZ10B-K8NJl

For anyone that played the early test (I posted in WIP) thank you and I did make some changes and improvements since then. New animation, enemy speed tweaks and collision fixes so far...
 

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red moon

Member
Let me know if anyone has any trouble running the rom. And if anyone spots any collision issues. There are known sound issues that raft is looking into with me.
Thanks,
Red
 

Dirk

Member
Hi, I had no troubles running the rom. I like your skull graphics by the way, the ones you have to collect.
I've found skulls fascinating since kindergarten, when I would often draw them. I had a book with miracles and mysteries of the world like the pyramids and so on. One mystery was crystal skulls and the book featured a big, beautiful picture of such a skull. I loved to draw it over and over and over again. Luckily in kindergarten they said how good I could draw and didn't send me to a psychiatrist ^^
But I digress...
I had slow downs throughout the game, but that's the game engine's fault and I hope Joe will fix it in the next version.
The right half of the altar at the end seems to be solid instead of walk-able, so I can finish the level only if I enter the left half of it.
 

red moon

Member
That's great to hear Dirk, thanks for letting me know! I appreciate the support too, I love to create this kind of art...is challenging because of the limitations but very satisfying too. I had some similar books that you describe too...might have been a time life set with amazing covers of ufos and sprits and the like. And I drew some crazy stuff in school as well, so I totally understand!
And yeah the slow down generally occurs when slamming into multiple spirits and setting them aflame. Hopefully that gets addressed like you said. If not, its more of an authentic NES experience! The altar object is the win game object which scripts you to go to the end screen. I tried to make both 16x16 pixel area to be win condition,, but it did not work. I can set it to be walk-able then to clean that aspect up a bit. Thanks again for playing!
 

red moon

Member
I captured some video footage and placed it here for anyone that wanted to see but did not have time to test the game.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jQlMDuqL7ak
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hWfrsDONs6k
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-EMEHApCPqQ
 

Dirk

Member
Good thing you posted the videos, because they helped me find a reason for the slow-downs. I saw your footage is faster than my gameplay and I checked the region setting of my emulator. It is set on PAL, because I'm from Europe. I set it to NTSC and now the slow-downs are either not there or aren't as pronounced because of the higher frequency of the NTSC standard.
Your music could have been my first clue that I haven't changed the setting, but my emulator volume is set to low.

The difference between NTSC and PAL is quite severe though. I wonder what I can do to ensure my games will play the same or nearly the same on NTSC and PAL systems.
 

red moon

Member
it’s good that you checked and was able to make the change to play though at the intended speed. What did you think of the difficulty?
 

Dirk

Member
I think the difficulty was okay, not too hard, not too easy.
A corpse AI would be interesting, where they chase you like pacman ghosts. I hope this will be implemented in NESmaker one day.
 

red moon

Member
I shared lost souls with my older brother and he said it reminded him of this :mrgreen:
 

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v666

New member
Thanks for sharing your game.
I found it awesome!
The atmosphere is really dark and eerie. Just my type of game.
All sprites look fantastic.
How long did it take you to build this?
 

Basty

Active member
I find this game quite head scratching to be honest.

Creepy and dark atmosphere = certainly 10/10; I like it.
Interesting gameplay = 3/10; You could've implemented much more interesting game mechanic to the game.

It's literally like pacman but much simpler and with creepy theme.
I didn't even realize what you were supposed to be collecting at first since they just seemed like bg objects.
 
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