Working Title "Babysitter"

Well, I guess I've done enough watching tutorials, and it's time to get to work! I'm planning to use the Adventure module, and creating something of a survival horror game. My original, pre-NESMaker idea was for each "round" or playthrough to have a semirandomly generated house with a child to watch over while you barricade and defend the house against a randomly selected monster (zombies, masked slasher, etc). Considering the limits of the NESMaker tool, though, I already know this will need to be different.

So, a fixed map it is. Hoping I can get it nice and sandbox-y, but we'll see. Right now, I'm thinking you start in the bedroom that the kid you're watching has just vanished from, and you need to try to find and rescue them. Explore the neighborhood and the town, solve puzzles, fight monsters, win!

I also recently rewatched David Lynch's "Mulholland Drive," and would like to try working in some of that reality-questioning surrealism, and I'm largely picturing an atmospheric and less melodic, almost "Eraserhead" kind of music to accompany it. More triangle wave and noise than square, I'd imagine?

Of course, I'll still need to start at the beginning. Hopefully, I'll be able to make weekly updates to keep myself working. Definitely won't be done in time for Halloween 2019, but maybe I can at least have a really rough demo by then? Time will tell.

...hope I'm not moving in on anyone else's idea.
 

red moon

Member
Very cool! I love the idea and cannot wait to see what you come up with. Especially when you combine the visual with the sounds, very exciting!
 
Well, WedNESday seems like a grand time for a weekly update.

Nothing to show right now; most of the work was on paper or in my head (or hitting my head on the wall). I wanted 16x24 for my character sprite, which was fine on its own but didn't fit in a world of 16x16 tiles as well as I'd hoped. It was requiring 32x16 and 16x32 for door frames, and over half my background was spent on really basic stuff.

But I wasn't able to get my character looking good in 16x16, ended up with 8x16 right now, which is making furniture and backgrounds look terribly out of scale, and rooms downright cavernous. Which means, from a design standpoint, with one room per screen (and one screen per room), my bathroom is the size of a two-car garage. So, I know I'll need to work to incorporate warp tiles, since I won't always have a screen edge to walk up to and cross once I make the rooms more "to scale."

My final problem was, especially when I had a 16x24 sprite, deciding to make the furniture you interact with a NPC (which would save me from worrying about recreating the floor/carpet/etc beneath the bed/whatever) or a background element with an invisible NPC. I still haven't solved that, yet, but I'm leaning towards invisible NPC over background elements, now that giving up 24-pixel height saved me so much background space.

So, maybe some screenshots for next week? Not that I'm proud of my graphics (though my player character would RULE the scene on Intellivision, lol).

PS - not in love with the default text box handling, either, but that is way down the list.
 

red moon

Member
hmm, I would consider viewing looking at the rooms as quadrants of a building and subdividing the space to get better proportion to support the intent of the room.
And limiting some furniture to be interacts is a interesting way of going about it, although the game object count per screen is something to consider when planning what is in each room. A large sprite 16x32 would also help tighten the visual aspects of the levels and increase the furniture sizes which would benefit the small areas like bathrooms and such.
It will be easier to understand once you share a screentest. Good luck, it sounds really cool so far!
 
Well, I missed WedNESday for my update, but I have been working this week.

I had a graphical breakthrough! While playing some "Final Fantasy" on my NES, I realized the White Mage overworld sprite looked like it may be 16x18, and I realized that just because I have to use 3 "tiles" doesn't mean I have to *fill* them all the way. I aimed for a 14x18 character, and got close; I still wouldn't call myself a talented pixel artist, but she fits through a 16x16 doorway and has a little breathe-blink idle cycle so I'm happy.

game-0.png

Other than making a larger character sprite, I made the rooms feel less ridiculously large by just dedicating the bottom portion of the screen, about equal to the HUD up top, to be the text space. It effectively "letterboxes" the play area, and left me with less room to fill to make the settings feel more realistic and properly scaled. (Now I just need to work on my perspective, haha)

game-2.png

I'm having some trouble, though, with the priority layers for the sprites. I made an "invisible" NPC to overlay the cabinets in the photo above, for the player to interact with in order to receive their first weapon, the knife. From the way I'm getting it, your Player hitbox needs to overlap with the NPC hitbox in order for them to interact. I tried making an invisible NPC the exact size of the cabinets, and it was impossible to trigger, so I had to make the NPC really large. Now, when you walk through the overlapping parts of the NPC, the Babysitter sprite falls to the bottom and disappears under the floor tiles.

nesmaker-0.png

I've also added my first monsters, some little 8x8 cockroach types that skitter in random directions. I'm pretty happy with them not only because their animation consists of a single frame, flipped back and forth (like the Goombas from SMB1!) but also because they tend to hug the walls and occasionally shoot out at random, but I didn't really tell them to do that - it was an emergent behavior. I just made them fast, move in random 4 or 8 directions, and turn when they hit the wall - the reasonably authentic roach-like behavior just happened, man. :)

game-4.png

Anyway, things are happening, I've got problems cropping up - my melee attack is not set up right, I believe the script is calling a different Game Object than I have set up, but I can't find which one... Anyway, right now I still want to focus on creating and organizing the assets. I still don't have a full Suburban home, quite yet. The doors, I've been tinkering with having one for each of the four directions, or just having one general upright door and stick it in the walls, direction be damned, you know what a door is. /shrug

But progress is being made and I am happy so far.
 

red moon

Member
This is great to see your progress, cant wait to see a video of everything in action! I like the babysitter sprite as well and the cockroaches are a nice touch!
 
[media]https://youtu.be/TKGld5rtpeA[/media]

I have a brief video update; my lacking Famitracker skills and I don't mind at all if you watch on mute, lol. You can still appreciate the idle cycle in silence.

Mostly this week I created new monsters, and managed to figure out why my Babysitter was "disappearing" in the kitchen - the "invisible NPCs" for the counters took up the 8 sprites per scanline. Turns out, even purely-transparent sprites count against the limit. Which seems obvious in retrospect, I guess. But it basically settled for me how I handle interaction with furniture-NPCs. The best approach, so far, seems to be placing a *visible* version of the appliance over a non-walkable *background* copy of the sprite. At least, it fixed my kitchen.

I also created a simple title screen, and did a little playing around with Famitracker. I only have one sound effect, which I intend to use for when the player is injured. And the couple bars of nonstop looping is a work in progress, based upon the Dies Irae (because it was the first, simplest example of "spooky music" in the public domain I could think of).

Next, I really need to get the weapon working, and I have learned that that is going to be a whole thing about which I will need to reconsider my entire approach. But first, I just need to figure out how the heck to do it, since it's different from the 4.1.0 3-hour Adventure Tutorial.

Productivity may lag in November, as I plan to participate in NaNoWriMo. Then again, maybe it'll put me in The Zone, and the projects will feed each other...

EDIT: PS - My player death may be just a little bit indulgent... :p
 

red moon

Member
Nice great to see a video of how this is coming along! i personally thought the tombstone after death was quite entertaining. Looks like it will be pretty fun and getting the memorization down of the house layout when there is trouble will be part of the experience. if you have not checked out Lucius Demake it is really well done and may be good source material for you!
 
Thank you! As predicted, November took a lot of my focus (and I still only reached 40,000 words of my novel, but I got a lot of plot holes filled in and that's beside the point, anyway). "Babysitter" did see some foundational work. I have the story expanded to something of a (yet another) Zelda clone, while still trying to keep the creepy, urban/suburban Lynch vibe.

Some time has been put into learning Famitracker, and deciding what I want the soundtrack to be (ominous bass, crickets, occasional snatches of out-of-tune nursery rhymes). I still have to put in the work on that, but I now both know what I'm doing and what I want to do.

Mostly, I've been plotting and planning and taking notes on what I want, eventually, and what order I should tackle it in. I've got notebooks filling up with maps and ideas for monsters and items and weapons. I'm aiming for three melee weapons (knife/bat/axe) on the B-button, three ranged weapons, with limited ammo, (revolver/rifle/shotgun) on the A-button, and a first-aid kit on Select, leaving Start for pause. I don't think a menu will be necessary, as the weapons will pretty much be a linear upgrade progression discovered in different locations around the world. I would also like to expand the five hearts in the HUD to ten HP with a half-heart system (and, ultimately, 20 with an Armor upgrade), but that'll come later.

For December, I want to crack down into Assembly and get my weapons working right. After I have weapons and damage (both on the monsters and the player) working, I'll be ready to build out the world, I think. After combat, I think my biggest remaining hurdle will be implementing a shop and money system. From there, it should mostly be crafting in the NESMaker interface until I have everything built and tweaked for balancing.

Hope everyone's projects (and holidays) are going well, as well!
 
So, mid-December update, and boy I have learned nothing good about ASM. Did learn my way around Notepad++, though. Very nice program.

Part of the problem is that the wrap-up on my NaNoWriMo project has taken more than expected, part is that the podcast I work on is in a crunch time, but most was me getting lost in the joy of creating a ~Lovely Document~

You see, in order to write a melee attack subroutine, I need to know how much damage I'm dealing, and how many hit points I'm dealing with (and no, I couldn't just work with some arbitrary values until the code works and fine tune the logic later, don't ask me why not lol). From there, it was a spreadsheet and all kinds of damage calculations and monster tier rankings and a whole bunch of worldbuilder's disease overall.

LoVeLy-DoCuMeNt.png

Still, things that needed to be done at some point, and now was just when they called out to be done. I have pulled up some of the code in Notepad++, and started looking at what NESmaker currently does do. I've got a book on ASM, and I understand the mechanics of it, but the logic of how it makes a game (like what part of the routine draws the sprite?) still manages to evade me. It's tempting to just go back to Famitracker and graphics tinkering, but I know I can't put it off forever.

I'm just finding combat especially perplexing because it no longer works remotely like the tutorial videos. Is there a way that I can download the old 4.1.0 code for study, or just to "downgrade" to something that's already closer to what I want?

Anyway, moral of the story is, no progress to show and I feel like I'm starting to lose steam even as I develop the project further. Hope that everybody's holidays are going well, and wish all a Happy New Year.
 

dale_coop

Moderator
Staff member
westcoastvagabond said:
I'm just finding combat especially perplexing because it no longer works remotely like the tutorial videos. Is there a way that I can download the old 4.1.0 code for study, or just to "downgrade" to something that's already closer to what I want?

About the Mele weapon...if you want to use an object, like in the 4.0, take a look at that topic: http://nesmakers.com/viewtopic.php?f=35&t=1777
A lot of things have already been discussed and some answers might be on the forum ;)
 

red moon

Member
This is an intense spread of values, well done. that will save some time setting things up that’s for sure. Can’t wait to see more!
 
Of COURSE I would get nothing done over the Holidays... -_-

dale_coop said:
About the Mele weapon...if you want to use an object, like in the 4.0, take a look at that topic: http://nesmakers.com/viewtopic.php?f=35&t=1777
A lot of things have already been discussed and some answers might be on the forum ;)

Thank you very much for the lead! I have been looking around the forum, and found some information, though I haven't gotten around to working it out yet. I will definitely take a look at the topic suggested.

As for the future.... I'm having a little total reorganization of my life for the foreseeable. I'm not sure how much work I'll be able to put in, and when. I've already packed my bookshelf with the 6502 manual from the 70s, and all of my gaming hardware. It's a whole long story, with heartbreak, bankruptcy, death, and hungry cats.

Anyway, December was a wash, January is being a struggle, February promises some serious shakeup, March marks the earliest that anything may be resolved, and by the end of 2020 I intend to abandon my home state for greener pastures.

But somewhere, in all of that, and maybe even not until 2021, I intend to make this game happen!!
 
red moon said:
This is an intense spread of values, well done. that will save some time setting things up that’s for sure. Can’t wait to see more!

Heh, yeah, it was a fun abuse of OpenOffice Calc. I opted for a low-resolution because I was more showing the extent of the spreadsheet than the specifics of the numbers (which are subject to change).

Also, you know, spoilers and whatnot. :p

But it's an old habit. I kind of applied knowledge of Craps to Dungeons and Dragons once upon a time, and now I just get such a kick out of tinkering with the odds.
 
OK, that was an exciting announcement about the upcoming update! I like the look of this scrolling update, might be useful to me (might not be; not sure I mind the single-screen adventure).

Been sidetracked. Moved house, lots of Life happened, and that update announcement was just about the kick in the pants I needed to think about "Babysitter" again. Of course, it would be a start-over, but I can keep most of the graphics for now; it's still a pre-alpha, anyway.

Too many irons in my fire... But it's on the list!
 
Top Bottom