Figured I'd look into who was trying to make games for the 22 year old system we all know.

I made the palette tester program as a demo to see what I could do.  Now I've moved into making a puzzle game, which I'm calling "Geminim".

Basically, the premise is you play vs. a computer (I may do 2 players too).  In each round, several colored gems are placed before you.  You take turns, and on your turn, you must select a color of gem to take.  You may ONLY take from that color and you must take at least one.  The process continues until somone takes the very last gem from the screen.  That person is the winner and scores a point.

I may do a "20 round" thing where the gem quantity keeps increasing, making for more complex puzzles.  I might implement a timer.  Not sure.

Anyway, this is my project.  I've got the title screen and menu options mostly working.  The game itself just displays an empty screen right now!  Heh.

So... opinions?  What games are you developing?

I haven't done assembly in years, so I'm trying to pick it back up.  I have a game in mind, but I want to get a little further along before I talk about it...

And anyway, I still have a ways to go to feel comfortable with assembly again, I tried switching the way I store background data and write to PPU using 5byte building blocks (4 tiles and pallette entry) and now Im working on fixing an infinite loop issue

I've been spending most of my time writing tools to make developing a game easier for me.

Lately I've been working on an image to tile converter.  You load in an arbitrary image(gif, png, etc..) , select the tile size (number of tiles wide by number of tiles high) and it generates NES tiles that approximate it (using a best fit of 3 or 4 selected NES colors).  I think I'm just about done with it.

I started doing a fighting game a while back, but my fighters looked like crap which is why I started working on tools.

Al

Geminim: Maybe in the second version of your game you can do either all gems a different size (easy mode is 32x32, hard mode is 8x8) or variable sized where some are larger than the others. Might be harder to plan ahead if counting the gems is harder. A timer could also add a challenge for planning, you only get 3/5/10 secs to make each gem choice.

My current game is almost done, just need sound effects and PAL support (which may not be possible). No idea what the next one will be! I would like to do something large but don't have any plans yet. The Nerdy Nights tutorials are starting to get more time consuming so another game may have to wait...

Someone make Oregon Trail....
~~NGD

O trail, then Number Munchers, then Lemonade stand.

amen Tusky, all great ones. Love me some Number Mucnhers!!
~~NGD

I say Oregon Trail then Lemonade Stand, the Apple IIc version... then number munchers

new to the board, but i've been working on a Pitfall! clone for the last year and a half. its failry close to completion, just have to polish some things.

my more abmitious project is a grid iron football game. i started on the a.i. scripting engine but had to switch over to get a working "camera." this i no more then a tech demo right now.

Anyone remember the TI-Calculator game, "Drug Wars". It was basically a text adventure where you played a drug dealer and had to make money to pay back the mob? It was fun back in the day. I bet that would be pretty easy to do. You could add some still graphics to the top of the screen and have the text option at the bottom similar to old PC text adventures.

If I can get any real time and get semi decent at programing, I may try and contact the Homestarrunner guys about trying to a Nes version of Where's an Egg, Trogdor, or Kid Speedy. Where's an egg?, is pretty much just a logic puzzle, and probably wouldn't be too hard. Kid Speedy is also not bad, Trogdor, would be more of a challenge for me, but would be tons of fun. Granted this is all a bunch of "IFs" , but would be fun.

I used to play the hell out of Drug Wars on my TI-86 in Chemistry class. Fun as hell
~~NGD

I actually considered looking at Trogdor.  It would be kind of hard due to all the sprites on screen and you can get that "blinking" constantly.  It would probably be doable without a mapper as there aren't really all that many graphics.

Stinkoman would be awesome, although it'd need MMC1 at least for all the graphics.  Probably MMC3.  That, and a lot of code!  I haven't even finished all the stuff for my title screen and I'm already up to 1250 lines (granted there are quite a few comments and line spaces for easier readability).  I'm going to implement a temporary credits screen tonight and then I'll get to work on the actual drawing of game elements.

I'm not sure if I should introduce a character as your computer opponent yet.

Trogdor would definitly be the toughest of those 3. I would do Where's an egg first just because it's pretty simple logically.

The Drug Wars idea is also probably pretty easy. It's another logic based game with little graphics.

Trogdor would definitely run into sprite problems. Widest part of Trogdor would be 5 sprites, knights are 2, people are 1. You could only have 1x knight + 1x people or 3x people without hitting the limit. The sprites per scanline is almost always the first factor when I look at making a new game, so many can't be done without flashing.

Don't forget that on higher levels that arrows come from off screen. I would think those would be sprites too.

I think if someone wanted to do a sprite hack, they could replace the boxers in Mike Tysons Punch Out with Strongbad and his friends. 

The cheat could be Little Mac, etc..
Mike Tyson could be Trogdor

Al

Somebody should hack Wall street kid and make that into Drug wars.  I think that would be perfect, just change the stocks to drugs, the options to whatever.  The Rich Uncle to the Mob boss. "Where's my money, somebody tell me where my money is"

Just a thought.  Totally new and unique would be awesome too.

there was a similiar computer game called Dope Wars i believe.  I remember the icon on the desktop was a needle. it was basically the same thing.  Possibly a little sweeter. 

Tusk!

Dope Wars is the same game. That's actually the original name of the game.There's a whole wiki on it. the TI-86 version I played was Drug Wars. I've never played Wall Steet Kid, but maybe a Hack is possible, or if anything, maybe you can dissassemble it and get some ideas of home to do it from scratch.

I also just realized something... Since both Drug wars and Oregon Trail are both Text based games, if we were to develop them we could probably write a basic game engine to use for any text type game. It would save a lot of coding time.

Thats the idea behind theSCUMM engine, used in NES Maniac Mansion. Same engine idea was used in other games for other systems like Zac McKracken, Monkey Island, etc.

Someone (Quietust?) removed the script from the NES game for running on computers, but the engine is too different from the computer versions to use those scripts on the NES. Depending on how much is hardcoded, it should be possible to write a new script for NES Maniac Mansion. Other than that I know absolutely nothing about it.

It'll be great if we could write some engines for a code library. If we can get some frameworks, we could really start pumping out some homebrews.


The problem I have with Nes Dev is that I've never used low level languages. The First Language I learned was C++. Other than that I learn Visual Basic, which is so easy it's not even funny. I did some electrical engineering in high school, like analog and digital circuitry, but I never got to working with processors. I have trouble keeping ASM stuff straight in my head. I still think too much in high level languages. I can understand If A is >0, Then B-1 and Math functions like that. One of my best buds is awesome at ASM, but he decided to go back to med school and has like 60-70 hour weeks at school, so I can't get much help from him atm. I really wish I had someone near me that I could work with to learn ASM better. I hope I can work through you later tutorials. I need to get an IDE setup so I can play around with stuff.If I could only get the NES to initialize and get a startup screen like Sivak up, I'd feel more confident I could actually write some of these Ideas. As of right now, I more of a Developer/producer than a programmer. I waiting to see some more tutorials and source code examples. Once I can put together what all these lines are actually doing, it'll click and I'll be able to pump out code. That's how I've learned all my languages before.

Well, I've got part of the game screen in.  There's an attachment showing what it looks like thus far.

Any opinions?  You can't select gems yet, but that'll be coming. 

drug wars would be awesome, i'd love that to be on a cart

I'm working on a puzzle game where you need to delete chunks of the same colour/patterned tile - the bigger the chunk the more points you get for deleting it. It's coming along, but I've run into a brick wall trying to debug some random bugs at the moment. My original plan was to have it finished by Christmas, but it may be a little late now...

My comments probably don't make much sense with that layout! I was thinking the gems would be in a random grid, closer to zzaps game. Not saying your way is bad, just that my suggestions aren't useful.

I thought that's what you were describing Sivak! It's Krang's bonus game 3 from TMNT Fall of the Foot Clan! Way to go I love that little game

And Zzap I recognize your game from Megatouches everywhere They all left-justify as you knock them out?

Both awesome picks, very visual.