Post by Mindbleach in Slaughter comments

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Controls might be close to final - in part because I've been sloppy. Letting player-two pause keeps breaking things. The easy parts are the hard parts. Strafing is deliberately walking-speed so that the fastest movement option is forward. Or backwards. Some of the new levels have jumping puzzles (floating puzzles?) that are just as easy in either direction.

The menu needs a do-over, which I've been avoiding, even as I've been shaving away wasted space. That code is two years old and fragile. I'm gonna have to redo it from scratch, and I don't waaanna. Which should (should) be good news for passwords, because I found a stupid way to make that simple, and the menu code is bad enough that I'd rather do that.

As for the strafing/turning and gun jitter, I think your turbo button's on.

trifalger57 days ago

Oh goodness you're right about me having turbo on... I forgot I was plugged into my four score on the floor and A button turbo was on 😅

Thanks for fixing the buzzing in the latest release!

I keep forgetting how hard it can be to work with the NES without breaking things. Snap turning might be disorienting and break something else. The accelerated turning you talked about before might do the same. It all works pretty well as-is. Sometimes I get carried away and want to run around like it's Quake for the NES and turning is the only slow-ish point. To compensate I usually run out of firing range, reorient and fire while running toward the enemy, strafing left and right. Still a load of fun and a total marvel to exist at all. Release this on cart on Kickstarter and it'll make a killing. I think I owe you some money at this point at least :)

I haven't played much with the menu until you brought it up. I didn't know selecting Give Up cycles levels I'm not good enough to reach lol. Memorize and Recall make sense. Suffer does damage to yourself but not sure why? Pain changes damage and HP I think. Edit is pretty much free roaming camera for me.

Mindbleach57 days ago

Thinking of it like tank controls helps. You can usually back up while turning and dodge some fire. Some levels are just hard as nails, though. I did a test run for 100% kills yesterday. The first six levels took maybe twenty-five minutes. The last level took fifteen. Ten of them after a mid-level save, just trying to clear the final room.

Some near-future project will just throw sprites. Walls represented mostly by corners, lumpen floors marked as highs and lows, enemies... presumed. Slayer The Hawk was originally supposed to be vertex-only Wave Race, or like, Thunder Helix. But it could be another shooter. Throwing dots is so much faster than trying to squeeze a tilemap onscreen, six columns at a time.

Pain is the difficulty level, but all it changes is AI speed. Only a few tiles each frame let enemies "think." More pain, more tiles.

Suffer is kind of a joke at this point. I was padding empty space, early on, and leaned into the edgelord vibe of putting an ultraviolent blood-splattered game on NES. It's stuck around because it turns out to be useful for testing health, death, respawning, etc. If I keep it, it could give you ammo, as a trade-off. But it might just disappear.

Start Over-- is broken again? Dammit. It's supposed to restart the level.

Edit is a full-featured editor. There's terse instructions in the readme. There's mouse support. I'll have to document all the lower stuff at some point.

There's a secret option below Give Up that toggles scattered versus linear updates.

Mouse support also works with gameplay. Rapid turning causes visual issues, because the NES fillrate sucks. Then again... smooth movements seem fine. Can I just double the turn speed? Oh, wow, yeah, that was easy. Twitchy. Very prone to lingering columns. Especially with scattered updates. 1.5x speed, every-other-frame, judders. And still has visual errors on busy levels. Hmm.

Screw it, I'll upload the bare ROM.

trifalger56 days ago

I've been playing the crap out of the game today now that turning is sped up. I think I'm on level 5 with the lava but Maybe they shuffled because I've played it before and don't remember level 4 before today. That last jump puzzle in level 4 had me stumped for a while.

I thought that if 1.5 speed broke it then maybe 1.25 would be fast enough and tried to dummy find the code that had been changed from "within sight" and alter it but I guess you did move levels or something because most of the code was swapped around lol. I can't say that I notice the jitter but either myself or the level gets discombobulated at times and I lose track of what's where at high speeds.

I did start using Memorize and Recall a lot more and find it's a great built-in save-state. It was useful before busy rooms or making jumps.

Mouse mode was surprisingly intuitive but turning to fast seemed to register the opposite direction and along with the wonky fill rate I'd get lost as to where I was facing. Which makes me think why snap turning wouldn't work because it wouldn't have time to fill the screen. I do not have an SNES mouse and adapter and was playing in FCEUX with emulated IR mouse which might be responsible for the opposite input. I will probably end up getting one for Former Dawn along with an SNES controller though. Which makes me think if Slaughter could benefit from an SNES controller and shoulder buttons for strafing would work.

The level editor is pretty cool now that I've tried it out. I would've spent a lot of time as a kid building my own levels. I don't know how you'd save them though. I also don't know how to place or edit enemies yet. A manual for this game would be cool. It's already pretty expansive. I could imagine spending some time reading through it.

Mindbleach56 days ago

The posted version is a full 2x turning speed. It is a bit much, but... it really is better. If you're searching in a cheat-engine, the number wouldn't show up, because it's two INC or DEC instructions in a row. If you're looking at the source code, first of all, my apologies. But in any case it's about halfway down movement_alone. Ctrl+F "not strafing."

Reversed mouse input is definitely the game. I have no idea why it does that. I tried fixing it recently, to use the input more directly, and turning left was twice as fast as turning right. That's straight-up haunted. It's on the same to-do list as the hilarious variety of ways multiplayer can break. Less debugging, more exorcism.

Enemy placement is the screen with letters and numbers on top of floor tiles. There's a 7x7 subscreen, showing a zoomed-in view, since the grid for enemies is finer than the level grid.

How you'd save levels is a password system. Which I really thought I had an easy solution for. Quicksaves are already in VRAM - that's where they're stored. So this week I figured, I could store them as hex. Displaying the second screen would be a human-readable version of that data. Unfortunately for that human, even simple levels weigh about two hundred bytes, and then get fatter as enemies move around and bleed on things. My approach to that problem was: tough shit. The idea of someone typing in a four-hundred-digit "password" is funny enough, before the implication of a mapping scene. Unfortunately for me, even with compression, doubling the size of passwords like that can easily wind up too big to fit on one screen. So I still have to do it the hard way.

In the meantime, the way I save levels to put them in the ROM is opening up Memory Tools and copying them straight out of RAM.

trifalger54 days ago(+1)

The level design is outstanding. I've noticed some really ingenious layouts all over the game but I finally found the last enemy in level one and man... I thought those glide jump paths in later levels were sneaky but here in level 1 was the sneakiest I'd found so far. I actually thought it was a glitch because I went over the level many times searching to no avail.

If it's any help with save size I think I'd be ok with/without blood on the ground.

Hey there's friendly fire amongst enemies! And boy it helps in the last level. I cleared out all the enemies in the open ground and let the ones in the cave kill themselves a bit but unfortunately got taken out before I could reach the finish. So close. It's neat though to see their shots and bodies explode behind walls, reminiscent of the Farsight gun in Perfect Dark.

trifalger46 days ago(+1)

I 100%-ed the game! ...sorta. I killed all of the enemies but try as I might I couldn't find the final portal. I did end up using the Give Up menu to cycle through to see what was past the last level and man, the credits... much appreciated!!

The value of this game is crazy. 7 fully populated and varied 3D environments with platform puzzles and diverse enemies. I don't think I'd ever have believed someone describing this game to me on NES.

It blew up on youtube! Awesome! It looked like the top comments were neck and neck with how impressive but dizzying/confusing the graphics were. I went into NESDEV and response seemed about the same. I personally love the graphics and both my 11yo son and I had no issues navigating the environment or identifying enemies, especially with the recent releases. I checked the post again and I see a lot more support now. I think it just needs more footage out there and more people playing it to gain traction and grow wings.

Mindbleach46 days ago

The game now has what I think are the two final levels, and one of them should clear up the final level. The other kind of final level. You know what I mean.

Enemies are a little more diverse, but not super well balanced. I tore out a bunch of code expecting I'd draw more guys, and instead let each level change their height and behavior. That needs tweaking. Enemy placement and quantity also need tweaking. Mostly to fill out secretive areas beyond that one trolling hidden guy in the first level. That was a placeholder for a secret exit or something, an entire year ago, but I might as well put some combat in the upper area if that's simply not a feature.

The game isn't done, done, but I think this is it for capital-c Content. I went from barely fitting four levels to having enough ROM for ten or eleven. There's nine and that's enough. According to John Romero that's a megawad.

The menu needs a whole do-over. It works for both players, finally, but it should really appear on either side. (Same side or opposite side?) God help me, I may yet redo the whole sprite-projection function, or at least drop it to 30 Hz when the game chugs. The tileset is surprisingly underused... and a lot of diagonals and dropoffs are still placeholders, somehow. It deserves music, and I have room, but apparently I cannot be arsed. I took a hard look at SNES controller support and said no. Maybe after I leave it alone for another six months.

I'm not sure what comes after this. Possibly chopping down a quick and dirty Wolf3D port. Possibly aforementioned dot-throwing. Possibly a C64 port, since I've got all the hard parts in 6502 assembly, and that machine could save your edited levels. But from here to at least the end of the year, it's only tweaks, fixes, and telling people the game exists.

The latter of which I did get scooped on.

It has been fun to watch the numbers go up, and tell people on Youtube to try their own ridiculous projects. Mmmight do a lower-detail version, per suggestions? It'd be an easy ROM-hack. I could add a mapper and make the tile graphics swappable, but quite frankly, I don't wanna. It's too much of an invitation to put in even more work. I want to do what's next.

trifalger42 days ago

I don't know what a lower-detailed version would look like 🤔. Cute?

For music all I could think of was 8-bit Duke Nukem theme. There are some great ones on youtube. They sound awesome while playing Slaughter.

The new 'ghost' effect on enemies is neat. I can't tell sometimes if they're going in the walls or are just transparent. Maybe both?

I think cleaning up the edges of cliffs would do a lot to reduce the visual confusion if that's possible. Maybe a few small tweaks and suddenly everyone can play it.

I like the 1st new level, level 4 with the red/yellow/blue. That's when I noticed the ghost effect. In the new level 7 the destructible portals is a neat idea that stumped me for a bit- I mean, there was nothing else to do right? Cool mechanic. AAAND it finally clicked how to beat the game in level 9. Duh! 🤦‍♂️But I got overwhelmed with all the red on red and close quarter enemies and the menu text was black making it pretty hard to read.

I think I realized part of why the new level 7 felt off. You go from the open blue/yellow level, to Hell basically, and then back into the trees with level 8. With a name like Slaughter the red/darker levels totally makes sense but they're mixed in with the rest. You could start the game off in the overworld, more open/brighter levels like 1,2,3, 8 and 9 and then proceed to take a trip into Hell with the darker ones like 4,5,7. Maybe make it something like 1,2,8,3,9,4,5,7. But lvl 9 is waaay too hard to go in the middle. it's honestly an incredible end-cap to the game sooo... man idk lol.

If you feel it's time for you to move on for now that's probably for the best. I'm an NES dweeb (still 6502 so yay).

Still, I can't help imagining all sorts of things for this, like new or reimagined games in the Slaughter engine. There hasn't been an FPS that's run at this speed before for the NES. An FPS RPG like a Zelda 1 or Crystalis would be insane. Bomberman. Also just fleshing this game out would, for myself, be equal to Former Dawn. Pack a manual with enemy names and behavior, level names and settings, a storyline (you're here to kick ass and chew bubble gum?). Snes controller integration could give shoulder buttons for strafing and added buttons for easier weapon swapping/bombs. Saves would be nice but it's a pretty short game and skippable levels (Give Up) and Memory/Recall make up for it.

Mindbleach42 days ago

The palette order vaguely conveys a day-night cycle, but is admittedly rough. It needs fixing. As with the diagonals and cliff edges - it's programmer art. A flat-color version would presumably look even moreso. Somewhere between Hovertank and Behind The Iron Gate.

This engine specifically might get reworked for a first-person Metroid affair. Fewer enemies (with respawning), limited draw distance, some kind of level streaming. I do want to play with controls that rely on timing. Like a double-jump that's also a Half-Life long-jump depending on when you press the button, and a unified gun for both pew-pew-pew and BLAM. And definitely SNES controller support, there, because I'm not doing multiplayer again unless it's really funny. Like if Slaughter 2 has four-player deathmatch. I can't beat Faceball on Game Boy supporting sixteen people.

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