Post by trifalger in Slaughter comments

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I keep coming back to this! It actually reminds me a lot of N64 FPS where a lot of the fun is in understanding the limitations.

I wish it were slightly easier to discern where the enemies were and I usually give up on finding the last 7 or so. There are also little gaps in the level where enemies can shoot from where I can't see them that are kind of annoying.

~~Is there any chance of it being multiplayer? My son and I love playing against each other in my NES games and I think this would be great.~~ Strike that! I just thought about what I was asking for... split-screen 3d multiplayer on NES ^,^! I think that's a little unreasonable but still....would be a lot of fun!

It's a great game honestly! I can't believe it didn't rank higher in the Compo. Congratulations still and thank you for pulling this off!

Mindbleach2 years ago(+3)

Ha ha, yeah, splitscreen multiplayer would be ridiculous.

So anyway the splitscreen multiplayer is jump-in co-op with friendly fire. Press Start on controller 2.

Originally this response was going to be within a day of your comment, because this project is so ass-backwards, I figured it would take about three hours to implement side-by-side splitscreen. I was wrong. It took five. Literally one night is all I needed to have two independent viewports, because all column-pairs are independently raycast. Even the FOV is maintained... so I guess this NES game is set for anamorphic 16:9. What I've been doing for the last two weeks, instead of delivering that 'ha ha so anyway' punchline, is finding ways the game breaks if it tries counting to two. If you picture Sideshow Bob in that field of rakes, it's basically that, with more swearing.

I spent an entire day reverse-engineering my own view-weapon code so that removing bits from a byte would make bullets disappear when they hit something. Rendering the other player took literally fifteen minutes. There's a reason all programmers are Like That.

Though if you're playing on PC you'll probably want Mesen to add scanlines after NMI. Single-player performance has been significantly improved. Splitscreen performance needs work.

trifalger2 years ago

I can't believe you did it!!

Ever since the multiplayer update we've had so much fun! It run so much better in single player too. The power ups are awesome. I figured out the smoke was from where the bullets landed so I try to use those to find the remaining enemies. Enemies can only shoot at you when you're facing them which is neat since you can only turn around so fast.

At some point we went into edit mode and somehow froze all the enemies and were able to look at them up close and shoot them. Pressing select brought up the code which kind of acted like a map which was interesting. We had some classic fun with hide-and-seek, screen peeking, and betrayal <3

If you wanted to increase performance you could probably cut out the entrails and I'd personally be fine. Sometimes it's useful to see where an enemy just died but there's already a lot going onscreen.

A cartridge release I think would be great. I already want a full color manual with backstory on the enemy characters. Like who are the big bazooka guys? Or the pink slimes? Do they behave differently? Are they from Mars?

trifalger1 year ago

I love the "paltry July update"! Everything seems to run smoothly and it may be me but the walls, ceiling, floor all seem to be more distinct. One of my favorite things is to strafe left to right in front of a corner and wig out over how well it renders an apparently 3D environment on the 8-bit system. It makes exploring the new environment a lot of fun. The floaty jumps are a fun feature from previously but seem to be more useful with the new level design. Also the portal door! Very cool feature!

I have a thought on movement. Maybe the start button could be held to speed up turning and swap out with select? Just a thought. I'm actually fine with it as is... I just never use the bombs and could use the button for speeding up yaw motion.

Easily one of my favorite homebrew NES games!

Mindbleach1 year ago(+1)

Turn acceleration is going in at some point. Probably after a menu clean-up. (There's a toggle for fast versus smooth rendering, but it's hidden below the last visible option.) In the meantime... Mesen lets you plug an SNES mouse into the second port.

Portals were another weirdly easy absurd feature thanks to raycasting. If you get a close look at enemies through one, you can tell the math is a little goofy. The surface was originally supposed to wobble or flex continuously. That's now limited to when they're shot, because the feedback is hard to distinguish at these framerates, Static-by-default lets one tucked into a corner look like contiguous space - like the one in that high alcove. (Which you can get to, with the glide-y jumping. Definitely keeping the bizarre platforming.)

The shotgun and machinegun might get combined. An amalgamated pew-pew weapon that fires differently based on how you hold B is extremely well-precedented on NES. Though it'd act more like you're always charging a shotgun blast, press B to release it, and spit bullets continuously while holding it. That's honestly more likely to go in "Slaughter 2," after this is complete enough to call a proper game. Anyway that'd free up Select to immediately fire rockets, making them easier and more useful. But so would nerfing the current rate-of-fire so bullets and pellets can get punchier. Even as a firehose of bullets, the sound effects make them sound like a polite suggestion. There'd be some power-up that brings back this rate-of-fire and absolutely rips through enemies.

Enemies should also be crammed into every inch of this level. Blue zombie guys in the green underground. Rabbit tank things around the exit. Their distribution hasn't changed since the compo, because I want the data stored in the same compressed format as the passwords, and that format is currently thrown out so I can start over. (This was not aided by finally discovering that reading data back from VRAM storage begins with a byte of junk. Nintendo. Whyyy.)

All of which has to wait until after GB Compo, which runs for another month. This update was an excuse to avoid my initial project. Two weeks ago I said "Screw it, I wanna play with scanlines!" and honestly it's been great. Expect 60 Hz parallax and a vulgar bird. Then more pew-pew NES stuff.

trifalger361 days ago

The Christmas update is so much smoother and faster! In single player it flies and in multi it seems maybe a little bit faster than before.

Great job!

Is there a way to fit both the original level and the new one in the game? I tend to like more open levels like the first (which I absolutely loved) but the new one has more nooks to hide in for a multiplayer session so I think they'd compliment each other well. They're so different they remind me of Goldeneye or Halo levels for matches with different play styles like close-quarters shotguns or long-distance sniping.

Mindbleach361 days ago

There will be as many levels as I can fit, once I get the dang password system working. Restoring a saved game and loading a level are basically the same idea. I want to compress savegames to make entering them as text, in-game, tolerable. Levels in ROM will basically be pre-typed passwords, and I only have to do the one system.

That's the same reason the enemy placement hasn't changed since the first release, even though some of them are inaccessible without cheating with the second controller. (Or rocket splash damage.) It is possible to have hundreds of enemies in one level. There's a rudimentary infighting system, if you get one type to shoot another. But they haven't moved because I don't want to code something I know I'll toss out later. I'm already replacing the wiggly rockets when you fire along a diagonal.

The deeply amusing side effect of a password system is that levels might work between platforms.

trifalger359 days ago

You know i was just watching a vid about the Portal port to N64 and guess what? With the new portal door you added this is practically a Portal port to the freaking NES! I don't know how easy it would be to place them wherever on-demand but as far as mind-blowing demakes go I should say this qualifies as mind-blowing already!

Mindbleach359 days ago(+1)

Honestly? It's shockingly plausible, if you threw out the shooty parts of this game. Limiting it to a door-sized height, on a wall, would be a little wonky, but without the enemy grid there's plenty of RAM for saying "portal goes from here to here." How it's done now is a frankly ridiculous hack with a tiny array of "special tiles." Shooting the portals so they fritz out moves the special-tile reference a few steps way, and then it advances every few seconds until it finds a matching level tile. Which allows some bizarre level gimmicks where a shattered portal reappears somewhere else.

That Portal 64 port is slick as hell, though. Dude's polished it halfway to being the preferred way to play the game.

itch.io

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