Post by trifalger in Slaughter comments

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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.

trifalger1 year 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.

Mindbleach1 year 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.

trifalger1 year 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!

Mindbleach1 year 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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