itch.io

Yes it is borrowing inspiration from it with more characters and platforms.  Good eye :)  I'll be honest though I hated the iOS version, the browser version was far better.  There was a iOS version of Miner Disturbance that was really good and I had the global highscore for a few weeks around launch lol.

Thanks.  Glad you're enjoying it!

Just beat the game.  I loved the wav audio at the end it was very clear!  I'm not too familiar with the simpsons, but I found the story quite sad lol.  Anyway cool game really neat!  I don't think I'll go for all the achievements but that's a cool replay feature!

If you'd like to send me a BGB savestate that would be useful for when I do try to hunt it down.  Emulicious is also a useful emulator for seeing performance graphs.  I would like to try to fix this bug and maybe add the random level option like you suggested, but time is a lot more limited for me lately.   honestly I don't think I'll have much luck tracking down the bug even with a savestate of it.   I'm not a pro when it comes to the Gameboy architecture/assembly so I don't have a super good understanding of how it's moving around the data.  I do think using another emulator would be good though just to potentially rule out that.  I only ever would play 100 or so levels in a session but it was typically on original hardware.  It sounds like the issue happens after around 300 levels or so, so maybe I can build a test environment to just skip through 300 levels and see if anything is growing. 

Also please redownload the game from itch.io just in case you're not using the most up to date one.   I did one update around the time I submitted the game to fix a header issue with some flashcarts.

Thanks for all of this.  Yeah I have no idea about this one.  I've seen the cursor glitch before but usually it happened when there was some issue on loading where an input got buffered or something.  It never corrupted the menus though.  There's definitely something persisting which is unfortunate.  How many levels did you play before 4686 before it bugged out.  I tried beating the level immediately before it and couldn't reproduce it.  I wonder if there's a way to export the state of the bug and I can look for anything odd because yeah IDK.  Something else is it could have something to do with the game mishandling the sram file and getting confused but I doubt that.  I'll look into it.

Thanks that's a ton already.  Maybe if I decide to try to fix it I'll open it up in a debugging emulator and try to figure out if something is leaking.  The things you describe are weird because I don't think there's too much if any stuff that persists through the levels.  I might remember once having something akin to lag but I don't think it was related at all and it was such a glaringly easy fix I have very little recollection of it.  I also don't remember ever having the cursor bug out during a level it usually happened on loading.  I will think about it it lol.

Hi thanks for the review.  I can't believe you beat every level.  I didn't expect that to happen but it makes me really glad someone was able to accomplish that. 

I spent a fair bit of time with trying to scale the difficulty and you're exactly right towards the last two sets of difficulty they do feel very similar and once you get good with the longer move puzzles it gets quite easy. 

Thanks for pointing out the issue in level 600. I accidentally deleted a char (when commenting my code?) and so the bottom rightmost block didn't appear.

There actually is a reset button but I guess I didn't make it obvious enough.  Pressing Select resets the level.

The random mode is a nice idea.  I'll think about adding that.

The cursor bug is weird I'm not sure how that happened.  During development there was some cursor issues exactly like you described and I can't exactly remember what caused them but it had to do with the level loading out of order.  It could very well be an emulation but I think you're right that it's a memory issue.  You might not of noticed this but I break up the levels into banks and try to mitigate the loading time by using constants within the banks.  So for instance, level ~1452 should take a bit longer to load then the level immediately after it. (Or something like that it's been a while since I comprehended the code).

Do you have any examples of how that bug first gets triggered?  It could have to do with bank switching so it could be a specific level completion that triggers it that I never caught.  How many levels do you beat before it happens?  Did returning to menu fix it? By resetting the game I assume you mean cycling the power.

Thanks for enjoying the game so much it really warms my heart!

Very cool entry.  When exactly was this made?  I'd love to know how the effect was done.

Edit: Nevermind, I found Stunner with source code.  Very neat.

Thanks!

Thanks.  Yeah, originally before the smartphone games it was a real life board game!

How would you do that?  Split up the processing between the several frames of animation?  That sounds rough.  Also don't they move at the same time the character is moving?  So I'd assume they HAVE to be calculated after input but before movement happens.  Unless you calculate all 4 potential next scenarios before input but that probably wouldn't play well with item usage.

No, I love great questions!  Yes exactly 1 Byte per block.  1 Byte for the key block and header.  I basically search through each Byte for the header flag. When I find one I loop that 122 more times, it then stops at header 123 and then loads the blocks after it until the next header/keyblock byte.  If you're curious I have a header byte for level 10001 so that it knows how to load level 10000 :). You might think that it's slow to do that, but it's about 1300ish levels in each rom bank and I have constants to determine which rom bank to search based on which level is being loaded.  So at most it takes maybe half a second to find the correct level to load.  I think my largest level is 16 blocks but I can't remember with 100% certainty. 

Thanks! Technically they ARE procedurally generated but they are done so by a much more high powered processor then the gbz80 would be able to do.  I suppose one could make the game generate levels but I don't think they would be good/complex/varried.  What the Game Boy is doing with the levels is loading the premade levels from rom. This required them to be very very compressed and did that by making use of every single bit to represent data.  36 different block positions with 4 different block types.  That is 1 byte.  Then the keyblock's position (only 4 not 36) represents another 2 bits and so the rest of the keyblock byte doubles as a header :)

This is really well done. Runs like butter. Hope you place well!

Oh you should include an output .gb file.  Not everyone uses GB Studio.

Where's the .gb file to try?

Right on. Yeah sound effects are tough to get right for me as well.

Hey man great game.

The only thing I would change was a different gunshot sound effect for when you fire your last bullet. It's hard to know how much ammo you have in all the chaos. Maybe a lower pitched beep for your last shot.

I think you should also change the sound effect for when you're firing and there's no bullets. Maybe something like NR10-14 0x00,0x40,0xA1,0x14,0x87. Because right now it sounds very similar to the regular bullet sound so on my first time against the bandits I didn't know I was out of ammo.

I loved the horse game by far the most.

Great game again! Good luck in the competition!

Thanks!  I'm sortof surprised you say it was too easy especially the later levels.  Around level 3000 is should jump in difficulty quite a bit.  The last 1000 levels should be the hardest difficulty and for most people who aren't acquainted with the this style of game it should be quite challenging.

Thanks lol.  Yeah I feel like once you get good you can do the levels pretty quickly but it still could easily take 400+ hours to beat.  I put that into Pokemon Sapphire back in the day :P

Just now finding your games.   They look great. This one especially! Can't wait to try them.