Februrarys NES Game – Coffee Run!

Let’s race through a quick idea for a NES game with Coffee Run!

As part of the many cool things that go on over at http://socoder.net, there’s a monthly challenge called Mind Poke where memebers of the ocmmunity suggest words to generate something based upon them. Sadly I didn’t get anywhere with Januarys one, aside from a few screenshots. This month, I’ve developed a bit more of my toolchain and it’s sped the game development up along the way, pics below.

Idea for the title screen
Coffee Run Player on a background
Some obstacles for the player
Ideas for the Players Status
Converting the background from photoshop into tiles
Using Tiled to lay things back out again
Where I’m at on the NES for Coffee Run

The idea is you have to travel a certain distance with your player within a time limit, avoiding obstacles and ensuring you deliver the coffee to the customer, who’s away, somewhere, in a car, getting ready to take part in a race, but they need coffee!

You lose coffee after every obstacle you run into and can opt to drink some of it yourself to temporarily go faster, maybe you can get some back along the journey but it should prove to be a nice risk vs reward mechanic.

Next task will be to get the sprites set -up on screen and colouring the background properly, maybe doing something with player input tonight once I get the previous tasks finished.

I’m more positive that I’ll have this game finished by the end of the month after having improved how I code my games inside NESASM3, Also, my order for a bunch of NES cartridge shells and dust covers arrived today, so I have enough parts to create 30 cartridges, just not the boxes yet. Either way It’s another piece of the Refresh Games puzzle completed 😀

Secret Hidden Mini Game Complete!

It came out at 2,789bytes in the end after adding the title screen and removing a few bugs, adding the remaining SFX, etc, etc. I let my son loose on it and he seemed determined to beat his previous high score on it for a fair few minutes before eventually wanting to show me what he’d been making in minecraft which is a good sign 🙂

Coding up this mini game took a lot longer than I thought it would which isn’t great for my hopes to get a lot of games ready this year, which is a okay, I may just have to scale back my ambitions somewhat, we shall see I guess.

Cartridge Boards in both NROM and CN-ROM Formats, shiny!

I received my cartridge boards I ordered from second-dimension.com earlier in the week which I’m excited to have with me over here, hopefully that’ll give that extra push to get these games done in time and got some really cool tunes from Jayenkai for me to plug into my sound engine which is next on my list of things to do, so, without further delay, I need to port things over!

More Homebrew NES Games

I’ve decided to make a many NES games as I can through 2023, ideally ~ 10 different games along with some tools to make my life a bit easier in the act of creating them, be that nicer, generic functions in ASM, ways to quickly make and import music / sfx, I’m not sure.

Most of these will be NROM style games but I am about to receive some CNROM NES cartridge boards from second-dimension.com along with standard NROM boards so it makes sense to do something a bit bigger with them, probably porting They Are Everywhere to the NES as there’s a few more tiles in that game. I began working on a robotron-like game for the NES in November which is nearing completion, along with a cool little secret game embedded within it. I like the idea of having secrets in games and, thankfully, this secret game took only ~2Kb of the total 32kb available. It’s nothing crazy procedurally generated like Flap Happy but it’s a cool little add-on, I wander how many people will find it!

I’ve began potring the sprites and tiles to the NES format for They Are Everywhere as well as get started figuring out how this pirate themed game will work, more details on that over at Socoder.

Flap Happy has also been shown to the public at MAGFEST 2023! Which is pretty cool, that’s two games I’ve had shown at festivals, the first being Super Grid Run a fair while ago by the lovely folks behind the sadly ill-fated Gamestick console. I’m hoping some people played it and appreciated it for what it is meant to be, a homebrew hark back to early 80’s NES Black Box style games and not as a more modern homebrew. The authenticness is important to me as it reflects the style of games I began playing.

I’m aiming to be soldering up a successful copy of my NES robotron-a-like game by the end of January, now that I have opted not to cheap out on the CIC Chips it’s one less point of failure for me to handle or debug.