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!
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.
aaaand no, I don’t need new features for my legit copy of CS3 Suite.
Where did that come from, huh? well, I’ve been running with mainly Photoshop CS3 and Flash CS3 for agessss, know them like the back of my hand and they’ve been useful from the off, still function a okay in Windows 10 and they’re just great to make things with, quickly.
Sure, the activation servers got switched off years and years ago but you can still use them with a bit of hidden know-how which I won’t go into here, but, it stuck me whilst I was there, over at Switch Computer Support, chatting over ideas for their animations in their advert that I’m still using software from 2007, in 2022 and it’s all there.
With the recent kerfuffles with Adobe and Pantone, Software and now apparently…Colour as a subscription service, it’s gone more insane than before. I get it, I don’t have all the bells and whistles but I also don’t have the monthly bill to just ruddy use it. I will, like i do with most things, use it until it’s broken and I can’t fix it anymore, but Flash, yeah, remember that? Cool! It’s still great in it’s older forms for producing lots of stuff and you can always export the files as executables for the main operating systems also, I’m going to stick with that method for making animations again, for as long a possible.
I guess i’m just a holder out from newer versions of stuff but, if it’s not broken, at least, not broken to use, then why upgrade?
Also, the gym was amazing today, I need to get there again tomorrow as it felt great to feel some progress going on there, hooked up a more powerful speaker to my lil raspberry pi ( lewd electronics, it’s best not to ask ) stuff today and, it’s loud enough now, just need to figure out how to get all these parts enclosed and fit into some sort of wearable, maybe a collar perhaps? I don’t know, with the raspberry pi, this is my first rodeo and Python is a pretty trash language compared to PHP, etc in my opinion, LIMITS ON LINE LENGTHS? GTFO
But still, I will persist until this project has reached it’s eventual conclusion.
Also, I bought some cute fabric to make one of the cutesy projects I mentioned yesterday, best get cracking!
