167 replies to this topic

[Ben_Larson]

I guess it's high time I announced my new WIP homebrew, so without further ado I present to you... the epic saga of...

PANKY THE PANDA: EPISODE I: QUEST FOR THE UNSEVERED PENIS

This is going to be a platformer game where you will traverse a bunch of underground rooms looking for keys and other items to help you proceed to new areas. Think scaled-down metroid-type gameplay. The goal (obviously!) will be to find your brother who is being held captive by Chinese poachers who are going to cut off his you-know-what and sell it on the black market.

Anyway, here's the latest WIP build. Not much to do yet except jump around a few rooms, but the game engine and physics is mostly complete as you'll see.

The game uses a tile system for each screen, with 12 tiles (in a 4x3 arrangement) out of a 'palette' of 64 tiles (actually 32 plus a reflect bit) making up a screen, so I think it should be possible to get 100+ rooms in an 8K ROM. Of course if it ends up being larger, even more rooms will be possible.

As always comments are welcome...

Attached Files

•  pp.bin.zip   1.96K   199 downloads

[GroovyBee]

What platform is this for? Can you post screenshots too?

[s0c7]

GroovyBee, on Wed Jun 10, 2009 12:18 PM, said:

What platform is this for?

2600.

This is very cool! I can see this being quite fun when you get it a bit further along. Score going to be in the box on the bottom?

Attached Thumbnails

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[Devin]

Ben_Larson, on Wed Jun 10, 2009 9:15 AM, said:

I guess it's high time I announced my new WIP homebrew, so without further ado I present to you... the epic saga of...

PANKY THE PANDA: EPISODE I: QUEST FOR THE UNSEVERED PENIS

The game looks great so far... maybe not the name, but the game looks great! The jumping is perfect and feels like good 'old Super Mario Brothers.

[roland p]

Looks nice!

I've noticed a fracture in the space-time-continuum. If you open the door, proceed to the right screen, then go left, you'll end up somewhere else. Anyway, it looks like a nice platformer and works very well already.

[Ben_Larson]

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What platform is this for?

Sorry, yea it's 2600.

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The jumping is perfect and feels like good 'old Super Mario Brothers.

You may have noticed that if you hold the button vs. tapping it, you jump higher, just like SMB...

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Score going to be in the box on the bottom?

Actually that's where your 'active item' is going to be, which you'll be able to change by pressing up/down. You might have noticed in the first screen a pair a boots sitting there. That's going to be one of the items that you get at some point in the game to use later...

[Nathan Strum]

I'm not sure I want to see the label contest for this one...

[Devin]

Nathan Strum, on Wed Jun 10, 2009 11:58 AM, said:

I'm not sure I want to see the label contest for this one...

(shutters)

[Nathan Strum]

Ben_Larson, on Wed Jun 10, 2009 10:15 AM, said:

Anyway, here's the latest WIP build. Not much to do yet except jump around a few rooms, but the game engine and physics is mostly complete as you'll see.

It's an excellent start! It already has a very nice feel to the controls, and the graphics look terrific. Looking forward to more.

[Bill_Loguidice]

Don't like the name, but it looks great!

[SpiceWare]

Impressive beginning!

I did run into a screen jitter problem on this screen:


Trigger the jitter by holding joystick right and hitting fire button to jump while standing at the position shown.

[TrekMD]

This looks very good. Thanks for sharing the binary. I look forward to see where this goes...

[jrok]

This looks fantastic. Really well done art and responsive control. Nice work so far!

So will the game mainly consist of jumping puzzles and memorizing the locations of keys/doors? It might be nice to add a simple enemy here and there to shake things up.

Also, I'm not sure whether the quest to save Hsing-Hsing's thing-thing is quite compelling enough.... I mean, its not like they're using them anyway.

Cheers,
J

[Nathan Strum]

jrok, on Wed Jun 10, 2009 3:12 PM, said:

Also, I'm not sure whether the quest to save Hsing-Hsing's thing-thing is quite compelling enough.... I mean, its not like they're using them anyway.

Maybe he just could have been kidnapped by an unscrupulous zookeeper, and you're working your way through his evil underground lair beneath the zoo.

That could open up the possibility of running into other animals as enemies, too. Or perhaps there are other animals you'd have to rescue first, in order to gain items/help from them.

[yuppicide]

I also don't like the name, but the game looks great. Although my wish would be for it to turn into a "Kangaroo II" or "Kangatoo" as I call it.

Lovin the Panda, tho.

[Devin]

...

Attached Thumbnails

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[atari2600land]

Looking great so far. I assume the words "Episode I" are in the title because there will be an Episode II some day?

[Nathan Strum]

atari2600land, on Wed Jun 10, 2009 6:54 PM, said:

I assume the words "Episode I" are in the title because there will be an Episode II some day?

I hadn't thought of that. Now I'm really worried...

PANKY THE PANDA: EPISODE II: THE REATTACHMENT

[Impaler_26]

This is great! I like the concept and the name ( ) and the jumping is already very nice. Looking forward to see how this one develops!

[cd-w]

Nice work - I like the flicker-free graphics and movement of the Panda - looking forward to seeing how this develops.

Chris

[Ben_Larson]

cd-w, on Sun Jun 14, 2009 12:35 PM, said:

Nice work - I like the flicker-free graphics and movement of the Panda

Well... , it probably won't stay that way. The way I've set up the data structures for each room in the game is that you can have 2 objects per room, even though I'm only showing 1 right now. To display that, I'll probably have to use 30Hz flicker on the objects when there's 2 in a room. The other option would be to reset the object position mid-screen and 'reuse' the sprite if possible. Unfortunately, I don't think there's enough time in the kernel to do that...

[Richi_S]

The control is great. A good omen for a platformer.

[Ben_Larson]

Ok new WIP version. Still mostly just a useless demo right now though. Changes:

* Fixed scanline bug
* Added in functional item display
* Added ability to have multiple-objects-on-screen 30Hz flicker (walk to the left to see)
* Refactored into 8K, in preparation for adding the level info
* Added ability to have different colored backgrounds (walk to the left to see)

I have the game world already laid out on paper. I think I'm getting close to a point where I can start implementing it and maybe have an actual playable demo of some sort...

Ben

Attached Files

•  pp.bin   8K   145 downloads

[Devin]

Ben_Larson, on Sat Jul 4, 2009 2:11 PM, said:

Ok new WIP version. Still mostly just a useless demo right now though. Changes:

* Fixed scanline bug
* Added in functional item display
* Added ability to have multiple-objects-on-screen 30Hz flicker (walk to the left to see)
* Refactored into 8K, in preparation for adding the level info
* Added ability to have different colored backgrounds (walk to the left to see)

I have the game world already laid out on paper. I think I'm getting close to a point where I can start implementing it and maybe have an actual playable demo of some sort...

Ben

Simply outstanding. The graphics and controls are top-notch!

[Ben_Larson]

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Simply outstanding. The graphics and controls are top-notch

Thanks. Likewise with K.O. Cruiser.

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I think I'm getting close to a point where I can start implementing it and maybe have an actual playable demo of some sort

I was crunching the numbers today, and I think the game will have 113 screens. If it takes me 15 minutes to put together a screen (that's probably optimistic), that's like 28 hours of effort.

With that in mind, I think maybe I'll make a very simple Java level editor that allows me to place the game tiles for a screen visually and then output the appropriate text. I have a feeling this could be a major time saver down the road...