zeta0134

zeta0134, 2 months ago to gamedev

How very exciting! My cart supplier for Tactus (Broke Studio) recently verified that the lighting effect and associated palette swap run just fine on real NES hardware! Here's a recent capture from an AVS, which has admittedly cleaner video output than an original console, and otherwise is perfectly compatible with my techniques:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U0pqGSTuTtY

Now that the engine is all working, it's time to overhaul the concept of a "level" and start adding new tiles to the game.

#nes #gamedev

zeta0134, 2 months ago to gamedev

I got a dynamic torchlight effect running on #NES, with a little help from the Rainbow mapper. I've written a technical breakdown on my Patreon, available to everyone here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/tactus-devlog-100468890

In addition, this month's build showcases the updated HUD, which can now dance to the rhythm and which has a much better minimap. No more tedious brute-force-search for the exit door! There's a lot more I want to do, but this is a good solid start.

#gamedev

A gameplay demo of Tactus, running on an NES. The player defeats three slimes, surrounded by dynamic torchlight and pulsing rhythms.

zeta0134, 4 months ago to gamedev

Tactus is fairly CPU heavy. The musical nature of the game lets it spread work out over several frames, but this makes it hard to profile, as each frame has different performance characteristics. So, I made a profiling Lua script!

The colored bars tell me when major bits of the engine are running on each frame, relative to the start of a musical beat. The game code is mostly unchanged. Lua reacts to PPUMASK writes surrounding each section, keeping the CPU overhead minimal.

#gamedev #nes

zeta0134, 4 months ago to pixelart

I've got my head buried in a HUD rewrite, which has me thinking about new map tiles. The mapper I'm targeting has way more CHR space, which means I can get a lot more detailed with this thing. Of course it's also a rhythm game! Everything must dance!!

#nes #pixelart

video/mp4

zeta0134, 4 months ago to pixelart

Now that Tactus is expanding in scope I need to start experimenting with new enemy behavior. Drawing takes time though, and I don't want to spend time polishing art on an enemy I might not use, so... I need a demo sprite to test with.

I knew it needed to be simple, face 8 directions, and have an idle and anticipate, so it can communicate most common game states. But then I drew eyes on it, and... what's this? I'm being prompted to "Name him?"

#nes #pixelart #animation

video/mp4

zeta0134, 6 months ago to pixelart

Got some light practice in over the weekend. I have... no idea what I'm doing, but at this small size, even my nonexistent skill seems to be able to make recognizable faces. Yay progress?

#nes #pixelart

zeta0134, 7 months ago to random

Final Fantasy: ✅
Nobuo Uematsu: ✅
One of the good songs: ... [subjective]

Look, FF9 doesn't really have bad songs, it just has less popular ones. Anyway, this is my #NES cover of one of those. Enjoy!

#chiptune #famitracker

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y0yX7ognolo

zeta0134, 8 months ago to gamedev

Much progress on a new animated metasprite conversion script. It has some limits, but I can more or less do the whole animation within aseprite, and get a mostly optimized result running on the #nes

This particular animation is nothing to write home about, more of a black triangle accomplishment, but it is fully working and runs on hardware. I can edit, save, build, and instantly have the new animation in-engine. Now the real work can begin!

#gamedev

video/mp4

zeta0134, 11 months ago to Emulation

Hooray! I can finally boot FDS games in RusticNES! The audio is working too, I'll try to post some examples of that later.

#emulation #nes #programming

zeta0134, 1 year ago to random

Been a while since I did a #chiptune upload, so here, have another #megaman cover. If I was smart I'd have gotten this out in time for the Switch collection release, but I wasn't. Oh well!

Pretty happy with how this one turned out all things considered. The pulse drums are a bit unusual but they pack quite a punch.

#nes #famitracker #8bit

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZRxaj3u49AE