Libbet the boulder girl

[tepples]

One day, Libbet was rearranging her basement when she discovered a passage to an empty hall whose floor had a peculiar pattern. She rolled in to investigate.

[Banshaku]

Very "Tepple like" game

Is Libbet has any meaning in English? Just curious.

[tepples]

The closest analogue is probably the Terries and Fermies from Uncle Scrooge (and as adapted to the DuckTales TV series and games). This is my design in the same vein while spending no cash.

As for the name, I guess it's one of the many, many names derived from Hebrew Elisheva.

[nocash]

Would be also interesting to see if somebody does (or doesn't) come up with completely different tile designs or the like.

Okay, that new design is pretty. I had never thought about animating the boulder, or giving it a head that can pop out when not moving.
The game rules in Magic Floor allow moving between identical fields (eg. white-to-white), but you won't get points/arrows for that moves.

[tokumaru]

The original Magic Floor used the obscure "1-chip cartridge" setup (where the cartridge doesn't have a CHR chip and repurposes part of the name table memory for patterns), didn't it? Does this version retain that characteristic?

[nocash]

Yes, as far as I know tepples is actually aiming at a 1-chip cartridge withou CHR chip, but not as how you might think. At the moment it seems to be only a gif/concept without any chip(s) yet. The design does neatly fit in (or extend) with what I had in mind when writing the original Magic Floor story. And, don't know if it's just a coincidence, but Libbet's white face and dark hair is roughly reminding me about the icon and figurehead that I had used in unlaunch.dsi's background graphics : )

[tepples]

Glad to see you like it.

Displaying the third arrow was a mistake, I admit. No code has been written yet.

[Dwedit]

"One chip" cartridge using the internal VRAM as CHR-RAM is limited to 64 total tiles, which can freely be updated during vblank time just like any other CHR-RAM game. You could have a fully animated main character just like Battletoads or Nightmare on Elm Street.

[tepples]

I ran into a problem with animating the hop move (A+Up, A+Down, A+Left, A+Right).

spritesheet-side.png (909 Bytes) Viewed 18438 times

I had been trying to draw her from the side, as many NES "overhead" RPGs did. The roll moves were fine, as was hopping over a tile sideways. But it didn't look right when I applied the same approach to hop up or down.

hop_test.gif (9.34 KiB) Viewed 18438 times

I think traveling up and down exposes the incongruity between side view and overhead view. So I'll have to throw her design into Blender in order to experiment with camera angles. It reminds me of the ongoing stop-motion discussion.

[Bananmos]

Given that the heroine will have to do a lot of moving from floor tile to floor tile, how about cutting her some slack and making her armless instead of legless this time around?

[tokumaru]

Looks like she's sniffing her own butthole.

[tepples]

@Bananmos
She'll be moving mostly by rolling with the occasional hop. (Another comparison is Geodude from Pokémon.) Is there a reference for an armless biped-type boulder creature that could fold up for something like that?

But with the help of some acquaintances on Discord, I figured out that part of the problem was lack of shadow.

[nocash]

Pretty! Looks good even without the shadow. And the shadow is making it even better. I like the animations for left/right and down.

The animation for up doesn't look so well. I think the arms are a bit too long and too vertical. Maybe you could spread the arms a bit to the sides in the middle of the move, and swing the arms forward at the end of the move?

Btw. did you consider continous moves in same (or different) directions? The animations aren't showing that, but it looks as if you have already designed it so that Libbet could keep rolling continously, and that she'd lift her head only if the player stops pushing dpad buttons, right?

Most versions of Magic Floor are using 24x24pix floor cells (for NES it's 32x32pix because NES BG color attributes don't allow 24x24pix). So far I've been cheaply using a single 8x8pix sprite as boulder. But now I am wondering if 10x10pix wouldn't look better on 24x24pix cells (and for NES, maybe 12x12pix on 32x32pix cells).

Or in other words: The boulder could be as big as possible (if possible leaving a small gap between boulder and arrows). Although, to be geometrically correct, the perimeter of the boulder should be roughly same as the width/height of the floor cells (so it takes one rotation per floor cell, unless you would want Libbet to end up with the nose on the ground after 1.25 rotations).

[pubby]

Shadow should get smaller the higher she goes.

[tepples]

it looks as if you have already designed it so that Libbet could keep rolling continously, and that she'd lift her head only if the player stops pushing dpad buttons

That's correct. A buffered move will execute without delay.

(for NES it's 32x32pix because NES BG color attributes don't allow 24x24pix)

Yet the ZX81 tileset works without need for attributes.

Although, to be geometrically correct, the perimeter of the boulder should be roughly same as the width/height of the floor cells (so it takes one rotation per floor cell, unless you would want Libbet to end up with the nose on the ground after 1.25 rotations).

It's an animation cheat, I admit. Games are full of them. Look at how small the houses are in outdoor scenes in many RPGs.