nesdev.org

Hey NESdev, this is my first post here. Nice to meet you.

You've read the title, so you probably have a good idea of the two things comin' up... It's a classic case: The "artist without a programmer" syndrome! (but also Kid Icarus)
So let's start with the latter. It's something I've been doing in the background of my day-to-day schedule, not much of a serious commitment (but something I've been interested in nonetheless)

Here are two mock-ups with sprites I made. It's all in SNES limitations in terms of palette and color count, so it could probably be ported over with minor adjustments. I also have more stuff that I can show later.

Anyway, if you're interested or have any advice for me, shoot me a post. It isn't a "BIG ambitious fan project!"--We aren't aiming for the skies here, lol. Just a short, but smooth-playing action adventure game that builds off the first KI would be nice. And I figured a hobbyist forum like this one would be a good place to pitch it. (...Thanks, Koitsu )

I wonder if I can have two games share the same engine?

Any particular reason you've dithered the sky? It looks like the colours are far enough apart that HDMA would look at least as good, and it would free up an extra scroll plane if you want it. (You could use dither and HDMA to get better colour resolution than the 15-bit RGB affords, but that might be overkill.)

93143 wrote:Any particular reason you've dithered the sky? It looks like the colours are far enough apart that HDMA would look at least as good, and it would free up an extra scroll plane if you want it.

psycopathicteen wrote:I wonder if I can have two games share the same engine?

I don't see why not. You just have to tell him how it works and what it specifically does. If it isn't perfectly suited to his needs, he can always change some things. one thing I always wondered was if developers usually re used their older game engines when making newer games on a system, or if they just started from scratch every time. What I'm making could probably be adapted into a lot of different things because it's pretty versatile.

93143 wrote:Any particular reason you've dithered the sky? It looks like the colours are far enough apart that HDMA would look at least as good, and it would free up an extra scroll plane if you want it.

I noticed that too. Donkey Kong Country actually jitters the colors of the sky in the background on the jungle levels to make it look like there are more colors.

Do you have any sprite sheets?

And just a footnote: despite having chatted with Pik on Twitter, the project mentioned here doesn't have any direct relation to the "Super Kid Icarus" project that Gau and I did back in the mid-90s. This is a different project.

Do you have a set of fallback characters in case someone's lawyers catch wind of this?

tepples wrote:Do you have a set of fallback characters in case someone's lawyers catch wind of this?

I'd like to think Nintendo has better things to do than look for homebrews with copyrighted material to sue people.

Then you'd be thinking wrong. As I've talked about before: the continuation of characters in present-day games (ex. Smash Bros) and retro games through things like Virtual Console allows Nintendo substantially increased amounts of legal justification ("freedom") when it comes to things which represent their brand. Go look at how they're handling people streaming (or reviewing) their video games on Youtube in case you think I'm reaching far.

I won't respond about this subject past this point, as it starts to divert from (what I believe to be) the original point of the post/project. Legalities are just a subset of the entire thing; maybe splitting thread off would be wise. But remember: as far as I know, to date not one person here on this forum is a lawyer. Talk to a copyright attorney if you need actual insights.

After you said that bit, it got me to remembering that the answer was no. Anyway, yeah.

Speaking of derivative works, I expect the temptation to add a 6502-emulation set instruction to the initialization of the NES ROM and go from there is high.

Myask wrote:Speaking of derivative works, I expect the temptation to add a 6502-emulation set instruction to the initialization of the NES ROM and go from there is high.

What? Taking code from the NES rom?

I suspect I misinterpreted "builds off the first KI" as "ports". But yes that was kind of the idea. It would be a handy way to bootstrap the project, adapting the classic game's graphics...and then you'd have bonus content for later.

(Super Mario (World? All-stars? World.) was found to use nearly the same SFX codes as SMB by the TASers who used an arbitrary-code exploit to play SMB1 on SMW, surprise surprise!)

I think it would just be easier to adapt whatever game engine you're using and are familiar with instead of trying to use the one from the NES. At least you wouldn't have to try to reverse engineer anything. I've always wanted to make a port of a certain game, but I did stuff like looking at the screen and seeing how many pixels something moved in how many frames and trying to code something that would imitate that. Off course, there are some really random things and other stuff that you could never really guess on your own, like the exact amount of damage something does in a shoot em up.

I hope this isn't just 1 post and gone. Those are pretty mock up screenshots.