Robin Hood like game for SNES

[Erockbrox]

Yeah, if my experience with homebrew is anything to go by, people don't just want you to make the game look good, they want you to make a game that goes beyond whatever the best licensed games ever did. And then later people wonder why I insist in comparing my stuff against the classics, that's the bare minimum bar to aim for if you don't want to get swarmed down in everybody and their dog throwing endless suggestions at you =/

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From my understanding I would think that the expectation for homebrew games would be quite low and I wouldn't expect them to be as high quality as the officially licensed games of the era. Why? Because back then there were companies and teams of people working on these games and they had money to put into the game along with it being their full time job.

Now its mainly for hobbyist. When someone does a homebrew now its not like there are sitting on a huge lump of cash with an entire team of people working around the clock on it. There are some exceptions to this and it does vary from platform to platform.

Sure a single person can make an atari 2600 game now that rivals that of the best games from its time, but a single person can't do the same thing with like an SNES game.

I think doing an snes game in an nes style would be cool. It would be like a glorified nes game. If you just watched a playthrough video of it, you might actually think its for the nes.

[tepples]

Even if a homebrew Super NES game doesn't graphically surpass the best looking commercial games on the platform, players will still want it to look no worse than launch titles such as Super Mario World, whose graphics can be seen as a transitional phase between NES and Super NES.

"The PPU is more complex. Why bother?"

"The APU has a separate ISA, supported natively* only by assemblers with a greater reputation for bugs, and communication between it and the main CPU is fiddly. Nor are there a wide variety of pre-made music engines like FamiTone, GGSound, and Pently. Why bother?"


* Yes, I'm aware of a ca65 macro pack that blargg and I worked on years ago that adds support for SPC700 with both Sony and 65C02 syntax.

[psycopathicteen]

The weird thing about graphics is that you can be doing stuff that is impressive for an SNES game, but if you keep the color count low, people will think you were lazy.

[rainwarrior]

Or you could stop making up imaginary arbitrary reasons the public will hate your game, and just make something you think is good.

[calima]

Or you could stop making up imaginary arbitrary reasons the public will hate your game, and just make something you think is good.

Haha, for people with high standards that is way worse. Making a game I'd find good would require me around 100 years or so

(need to become a good artist, a good composer, master a few dozen instruments, learn several languages, and gain enough money to hire people for full VA and several hours of cutscenes)

[tepples]

Then you may need to seek funding in order to acquire the right talent.

1. Write a design document. At first, it sets the direction for the game; later, it serves as a living standard to document its style.
2. Produce a playable proof of concept with very basic art and music. For Portal, the proof of concept was titled Narbacular Drop.
3. Crowdfund. Include only one language with subbed dialogue in the basic goal, and include translations and voice acting in a stretch goal.
4. Hire artists, musicians, sub translators, and voice actors.
5. Make your game.

[tokumaru]

gain enough money to hire people for full VA and several hours of cutscenes)

You and I have very different opinions about what constitutes a good game!

[koitsu]

Or you could stop making up imaginary arbitrary reasons the public will hate your game, and just make something you think is good.

In full agreement with this.

If your heart is set on accomplishing something, do it! There will always be people (members of general public) who dislike a game for whatever reasons (legitimate, trivial, doesn't matter) -- in the same way there are people who dislike commercial high-end games for whatever reasons (I know lots of people who loathe several classics that, for me, are awe-inducing). You can't make everyone happy. Just take the criticism with a grain of salt (or to heart if you feel it has merit) and do what makes you happy.

[Drew Sebastino]

gain enough money to hire people for full VA and several hours of cutscenes)

You and I have very different opinions about what constitutes a good game!

[tokumaru]

I didn't mean to sound rude... Different people like different types of games, and that's OK. I actually do like cutscenes (VA is really hard to get right, though... most games end up sounding very silly), but when you have hours worth of them the game starts feeling more like a movie than a game.

[tepples]

Plus even if you devote half of a 32 Mbit ROM to BRR voice samples played at 8 kHz (about telephone quality), you get 466 seconds of voice.

That is, unless you detect and exploit micro-loops in the voice data. (Lord Nightmare has been pestering me off and on to make an encoder for these micro-loops, but I'm busy with other (paid) projects.) But even that won't get you past, say, an hour of voice in 2 MiB.

[93143]

Making a game I'd find good would require me around 100 years or so

I'm feeling a bit of detachment from the issue at hand, in that my current project (being a port) doesn't require me to be good at art, music, or game design. All I need is knowledge and technical skill in graphics, digital audio, and programming, coupled with enough problem-solving ability to make everything work.

And it's still taking forever. This "free time" thing ain't what it used to be... and let's just say that with sufficient attention to detail it's possible to substitute time for skill...

Now, I could technically have proven my point with much simpler graphics and sound, or even no sound at all (it's pretty well known that the SNES doesn't take much of a penalty for basic audio). The essence of the game doesn't lie in the fancy sidebar or the rotating/perspective backgrounds or the multilayer transparency or the high-fidelity music and sound effects. It's a bullet hell game. 2bpp bullets with a basic HUD is all I needed. But I wanted more. I wanted to replicate the presentation of the original as closely as possible, not just the gameplay, even (or especially) if it required me to push the envelope in every direction at once.

Now, my concept for an RPG - that, simply put, I expect to never bother with. Maybe if radical life extension becomes available and I can get on board for millennia of extra time...

...

I guess my point is the same as calima's - it's not just the expected reaction from players that motivates SNES homebrewers to try to fully utilize the available resources. For the most part, the developers I'm aware of seem to want to push the limits of the hardware in some way, not just implement a brilliant gameplay idea in whatever audiovisual style they feel would be deemed acceptable, or produce some kind of faux-retro game on an actual classic console...

That is, unless you detect and exploit micro-loops in the voice data.

That sounds a bit like something I've been trying to do with instrument samples, to fit long dynamic sustains or decays into a small amount of ARAM. I'm not sure whether I got the idea from psycopathicteen or KungFuFurby, or both, but it seems to kinda work.

My problem is that I'm using manual detection...

[Sik]

That is, unless you detect and exploit micro-loops in the voice data. (Lord Nightmare has been pestering me off and on to make an encoder for these micro-loops, but I'm busy with other (paid) projects.) But even that won't get you past, say, an hour of voice in 2 MiB.

Unless you're making a full blown RPG, that may be enough though. Your alternatives are:

• Write the script intentionally trying to reuse parts of phrases (how odd it turns out depends on how clever you can get).
• Figure out how to make speech synthesis that sounds good =P

[Drew Sebastino]

I still don't quite get the big aversion to having large carts.

[Sik]

Well, for one, you need to use the rest of the space for graphics and such, and something of this scale is probably going to be using a lot of them.

I suppose that if you really insist you could just make a cartridge that has all the heavy stuff in a SD card =P