Mega Mountain: NES Edition

[adrian09_01 (old)]

Just released my first NES homebrew! Developing this was great fun.
It's a port of a PC game called "Mega Mountain" by @sylviefluff.
Music was done by Damian Yerrick/DJ Tepples/PinoBatch and you can listen to it here: Listen to the soundtrack
You can get the game from the attachment here, or, if you want to donate to me or have the game in your itch.io collection, from Itch.io: https://adrianmakesgames.itch.io/mega-mountain-nes

Copied itch.io description of this follows.

original mega mountain description, courtesy of @sylviefluff:
Your best friend has been kidnapped and taken to the top of the Mega Mountain. You must save him.

features:
- a new NES game!
- easy and hard modes!
- 2 endings to discover!
- a platformer without jumping!
- not a port of cat planet!
- play using any available nes emulator (except nesticle) or on a real cart! (carts coming soon)

credits:
a game by @sylviefluff. NES/FC port by Adrian Makes Games. Music & sound engine by @PinoBatch.

© 2018 Adrian Makes Games.

[lidnariq]

I think the movement mechanic is fun and different!

[Ice Man]

Have to agree. It's very tricky but I like the concept.
Though, some palettes really aren't the best choice, but perhaps this might be improved?

[nesrocks]

This was a lot of fun! Nice mechanic Promptly added to my homebrews collection.
I agree about the palettes.

[FrankenGraphics]

Welcome to NesDev! Always exciting when someone has homebrew to share in their first post!

Sort of reminds me of knytt stories - which is a good thing, of course!

Some constructive criticism:
-If i'd add or change one more thing, it'd be an animation for climbing. It'd help informing the players what they can and cannot do.

-If i'd change a second thing, it'd be to give the vines a bit of a "drop shadow" to distinguish them from the background: green on red can be hard on the eye, and some might not be able to tell the difference (colour blindness).

[adrian09_01 (old)]

Palettes, huh?

Experiment with them in your emulator's palette editor/Hex editor and then tell me the palette I should use, along with some screenshots.

The palettes are:
Intro: day sky + palettes for friend/shadow figure sprites
Day/Red/Sunset/Night: the respective sky + palettes for enemy/rope sprites
Finale: night sky + palettes for friend/shadow figure sprites
Every palette contains ground colors.

For more advanced graphics changes, fork the game on GitHub. The link to the repo is on the Itch.io page.

[zzo38]

Why is there two license files? You should make more clear what is applicable to what.

[tepples]

The music code (Pently) is under the zlib License, and as far as I can tell, the game itself (src/lesson8.c) is under the MIT License. But I agree that clarifying this would be a good idea.

[rainwarrior]

Nice little game.

I sorta wish there was some middle ground between Easy, which had no resistance at all for me, and Hard, which I didn't find fun without savestates because the timing windows were just too narrow. The timing on the original version of the game seems much more forgiving to me (faster player, slower stars, basically).

The climbing mechanic is interesting. I feel like a pretty good puzzle game could be made out of this. (I'm reminded a little of a puzzle game called Popils which has no jumping, but in an almost inverse form of this mechanic you destroy blocks to make the level fall down to meet you.)

I was surprised that the double-climb when you use a wall while touching a vine was in the original too. It felt like an accident, but it's also kind of fun. Wish there were places it could be exploited to my advantage though.

I wasn't expecting the introduction cutscene! I missed it the first time I tried playing, only caught it when I reset to go back and play through easy mode and happened to wait a few moments there. That's new, right? I can't seem to make it happen in the original game.

What's Cat Planet? (Are you remaking it for NES now...?)

[adrian09_01 (old)]

Cat Planet is a different game from the creator of the PC version of Mega Mountain. It's kinda famous thanks to raocow. And yes, I will port it to the NES someday. Also, I'm thinking about adding a medium mode that makes some harder fireballs disappear.

[M_Tee]

Interesting game. Stronger contrast between far-background cave and interactive cave (walls) could be helpful.
I checked out the original. I'd be tempted to improve in presentation over the original, such as by having different animation states (like how are the walls and vines ascended? Levitation, Climbing, and if so, in which manner, etc.)

[OmegaMax]

Quite fun,thanks.

[JRoatch]

Nice little game, would recommend for Action 53.

A thing that would be nice to improve is making sure to that after a screen load that the screen turns on only at vblanks, that way you don't see single frames glitches of rainbow stripes, misaligned screens, and stale sprite placement. (also continuing to play the music in screen transitions)

I also found a interesting corner case of hitting the next screen edge, and the death screen edge at the same time. I would expect it to kill you to restart at the same screen, but instead it plays the death sound and proceeds to the next screen.

Edit: Remove video link, as youtube flagged it as "spam". replaced with a elaboration on what was going on in video.

[na_th_an]

I'd have this on this year's Action 53, it's quite fun. Good job.

Just a bit of polish as suggested and you have a hit.

[tepples]

I'm planning to include it, but I have a couple pull requests for you to take on the GitHub repository in order to fix music conversion glitches.