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We are Hejickle

Posted: Tue Jan 29, 2019 11:27 am
by pubby
A small little roguelike game by me and music maestro MovieMovies1.

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The goal is to progress through the floors by walking onto exits. Killing enemies is optional, but often a necessity as you can't take the stairs when an enemy is adjacent to you. Along the way, you'll collect gems which can be used to purchase items in shops.
  • D-Pad moves. Bump into enemies to attack.
  • Start button is your inventory and ability screen.
  • Hit select to examine things. This is kinda like an in-game help, and can be used almost anywhere including menus.
  • A button casts spells, assuming you have one.
  • B button is multi-purpose. Press and release it to wait a turn. Hold B down and press select to change weapons, press A to change spells, and press the D-Pad to change your facing direction.
There's a handful of little game mechanics involved, so if anyone's confused about something just ask.

Re: We are Hejickle

Posted: Tue Jan 29, 2019 11:51 am
by gauauu
Wow, I'm impressed with how much detail there is. The text quotes about scenery in the level adds a lot of flavor. Well done!

And unlike many roguelikes, it's not impossibly hard out the gate. I'll have to spend some more time on this one soon.

Re: We are Hejickle

Posted: Tue Jan 29, 2019 12:28 pm
by FrankenGraphics
Wowww. I'm stuck watching the title screen and listening to the song. Love the pattern of the falling particles/leaves and that they're passing in front of/behind the text sorted by colour. Minimalist and very effective.

Re: We are Hejickle

Posted: Tue Jan 29, 2019 1:10 pm
by FrankenGraphics
Second impression: Love it. Absolutely love it. Very atmospheric. The music does a lot to help, but the characters are well designed and the dungeons moody. The system feels rich with special abilities, status effects and statistics - this is not common on the system.

So far there's just one tiny thing i wish i could do - use D-pad left and right in the encyclopedia (named map?) to cycle through entries.

Re: We are Hejickle

Posted: Tue Jan 29, 2019 1:27 pm
by gauauu
FrankenGraphics wrote:... in the encyclopedia (named map?) to cycle through entries.
The naming of that really confused me also. I spent a few minutes mashing different buttons trying to see an actual map.

Re: We are Hejickle

Posted: Tue Jan 29, 2019 1:34 pm
by FrankenGraphics
Another thing i really like is that game rules change slightly on the 5th level of each area by providing a bonus if the condition is met. It changes from a game of careful resource management and trying to get all gems and to the exit without losing too much life to a game of risk vs. reward.

Re: We are Hejickle

Posted: Tue Jan 29, 2019 5:45 pm
by Banshaku
Was able to try the game a little bit and it's good. I recognized right away that the music from the store was inspired from Konami Bayou Billy :D

Since I need to learn about updating a good part of the screen in real time without closing the PPU, I'm curious how is the map field is updated? Does it requires to drop some of the scanline to allows more time in vblank to update it? My very basic testing so far is when you have more than 64 bytes to update, after updating OAM and palettes, it starts to spill outside vlbank and garbage ensue. A complete NSST screen RLE encoded seems not possible without closing the PPU, which causes a small hitch/flicker but in your map, I don't see anything like that.

If it becomes too much explanation we just split the thread. I'm very curious to learn how to improve writing data in real time.

Good work!

Re: We are Hejickle

Posted: Tue Jan 29, 2019 7:00 pm
by WhiteHat94
I've briefly messed around with it a little and I really like it, the gameplay is nice and the music is really good. But I just tried it on console, Everdrive, and there are some fairly substantial graphical glitches every time you move, not sure if that is able to be fixed. Here is a clip so you can see what I mean.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f433hhOfEHM

Re: We are Hejickle

Posted: Tue Jan 29, 2019 7:23 pm
by tokumaru
I assumed it was using the alternate name table for double buffering the background updates, thus scrolling without tearing, but that doesn't seem to be the case. Apparently it uses a sprite 0 hit to disable rendering early and have enough time to redraw the screen.

Re: We are Hejickle

Posted: Tue Jan 29, 2019 8:20 pm
by gauauu
WhiteHat94 wrote:I've briefly messed around with it a little and I really like it, the gameplay is nice and the music is really good. But I just tried it on console, Everdrive, and there are some fairly substantial graphical glitches every time you move, not sure if that is able to be fixed. Here is a clip so you can see what I mean.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f433hhOfEHM
I just tried on my powerpak and see the same glitches there as well, so it's not Everdrive specific.

Re: We are Hejickle

Posted: Tue Jan 29, 2019 9:05 pm
by Sour
As far as I can tell, it looks like OAM is getting corrupted for a single frame?

Rendering is turned off halfway through the frame to update it. And then the sprites are updated by writing to $4014 around scanline 244, without writing to OAMADDR ($2003) first. Since rendering is disabled around cycle 200, it's in the middle of OAM evaluation, and rendering getting disabled means the reset of OAMADDR to $00 from cycle 257 to 320 is not going to run until rendering is enabled again. Which means $4014 is probably getting written to while OAMADDR is in an unknown state? This could probably cause glitches, considering how glitchy everything OAM-related seems to be.

Re: We are Hejickle

Posted: Tue Jan 29, 2019 9:11 pm
by Memblers
That's awesome, I love it. I was immersed into it for a while, really nice game.

Re: We are Hejickle

Posted: Wed Jan 30, 2019 1:25 am
by pubby
Thanks for the feedback everyone! :beer: 8-)
Sour wrote:As far as I can tell, it looks like OAM is getting corrupted for a single frame?

Rendering is turned off halfway through the frame to update it. And then the sprites are updated by writing to $4014 around scanline 244, without writing to OAMADDR ($2003) first. Since rendering is disabled around cycle 200, it's in the middle of OAM evaluation, and rendering getting disabled means the reset of OAMADDR to $00 from cycle 257 to 320 is not going to run until rendering is enabled again. Which means $4014 is probably getting written to while OAMADDR is in an unknown state? This could probably cause glitches, considering how glitchy everything OAM-related seems to be.
Hmm good hypothesis. I've posted an updated ROM that writes #0 to OAMADDR before each DMA. I don't have a cartridge to test it myself, but hopefully that is the fix.

And yeah, PPU changes happen by disabling rendering around scanline 200 and doing everything before NMI occurs. There is very little buffering involved.

Re: We are Hejickle

Posted: Wed Jan 30, 2019 1:32 am
by WhiteHat94
Yep, appears to be working correctly now on console. I'll definitely let you know if I come across anything else

Actually noticed a small graphical glitch right after I typed this, if you inspect the floor, and get the Carlin quote, there is 1 tile of brick on that screen that is out of place.

Re: We are Hejickle

Posted: Wed Jan 30, 2019 1:43 am
by pubby
Cool, thanks a ton WhiteHat for testing!

If the bricks are in the upper-right corner of the text box, then that's intentional. It looks a bit odd, but it's showing what's being examined (the floor).