Gimmick! exAct * mix

A place where you can keep others updated about your NES-related projects through screenshots, videos or information in general.

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Sumez
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Re: Gimmick! exAct * mix

Post by Sumez »

mikejmoffitt wrote: dealing with how to use outlines properly has been more troublesome than I had imagined. I was drawing over an onionskin of the original famicom sprites, scaled to the full size, and chose line widths that would respect roughly the size of one famicom pixel. I think a lack of line weight variation sucks a bit of life out of it. It is something I have to continue to play with.
I think a varied line weight would mesh well with the game. I always saw Gimmick as having a style fitting somewhere inbetween the likes of classic hand drawn animation, and something along the lines of SunSoft's own Waku Waku 7 where the colors really pop!.
mikejmoffitt wrote: Almost certainly there will be a stage timer, or at least a segment timer. I would like the scoring system to reward fast progression and nuanced play over life hoarding.
I'm glad to hear so! Gimmick is a game where it's super fun to just zoom through the stages in a solid flow, so rewarding that would definitely be a good choice! Skilled players would employ star riding for even better times (maybe even have a speedrun mode built in?).
As for difficulty, unskilled players get thrashed pretty quickly, while skilled players enjoy speeding through the game efficiently. That is already how an arcade game should play. I may have a broken sense of difficulty, because Gimmick has felt like second nature to me for a long time now.
I often hear people claiming that Gimmick is deviously difficult, so there is definitely some truth to that. The controls really take getting used to, and so does wrapping your head around the fact that the enemies react much more intelligently to your actions than what is usual for an NES game.
That said, I think once you get the controls down, Gimmick is still a fairly easy game albeit with a few spikes. I wouldn't mind some ways to to further increase the difficulty (maybe dynamically based on player actions, with a higher scoring potential to follow?), but I don't have any specific ideas at the moment.
I am very interested in reading about this shmups thread about making it arcade-ready; have you got a link handy?
BIL tends to bring it up every time he namedrops the game :) Not saying that much outside of what we have already discussed though: Fewer 1ups and a stage/section timer.
Example
There's some more in-depth talk about it somewhere, but I honestly can't find it among the noise.
jmr
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Re: Gimmick! exAct * mix

Post by jmr »

Bregalad wrote:Just to say this looks amazing, but it's a shame there's those guys talking and we can't hear what the remixed music sounds like.
Same. I'm really curious to hear more. I first discovered Gimmick through some friends in the chip music community raving about the soundtrack about a decade ago... fast forward to last year, my band did a cover of Happy Birthday. So yeah, the original soundtrack is pretty important to me. :D

Masashi Kageyama's soundtrack demos for most* of the songs were released on CD back in 2011 - it's not hard to find online, I was able to import the CD a couple of years back. They're mostly the same as the final 2a03+5B versions, just with different synth patches and drum sounds. I haven't listened to them in a while but I do remember being surprised at how certain details translated between the different versions (ie: the snare flam in Aporia, the softer bass tone in Just Friends) - goes to show how practically every detail in the soundtrack was intentional and planned.

mikejmoffitt, out of curiosity, do you have access to any "source material" beyond the original famicom game? Beyond just the soundtrack, the manual, for example has some hand-drawn renditions of some of the characters, items, the overworld map, etc - I guess it's probably not likely that any assets beyond those survived, but it would be pretty cool if they did.

*Apparently no demos of Slow Illusion, Lion Heart, Cadbury, and Strange Memories of Death exist.
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mikejmoffitt
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Re: Gimmick! exAct * mix

Post by mikejmoffitt »

jmr wrote: Masashi Kageyama's soundtrack demos for most* of the songs were released on CD back in 2011 - it's not hard to find online, I was able to import the CD a couple of years back. They're mostly the same as the final 2a03+5B versions, just with different synth patches and drum sounds. I haven't listened to them in a while but I do remember being surprised at how certain details translated between the different versions (ie: the snare flam in Aporia, the softer bass tone in Just Friends) - goes to show how practically every detail in the soundtrack was intentional and planned.

mikejmoffitt, out of curiosity, do you have access to any "source material" beyond the original famicom game? Beyond just the soundtrack, the manual, for example has some hand-drawn renditions of some of the characters, items, the overworld map, etc - I guess it's probably not likely that any assets beyond those survived, but it would be pretty cool if they did.

*Apparently no demos of Slow Illusion, Lion Heart, Cadbury, and Strange Memories of Death exist.
Wow! I had no idea the demos were released. I've purchased the disk just now, so I'll take a good listen to those for sure.

I can't comment on the availability of source material, but I did suck it up and buy a boxed copy of the game in Akihabara a month ago. I sold my loose cartridge to lessen the blow to my wallet a bit... however, it was important to me to get access to the original manual in a high quality format.

This track is not related to Gimmick!, but I tossed it together a while ago as a demo for an X68000-style sound that I wanted to use: https://soundcloud.com/mikejmoffitt/tri ... 0-opm-demo
Erockbrox
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Re: Gimmick! exAct * mix

Post by Erockbrox »

This looks cool. Is this like an updated HD version of Gimmick for NES but only running on another platform. It was hard for me to make sense out of it, but the game seemed very cool.
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mikejmoffitt
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Re: Gimmick! exAct * mix

Post by mikejmoffitt »

I am considering taking the graphics in a bit of a different direction. I am going to ask if it is okay to share potential concepts that aren't confirmed for the game.
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Sumez
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Re: Gimmick! exAct * mix

Post by Sumez »

I'd say it's definitely worth it brainstorming different concepts.
I would love to give my feedback too, but of course it's ultimately your own decision.

As long as you don't compromise "cute" and "colorful".
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FrankenGraphics
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Re: Gimmick! exAct * mix

Post by FrankenGraphics »

Would love to see/read what direction you're exploring!
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Fisher
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Re: Gimmick! exAct * mix

Post by Fisher »

Oh please, I would totally love it!! :-)
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mikejmoffitt
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Re: Gimmick! exAct * mix

Post by mikejmoffitt »

Well, I don't think I'm going to be able to post something like that any time soon, but I think the change will be for the better.

About music, though, I will see.
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mikejmoffitt
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Re: Gimmick! exAct * mix

Post by mikejmoffitt »

okay guys, here's the new art style in action

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RMpNAMPF4mA

changed the gameplay a bit too
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nesrocks
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Re: Gimmick! exAct * mix

Post by nesrocks »

That is so much better! The bad side of it is that now the game's gonna take so many years to be finished as the art team adapts the graphics to this style with its acute level of aesthetics. It'll all be worth it though.
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Fisher
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Re: Gimmick! exAct * mix

Post by Fisher »

Oh yeah!
Amazing!! LOL
:wink:
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Sumez
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Re: Gimmick! exAct * mix

Post by Sumez »

mikejmoffitt wrote:okay guys, here's the new art style in action

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RMpNAMPF4mA

changed the gameplay a bit too
I love it <3
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mikejmoffitt
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Re: Gimmick! exAct * mix

Post by mikejmoffitt »

I'm taking a break from tearing out what little hair I have while working on graphics, and am focusing on some more technical aspects.

One little irksome behavior that Gimmick does is that it takes advantage of the 256px screen width when having objects push or pull other objects. While acceleration and movement occurs in a 12.4 fixed point position representation, sometimes objects are a bit lazy.

For example: When Yumetarou is walking against a wall, he stops, and his animation continues slowly. It appears that he smoothly stops on the boundary of the wall.

When you extrapolate his position, though, and consider the floored 4 bits of precision, it becomes clear that he is actually walking into the wall, which then "bounces" him back by one screen pixel (or 16 on-screen units). For the HD rendering mode, this is pretty obvious :P

Another example is the boat at the beginning of the second stage. In the original game, it appears to move 0.5px/frame, so you'd imagine the programmer would simply set the boat's dx to 8 units/f and be done with it. Unfortunately, it appears to actually increment the X position by 16 units every other frame - the lazy way of moving at subpixel speeds :roll:

I have a few ideas to explore to solve these. I am trying to avoid patches to the game itself whenever necessary.
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koitsu
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Re: Gimmick! exAct * mix

Post by koitsu »

mikejmoffitt still has a full head of hair, read: more than I do. Don't listen to his nonsense! ;)
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