nesdev.org

Yeah I'm pretty sure Dragon Warrior 1 and Final Fantasy 1 were developped by 4-5 people at most, and not even all of them were full time workers. However the credits for Final Fantasy 3 are already pretty long (although again most of them might not have worked full time all the way along).

Hmm that is true, they probably all weren't


I wonder why with that Pier solar game, 5 years of development, and sidequests are JUST getting put in :/ I mean.....5 years? Am I the only one that thinks it should have been LONGGGGG done, or atleast a proto version of the sidequest system added in? Well as long as it's a great game (Which it definently seems like) I guess it doesn't matter....

65024U wrote:Hmm that is true, they probably all weren't


I wonder why with that Pier solar game, 5 years of development, and sidequests are JUST getting put in :/ I mean.....5 years? Am I the only one that thinks it should have been LONGGGGG done, or atleast a proto version of the sidequest system added in? Well as long as it's a great game (Which it definently seems like) I guess it doesn't matter....

People have their own lives and jobs, it's not like they're on it full time. And if you can't invest time in it constantly, you have periods where you'll go six months without doing anything.

I've been mildly interested in NES dev for about 5 years now with several game ideas in mind and I don't have anything to show for it!

I can definitely understand five years or more, especially when it's just a forum effort. It can be hard to convince everyone on the team that one person's ideas take precedence over the rest.

UncleSporky wrote:

65024U wrote:Hmm that is true, they probably all weren't


I wonder why with that Pier solar game, 5 years of development, and sidequests are JUST getting put in :/ I mean.....5 years? Am I the only one that thinks it should have been LONGGGGG done, or atleast a proto version of the sidequest system added in? Well as long as it's a great game (Which it definently seems like) I guess it doesn't matter....

People have their own lives and jobs, it's not like they're on it full time. And if you can't invest time in it constantly, you have periods where you'll go six months without doing anything.

I've been mildly interested in NES dev for about 5 years now with several game ideas in mind and I don't have anything to show for it!

I can definitely understand five years or more, especially when it's just a forum effort. It can be hard to convince everyone on the team that one person's ideas take precedence over the rest.

Yeah but at this rate, if sidequests are just getting in, thats gona be like 7-8 years from init. develoment to release :/ I don't think any game in history has went that long from making to release, except unreleased prototypes XD

And look at the development team, thats like 10 people and apparently they definently know what they're doing (now?) :/

It is a great game though, just walking around in the demo now.....^_^

My #1 project, Dragon Skill has been in development since 5 years and 1 month (started on March 2005). I expected to complete the game in about 2 years and now 5 years later it's still far to being complete. The engine is completed, but the big issue is that actually creating enemies and coding their AI ended up infinitely more difficult than what I originally expected. The very hardest thing is bosses, you have to come up with an attack pattern and this is really difficult.
Another issue I'll soon run into is memory usage : Even tough I only coded about 1/3 of the enemies I'd like to see in the game and 2/3 of levels, and about half of the music, $8000-$e7ff is taken and only $e800-$ffff remains free (aproximatively) so only 18% of ROM space remains free. This is yet another problem anyway and is not related to time it takes to make the game.

For an RPG, there wouldn't be this issue because monsters would do simple things like attack and cast spells. However, there would probably be other things that you'd think they are easy before actually doing them, but that turns out to be infinitely harder. I haven't ever gone far in the development of a RPG (all I did is a lame attempt when I was 14ish before I decided to do Dragon Skill instead) so I don't know, you'd have to ask someone who did a complete RPG engine.
The reason I stopped doing it is that I was really bad at coding stuff back then, now I'd probably be able to code a RPG engine when the need will arise.

Bregalad wrote:My #1 project, Dragon Skill has been in development since 5 years and 1 month (started on March 2005). I expected to complete the game in about 2 years and now 5 years later it's still far to being complete. The engine is completed, but the big issue is that actually creating enemies and coding their AI ended up infinitely more difficult than what I originally expected. The very hardest thing is bosses, you have to come up with an attack pattern and this is really difficult.
Another issue I'll soon run into is memory usage : Even tough I only coded about 1/3 of the enemies I'd like to see in the game and 2/3 of levels, and about half of the music, $8000-$e7ff is taken and only $e800-$ffff remains free (aproximatively) so only 18% of ROM space remains free. This is yet another problem anyway and is not related to time it takes to make the game.

For an RPG, there wouldn't be this issue because monsters would do simple things like attack and cast spells. However, there would probably be other things that you'd think they are easy before actually doing them, but that turns out to be infinitely harder. I haven't ever gone far in the development of a RPG (all I did is a lame attempt when I was 14ish before I decided to do Dragon Skill instead) so I don't know, you'd have to ask someone who did a complete RPG engine.
The reason I stopped doing it is that I was really bad at coding stuff back then, now I'd probably be able to code a RPG engine when the need will arise.

Ahh well the other is a little bit more but still, your one person. They're ten, and if each person coded one program over a 5 year period.....dangggg


So breglad, is bankswitching out of question because you could store the music in another part of the begining of the next ROM's space (33K Bytes In).....Im sure you know this but it seems like it may need it? Im not sure how much a full ame's music would be for such a game :/

Well if I really get out of space I'll have to switch from mapper 3 (CNROM) to mapper 66 (GNROM) or maybe even mapper 2 (UNROM) but it's not the case yet.

If you can spare some vertical blanking time, you're not using DPCM, and you're not using all your CHR ROM for tiles, you can always load small amounts of data from CHR ROM like Milon's Secret Castle does.

Recently I came to the conclusion that there is really no reason to use CNROM rather than UNROM. It's not like CNROM allows for sophisticated CHR bankswitching tricks, due to the huge size of the banks. Because of this, UNROM is more versatile because it allows you to distribute the available space between CHR and PRG freely, and you can also do CHR-RAM tricks if you want to.

This is getting out-topic, but yes I'll be able to load data from CHR-ROM. I'll have to first draw all graphics I want to use in the game so I see what's free tough.
An issue is that sprite definition easily takes up a whole lot of ROM space for little things.

You're probably going to notice stuff like I have during long-term projects, by the time the game is ready to be built, 32kB EPROMs could be more expensive than much larger ones. Not long ago I had even seen 2Mbyte EPROMs going for just a couple bucks.

If you can get by with CNROM, that's cool though. Loading data from CHR-ROM isn't uncommon, but I wouldn't do it if it ever looks like it could be a limitation (consider what amount re-usability of your code you might want for bigger projects later, for example).

Writing an RPG is really something that requires a team effort... I might be interested in helping plus assisting to organize it; lately, I was pondering on porting some old PD Apple ][ and C64 TBAs to Family BASIC.

Does anybody know how to convert Family BASIC code into Mapper-0 ROMs? I have Family BASIC v3, which has a backup battery, as far as I can tell. There must be a way to compile the code or adapt it to cartridge format, and this could potentially open up a completely new method of writing simple games and apps.

-Xious

Xious wrote:Writing an RPG is really something that requires a team effort... I might be interested in helping plus assisting to organize it; lately, I was pondering on porting some old PD Apple ][ and C64 TBAs to Family BASIC.

Does anybody know how to convert Family BASIC code into Mapper-0 ROMs? I have Family BASIC v3, which has a backup battery, as far as I can tell. There must be a way to compile the code or adapt it to cartridge format, and this could potentially open up a completely new method of writing simple games and apps.

-Xious

Compiling code seems to be possible, have you looked into nbasic? It's true that a lot of the stuff made with it doesn't work right on an NES, but it's not because of any fault in the compiler. It's NMI routine is just an RTI though, it would be a good idea to add-in something there (I can hardly fathom not using it).

Family BASIC I'm sure would use some kind of interpreter and store all the BASIC commands and syntax in a special binary format. It seems that maybe it's related to HuBASIC by Hudson, it's maybe better documented than Family BASIC, but might not be much help either.

Maybe there is another BASIC interpreter written in 6502 with source available? There are tons of small computers using the 6502, so I'm sure there must be something like that somewhere.

Microsoft wrote the BASIC interpreter in most of these old computers, such as the Apple II Plus, but I don't remember any Microsoft BASIC interpreter being free software. I considered writing my own, but the 72-pin NES has no keyboard, so one would have to enter the programs on a PC.

tepples wrote:Microsoft wrote the BASIC interpreter in most of these old computers, such as the Apple II Plus, but I don't remember any Microsoft BASIC interpreter being free software. I considered writing my own, but the 72-pin NES has no keyboard, so one would have to enter the programs on a PC.

Or do it TI-83 style where you bring up a menu full of commands every time you want to insert one. That ought to be slightly less painful than "INPUT PASSWORD:" style.