nesdev.org

Has anyone studied the size of scrolling NES games? It seems like they vary quite broadly in overall "screen real estate" (how many TV's could be lined up side by side to display the entire game in a bitmap). From a quick look at SMB1, it seems that each level is about 16 screens wide, and the game is about 32 of these levels, so it is about 512 screens total in size. I've heard Battle Kid is over 500 rooms (screens). However, Battle Kid may be perceived as a longer game due to the challenge of finding things within it, and also the challenge of doing battle without getting hit. But in terms of total screen real estate it is "on par" with SMB1.

From the perspective of Homebrew Complexity, pure "screen real estate" may be an important topic to consider if you're making a scrolling game (or multi screen game as in Battle Kid), but one can increase the perceived length of a game by tweaking its challenge, I think.

Zelda 2 was made of 4x16 wide rooms, and allowed up to 64 of them per bank. There were 8 banks of levels, but not all rooms were used, and not all were full width.
Plus there's the overworld maps too.

Oracle of ages had 10x8 maps, on a 14x14 grid, and 4 overworlds. Plus 28 floors of dungeons, each map 15x11, and each floor up to 8x8 if filled. But that's not a NES game.

It's also important to consider the types of the games. Games that only scroll in one direction at a time (SMB, Mega Man, etc) are usually very linear, meaning that the player will have to go through every screen in order to complete the levels. Games with free scrolling (more common on the SNES and Genesis than on the NES) need many more screens, because the player may not even see many of them depending on the route taken, and it's not as simple to stop the player from advancing by using some level gimmick or tough enemies.

In my game, each level can have up to 256 unique screens (256x256-pixel blocks), which can be used to fill an area of up to 128x32 (4096) screens. I will probably use less than that most of the time, but those are the limits, and I do plan to have a couple of really huge levels.

I have looked for NES games with huge levels, but I don't think there are many of them. For some reason, most of them use small metatiles, which causes levels to take more space.

The test map (the only level, currently) in my multidirectional scrolling game is 3840x1536. I plan to make it a little taller, since there's a few things I still need to throw into it to test.

Here's another thing to think about when designing how big your levels will be. How fast your main character is.

The first few Kirby levels can be completed in <50 seconds with the UFO glitch.

The first few SMB levels can be completed ~20 seconds.

My main character can travel at 8 pixels per frame, so he'd blow through World 1-1 in ~7 seconds assuming no resistance. Edit: That... actually sounds super fun to try. I might recreate world 1-1 and throw him in there for my own amusement.

My levels aren't exactly small (datawise)... but they'll need to be longer than that to be satisfactory. Or... provide lots of resistance. I at least want to have my levels be longer than 20 seconds. As long as a Kirby level would be even better. My game will likely have more screens than most, but still be perceived short. But I guess I'm still on NROM for the moment. If I can pack a fair amount of huge levels into that, I should have no problems getting a bunch onto a mapper setup.

Wizards and Warriors III is pretty big. A quick estimate puts the number of screens at 760. Solar Jetman is pretty large too. Both games have fairly sophisticated physics engines as well.

Dwedit, am I understanding correctly that Zelda II could potentially have over 2000 screens worth of side view areas? Wow. I never thought of it that way. And I assume that is even before using that method of doubling its size, which would make it capable of having 4000 screens worth.

- Just a remind about SMB: yup, you can count how many screens have objects placed there, but if you jump over the flag pole, the scenario continues infinitely. In other words, the scenario is autogenerated (perhaps not randomly) and the objects being placed while scrolling.

tokumaru wrote:Games that only scroll in one direction at a time (SMB, Mega Man, etc) are usually very linear.

I disagree.
There's at least one not lineral game that have only one direction scrolling(except minigames).
Fantastic Adventures of Dizzy 8)

I have looked for NES games with huge levels, but I don't think there are many of them. For some reason, most of them use small metatiles, which causes levels to take more space.

I was gathering data for guy named Trex from Micro Machines.
Every level i HUGE.
Every level must be 0x340 bytes and 1 byte defines 64x64 piksel square.

Denine wrote:Fantastic Adventures of Dizzy 8)

Well, I said they usually are very linear, but I'm sure there are exceptions. I never played this game though, so if this was a joke, I didn't get it!

I was gathering data for guy named Trex from Micro Machines.
Every level i HUGE.
Every level must be 0x340 bytes and 1 byte defines 64x64 piksel square.

That's pretty big for NES standards, yes, but not what I'd call huge.

Kind of makes me want to look into fractal terrain generation and make Morrowind NES with a world map that takes 7 hours in real time to walk across.

Of course it would be a very boring map! Tree, rock, tree, grass...

UncleSporky wrote:a world map that takes 7 hours in real time to walk across.

If your character walks/runs at 8 pixels per frame (unusually fast for the NES), it will take 32 frames to cross an entire screen. In 7 hours there are 7 * 60 * 60 * 60 = 1512000 frames (NTSC). Divided by 32, that's 47250 screens. Depending on the number of unique screens you use, that's doable. Or you could build "random" screens based on seeds, following a set of rules to prevent weird screens, and store the whole level as a list of seeds. If the seeds are 4 bytes long, the level can be represented in less than 200KB.

I think it would be really interesting to have a game with only one level that takes at least 7 hours to go through. If you place enemies and obstacles in that level, it should take considerably more time!

tokumaru wrote:I think it would be really interesting to have a game with only one level

Would it look like Metroid or Castlevania?

that takes at least 7 hours to go through

How long would that password be?

tepples wrote:Would it look like Metroid or Castlevania?

Slightly blockier, I think!