Cool "Streemerz" game from Action52 Remake Project

Karatorian · Post by **Karatorian** » Fri Mar 02, 2012 9:55 pm

thefox wrote:It's a pretty simple game, but it sure is fun! Too bad the resolution is wrong (320x240).

That's probably due to the weird fact that the NES (and System M/J generally) has non-square pixels. As computers usually use square pixels, 240 scan lines at a 3:4 aspect ratio gives 320 samples per line. Which happens to be QVGA. As a lot of EMUs scale their graphical output to QVGA (or another 3:4 size), it's not surprising that you see this sort of thing.

Post by **tepples** » Sat Mar 03, 2012 6:53 am

NTSC pixels are square if they're 7/12 of a color subcarrier cycle wide. (That's for 240p; for 480i, it's 7/24.) This is where we get the 8:7 PAR for the NTSC NES, because the PPU makes a dot every 8/12 of a color cycle.

Now for a recap

thefox wrote:okaying it with the original author

Good.

He sent me the player sprites

Good.

hasn't responded to my latest message where I asked for more assets (levels...)

I think I know how to get screenshots of the levels by extracting them from a YouTube speedrun of the Flash game. Then I could use some basic image processing to figure out which metatile is in each position. That would give me a collection of 20x15 grids, ready to rework into 16x14 grids for this project.

thefox · Post by **thefox** » Sat Mar 03, 2012 10:28 am

hasn't responded to my latest message where I asked for more assets (levels...)
I think I know how to get screenshots of the levels by extracting them from a YouTube speedrun of the Flash game. Then I could use some basic image processing to figure out which metatile is in each position. That would give me a collection of 20x15 grids, ready to rework into 16x14 grids for this project.

Hah, I hadn't thought about that, sounds crazy enough to work.

If you can get the screenshots for each level this way, I can do the post processing from that point onward (I have tools for optimizing the metatile sets etc etc). Also, I think it might be fine to use the 320x240 levels with horizontal scrolling for this. It's a little bit awkward yeah, but not too bad on the tests I've done.

Bananmos · Post by **Bananmos** » Sun Mar 04, 2012 6:43 am

Bit offtopic and maybe known already, but looking for that Flash playthrough mentioned made me realize that there also was a Streemerz sequel made.

Very short short though, pretty much a 1 level demo. But nevertheless pretty cool... doubt it'd be even possible to adapt to the NES though with all the rotations of the playfield as part of the gameplay :)

Download link here

Jeroen · Post by **Jeroen** » Sun Mar 04, 2012 7:25 am

Watching that video of streemerz 2. It's kind of annoying how every 2 seconds he tries to throw in a reference to something. It's more fun when it's at least a little subtle.

Bananmos · Post by **Bananmos** » Sun Mar 04, 2012 8:19 am

I agree most of it seems a little over-the-top, in comparison to the more polished first game. But hey, given how this was developed with a strict rule of working on the game 1 hour/day for one month, making it a 28 hours work effort, I'd say the result is pretty damn impressive.

Karatorian · Post by **Karatorian** » Sun Mar 04, 2012 11:03 pm

Any chance I could convince you to implement vertical scrolling? I think it would improve the game a bit. Maybe I just suck (which, in twitch, I generally do), but some the screen transitions made it hard to avoid Mr. Y's Balls.

thefox · Post by **thefox** » Mon Mar 05, 2012 1:13 am

Karatorian wrote:Any chance I could convince you to implement vertical scrolling? I think it would improve the game a bit. Maybe I just suck (which, in twitch, I generally do), but some the screen transitions made it hard to avoid Mr. Y's Balls.

Possibly, I have been thinking about it, and I already got a multidirectional scrolling engine done, so...

Dwedit · Post by **Dwedit** » Mon Mar 05, 2012 1:14 am

One of the pie-throwing clowns in the original flash game can't be dodged without switching screens to make his previous shots disappear.

Post by **tepples** » Tue Mar 06, 2012 2:46 pm

Here are the maps extracted from a speedrun. Get them while they're hot:
http://www.mediafire.com/?pp201l5f3ufyshq

Caution: Looking at these maps may cause flashbacks to when NES games were in Nintendo Power.

Dwedit · Post by **Dwedit** » Tue Mar 06, 2012 3:10 pm

There's also a bunch of "DefineBinary" tags in the flash file. Maybe some of them are maps.

thefox · Post by **thefox** » Wed Mar 07, 2012 3:42 am

tepples wrote:Here are the maps extracted from a speedrun. Get them while they're hot:
http://www.mediafire.com/?pp201l5f3ufyshq

Caution: Looking at these maps may cause flashbacks to when NES games were in Nintendo Power.

Good work, I'll try to clean up some of these later today.

thefox · Post by **thefox** » Wed Mar 07, 2012 11:10 am

Dwedit wrote:There's also a bunch of "DefineBinary" tags in the flash file. Maybe some of them are maps.

Do you know a way of dumping the binary blocks?

Dwedit · Post by **Dwedit** » Wed Mar 07, 2012 12:23 pm

Here's all the DefineBinary tags ripped right out of the SWF file.

These are raw SWF tags, including the 2 byte header that specifies the tag type and size in bytes. Tags larger than 63 bytes get 4 more bytes for the size of the tag.

I looked at a few of them, many of them seem to be text. Binary122 is even a flash file, it's the Mak Gam logo.

thefox · Post by **thefox** » Wed Mar 07, 2012 3:32 pm

Dwedit wrote:Here's all the DefineBinary tags ripped right out of the SWF file.

These are raw SWF tags, including the 2 byte header that specifies the tag type and size in bytes. Tags larger than 63 bytes get 4 more bytes for the size of the tag.

I looked at a few of them, many of them seem to be text. Binary122 is even a flash file, it's the Mak Gam logo.

I took a quick look as well, there's a curious signature "CNC ARRAY" in some of them. Some googling led me to ClickTeam's forum, and then it hit me, CNC = Click 'n Create, i.e. one of those WYSIWYG game/multimedia tools. It looks like the game might have been made using one of the ClickTeam's tools, such as Multimedia Fusion (I didn't know it could produce SWF files until now).

Shouldn't be too hard to figure out the format of that file.

EDIT: Wasn't too hard indeed, seems to be like this:

Code: Select all

CNC ARRAY format
----------------

signature: CNC ARRAY\0
unknown dword: 02 (version number maybe?)
dword: x dimension
dword: y dimension
dword: z dimension
dword: option flags
  lowest two bits indicate the type: 1 = numeric array, 2 = text array
  next bit is "base 1 index" flag
  next bit is "global to this application" flag

after that comes x*y*z ints

EDIT: The Flash version is not made in Multimedia Fusion, maybe the level editor was (there are references to FlashPunk in the SWF, which is a Flash game engine).