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WIP - Castlevania Demo!

Posted: Wed Aug 29, 2012 3:34 am
by uze6666
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Castlevania fans rejoice! Seems it's been years we were talking about making a Castlevania game. A couple months ago after finishing the kernel upgrade and having some more RAM for more ramtiles I decided to give it a spin. However I did not choose the easy route by making my own map editor and engine. Built with the idea of being highly optimized in size it ended up taking forever and slowing down the actual game development greatly (plus the engine is very basic). Should I had to redo the whole thing, I'd use Platz for sure!!

So here's the demo I provided Harty for Gamescom. There's no enemies yet, but you can navigate the first level of the original NES Castlevania game. As said, it's a demo/proof-of-concept. The real goal would be to make a game with 4-5 brand new levels based on similar game dynamics as the original game on the NES. I usually don't publish stuff until it's done, but I wanted to show you guys I'm not dead! 8-)

I'll update the thread with more demos in the next few weeks/months as I progress. There much work left, like incorporating Lee's sprite palette code to save flash, rewriting the state machine, etc...

Cheers!

-Uze

Re: Castlevania Demo!

Posted: Wed Aug 29, 2012 1:13 pm
by Flecko
I can't wait to get home and try this!!!

Nice work Uze!

Re: Castlevania Demo!

Posted: Wed Aug 29, 2012 4:41 pm
by D3thAdd3r
Amazing stuff Alec, looks great and gameplay feels spot on! Very cool surprise :D What kind of map compression are you using/going to use? And of course....Is that scrolling WITH inline mixer??!!

Re: Castlevania Demo!

Posted: Wed Aug 29, 2012 6:37 pm
by Harty123
Awesome graphics & sound... 8-)

Do you have a new version (newer as the "Gamescom" version)?

-Harty

Re: Castlevania Demo!

Posted: Thu Aug 30, 2012 2:40 am
by greenpower
Uze, you are surprising, as always! ;) You've done an amazing work trying to port Castleavnia to the Uzebox. I hope you have fun coding this marvelous piece of cake.
BTW, If you want, I could contribute something to the developement of the game; I don't know how to program but if you want tilesets or level design ideas don't doubt to drop me a line :) .

Re: Castlevania Demo!

Posted: Thu Aug 30, 2012 3:27 am
by uze6666
Hehe thanks guys! :D
Do you have a new version (newer as the "Gamescom" version)?
Nope, that's the version I sent you, no progress since.
greenpower wrote:Uze, you are surprising, as always! ;) You've done an amazing work trying to port Castleavnia to the Uzebox. I hope you have fun coding this marvelous piece of cake.
BTW, If you want, I could contribute something to the developement of the game; I don't know how to program but if you want tilesets or level design ideas don't doubt to drop me a line :) .
I wish this could end up a community project since it is *a lot* of work. Still have to iron out details in the engine and the map editor. After that we can assign bits and pieces to who wants to contribute.

I'll keep you posted.

Uze

ps: Lee, what's up with you sprite/palette code for mode 3? Do you think it could be used for this project?

Re: Castlevania Demo!

Posted: Thu Aug 30, 2012 6:31 am
by D3thAdd3r
uze6666 wrote:I wish this could end up a community project since it is *a lot* of work.
Definitely a lot! There is enough skill around here to make it happen with enough effort. I'm in and interested in getting the remaining music+sfx done from the NSF + any PCM to start.

Lolo's 2bpp pallet blitter is actually fast and would work well, I'll dig it up and PM you.

Re: Castlevania Demo!

Posted: Thu Aug 30, 2012 11:59 pm
by Flecko
Wow!!!

Uze...I had not expected the quality of the game dynamics to be so high! You got the jumping, the ladder walking, and the falling all perfect! Just like the good old NES version.

Really...hats off.

Man...it's been soo long since I got to work on my game. I really really need to get back to it. I have a bunch of post it notes and scribbled letters hanging in my office with ideas, graphics, and drawings...but just haven't had the hours to sit down and work on it.

If only I could find the time...

Re: Castlevania Demo!

Posted: Sat Sep 01, 2012 7:13 am
by paul
Wow, it looks so good! Everything works very smoothly. Do you think you have enough space remaining to do most of what you want to do?

Re: Castlevania Demo!

Posted: Sat Sep 01, 2012 5:48 pm
by D3thAdd3r
paul wrote:Do you think you have enough space remaining to do most of what you want to do?
Looking at Castlevania.nes it's 128 k, and their tiles take 1/4 the space ours do. They also have large title, ending, and intro screens we could replace with something else which helps. But I would say it would have to be 2-3 roms for something like the first game due to each of 6 level NameTables(tile sets in NES speak) with about 208 tiles each we HAVE to have to look right...I do happen to know all screens+patterns+enemy data takes *edit* 12,059 bytes. Graphics are what'll kill us.

I have dumped a fair amount of free time into making a ripper for Castlevania 1 and am continuing work to extract needed graphics ready to be used with Pallet Blitting. So far it extracts all screen,pattern,enemy,and offsets data right from the rom and makes it into a nice include file. I would recommend going with konamis map format that they used for all 3 nes games(at least very similar according to research so far), it is space and drawing efficient(designed to fill vertical columns, since it only scrolls horizontal) and we have many levels and a couple level editors already made this wayhttp://www.zophar.net/utilities/neslevel/stake.html and others.

I can likely modify offsets of the ripper to extract data from cv 2 and 3 also. The level editors that exist can do most anything we would need, with a bit of hacking, to make entirely new quests with diferent layouts also...so I'm not saying just a CV replica here. But a good place to start would be making CV1, then we'd have the basics working spot on.

I will post the tool in a couple hours I need to fix a few things.