Former Dawn

Former Dawn Kickstarter

Former Dawn, a revolutionary RPG for the NES and PC has a Kickstarter campaign ongoing! This is a game by Something Nerdy Studios and features never before seen features on a NES game. It is truly jaw dropping. Check it out!

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/something-nerdy/former-dawn

A demo for the Everdrive N8 PRO and for PC (emulator) can be downloaded here:

Downloads

STORY: After a failed terraforming mission on an exoplanet light years from Earth, humanity dies out but leaves behind a child species(called the “Formers”) that forgets its own origin. You play a common hunter who rediscovers the truth and struggles against the faceless Organization which will stop at nothing to defeat you. Along the way, you recruit a motley crew of brave Formers who are willing to risk everything for Justice.

Chronicles of Astraea: Former Dawn is, in a nutshell, a story of discovery, resistance to evil, and exploration of the human condition. The world is rich, the plot complex, and the characters dynamic and multi-dimensional.

Patreon launched!

https://www.patreon.com/bitinkstudios

I’ve created this patreon so I can focus more of my time on NES related projects. The math is simple: the more patrons, the more % of my time is spent on NES and less on other freelance. If you like my work and want to see more of it, please consider supporting!

The patreon is divided into two major fronts. NAW and NES game development. I’ll let patrons decide which one should get more attention, but I will work on both to some extent.

A huge thank you to those already supporting, you’re the pioneers!!

E.C. Myers
Kevin L Drum
Danny Dawson
BacteriaMage
Fireskies Studios
Joseph Boyd

Super Hiking League DX released!

Super Hiking League DX is finally out on consoles and Steam!!!! A huge thank you to QUByte interactive! If you enjoy platformers go play it now, it’s guaranteed fun. I don’t have a huge marketing budget, so I have to rely on players’ support. As a thank you the price is really small!

Watch the trailer right here:

Playstation Store
Xbox Store
NA Nintendo Eshop
BR Nintendo Eshop
UK Nintendo Eshop
Steam (Windows)

TMNT II (NES) Options Mode

Here’s a hack that I’ve made that adds an options mode to TMNT II on the NES. I’ve tried to make it as polished as possible. The idea is to “replace” the original game, since the original mode is intact on it in normal mode. There’s now an easy mode and a hard mode. What easy mode does is cut all damage in half, except when it was already the minimum of “1”. And hard mode doubles all damage. Quite a challenge!!

This has been fully tested on fceux and on a front loader with an everdrive N8.

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NES Signal Tester

As seen on my twitter post.
I have created a simple ROM for testing this on emulators and flash cartridges without having to rely on having a copy of Megaman 3 around. Currently the sprite scrolling is kind of buggy but it’s not a big deal. I have added some stars as sprites because I have noticed that on Megaman 3 some of them are sprites. There doesn’t seem to be any difference between pixels made of sprites or pixels made of background. Sprites flicker at 30hz as in that stage.

Download NES Signal Tester

D-Pad moves the screen 1 pixel per frame, while A,B,Select and Start move them in directions step by step for a more controlled test.

Changelog:

v1.02: Added sprite flicker and restored sprite movement with the scrolling. Adjusted initial sprites positions. Sprites are still not wrapping correctly.
v1.01: Changed from mapper 3 to mapper 0. Fixed header for CHR banks count.
v1.00: Public release.

NES Darkwing Duck now with Sound Test

It seems there’s a hoax regarding this game having a secret sound test. Couldn’t get the code to work at all. Investigating the ROM I could not find any information about it having a sound test mode. So I created one. At the title screen, press left / right to use it.

   

Patching Instructions:

1- Download Darkwing Duck NES Sound Test

2- Get your Darkwing Duck USA ROM (please legally own the game). Make a BACKUP of it!

3- Download Lunar ips

4- Open lunar ips, click “Apply IPS Patch”. Locate the ips file contained in the zip.

5- Locate the Darkwing Duck ROM to apply the patch to.

Done! Now play it on your NES emulator of preference!

Super Hiking League is available on Steam!

Super Hiking League is finally available to Windows systems on Steam! It’s been a long ride, and it’s coming to a milestone. Not an end! There’s a lot of ideas about what to do next. Nevertheless, the game is ready and packing. Really excited to see player’s reactions ^^

You can get it here!

Be sure to check out the release trailer! And don’t forget to follow us on Twitter!

 

Bread In The Sky (BITS): An Odyssey2’s Pick Axe Pete level editor

I recently bought myself a super treat. The first console I’ve ever played, the “Magnavox Odyssey2”, widely known in Brazil simply as the “Odyssey”. I hadn’t played it in decades! The emulator that exists is a little weird to use if you are not very familiar with the system, not to mention that you don’t have the manuals which are very important to the experience. So it was amazing to play it all again. It brought back so many memories. It’s even A/V modded so the image is amazing on my CRT tvs.

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Tutorial series for simulating NES Graphics

On my twitter page (follow me if you haven’t yet!) I’ve been creating a few very quick tutorials to help people understand what NES graphics mean. I see a lot of people doing pixel art and just calling it “8-bit” or “NES style”, but a lot of the time it misses the target by a fair margin. Hopefully these will help clarify why. You can click on any image to see the original tweet.

Tutorial 1: Background palette


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NES Homebrew Source Code

As I’m making my PC game Super Hiking League, sometimes I need a break. Recently, it’s been in the form of translating some of its elements into a NES homebrew program. I can’t call it a game yet, as there’s very little going on gameplay-wise.

Still, it was quite an achievement for myself to get something not only being displayed on screen, but with interactivity resembling a videogame! So I decided to share this as an out-of-the-box, 100% portable, working project that compiles a NES ROM with graphics, screen transitions, music and interactivity. It is for Windows only, and since it uses the graphics from Super Hiking League, it is for educational purposes only, unless stated otherwise. Look in the license.txt file for more info on this.

By running the batch file, it generates a NES Mapper 3 ROM with 2 16k PRG banks and 8 8k CHR banks, with vertical mirroring. You can edit these settings on the nes.cfg and header.asm files in the system folder, provided you know what you are doing. Included in the zip are the ca65.exe and ld65.exe programs required by the batch file. So hopefully, absolutely no configuration is required. Just unzip the folder and run the batch!

I feel like not many working projects such as this are available out there, so here it is! The code is all in assembly language. Use any text editor for the files. The main file is “main.asm” in the src folder. Disclaimer: the code comes from an unexperienced NES developer who’s just really happy that it works, so you may use it to try things out, but do not take it as an example of good coding practices, as I’m pretty sure it’s far from that!

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February update (I’m not dead!)

Whoa! Nearly five months have passed and I haven’t posted anything. How did I let that happen? Oh, right, I’ve been very busy working on my new game!

After studying a few game engines I had to pick one of them. At first I settled with UDK, and I had pixel perfect 2D graphics working, but in the end, it was just overkill. There are better engines dedicated to 2D games out there. I’ve tried a few, and in the end I chose YoYo Games’ GameMaker Studio. It is perfect for an intermediate programmer such as myself. And now they have released GameMaker 2 Beta which has a lot of nice features and improved performance. I can add four thousand enemies with simple AI without a frame drop on my i7 notebook! The engine is still in Beta though, so it’s not perfect, but I’m very satisfied.

devlog01

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Famicom version’s manual scanned

I’ve been working a lot on my new game. Nothing to show yet though, so in the meantime here’s the manual for the japanese version of Super Pitfall scanned for your delight. I believe the US release got a pretty close translation, but who knows, there may be some differences.