In the works as in almost ready, just missing some finetuning. It's the first SNES game for 8 human players. I've been developing this in the past 3-4 weeks. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yx2wFwIrces Not meaning to brag here, but I believe this is one of the best-looking homebrew titles on SNES. Hope I can release within in the next week or so...
Looks good, if a bit homebrew-ish. But great job on all the effects, sound streaming, concept and coding!
Thanks for your comments, they're appreciated. =) It's true, and it probably always will be given that I'm an amateur, not a professional. What exactly do you think is the most striking in making the game look homebrew-ish? Due to the amount of time I've spent looking at it, I can't tell anymore...
Out of the videos I have seen, the one that shows it being played on a real SNES with 8 people probably showed it off best, after I while I wanted to punch the person speaking English with the stupid effect. The game does look like it plays bloody poorly and that after a few minutes you'll be itching to get Bomberman out. It does look mind numbingly dull is there anymore to walking around the screen and hitting people? Couldn't you have looked at Butasan and ripped that off? It looks good in places, although lots of palette swapped characters makes it look very amateurish as does the use of Japanese kanji when the game is not Japanese.
Probably the stock photography in the background, with the characters gliding over the image. In other words, there's no cohesion between the FG and BG, and thus no reason to have the BG. Kanji/Japanese in German-made games is uncannily popular, but it needn't look amateurish. While Nanostray goes a bit overboard with the meaningless Kanji, the original Apidya seemed to fit perfectly
I can see where you're coming from, but I think you're being overly harsh about it and kinda missing the point here. When the idea for creating this game came up first, I wanted something that could be used as a surprise competition of sorts. A minigame for eight players that nobody knew yet but could instantly play with equal chances. Learn to play in 2, master the game in 5 seconds, that sort of thing. Therefore, the gameplay is as simple as it gets: There's no depth, no secrets, and no advanced technique. You move around and have two punches, that's it. This game is designed to offer a quick multiplayer fix, not entertain you for hours. I don`t think that's necessarily a bad thing, though. I had multiple, different-looking characters with more realistic-looking color palettes in the game at one point, but reverted to having only one character with eight wildly different palettes, for two reasons: One, I want the player to know from the beginning that everybody is playing the same character, with equal stats and chances. When you're looking at other beat em ups, different-looking characters usually handle different, some are speedier, others are more powerful. I did not want to give that impression. Second, with eight players on the screen at once, you quickly loose track of who you are and where your healthbar is at, unless all characters are clearly distinguishable. I feel that different colors can improve this situation the most. I think you would be hard pressed to find a SNES game that doesn't use palette swaps in one way or another and while I can understand some may despise the use of Kanji in a non-japanese game, I've seen that in commercial games before. Therefore, I don't believe these are signs for amateurishness. As for directly copying Butasan or Bomberman, that's completely out of question. I think you're right about the backgrounds, they don't really serve a purpose. All have a collision map, but are essentially large quadratic arenas, except for one level, which is a series of narrow roads of sorts(not shown in the video). My original intention was to clearly seperate player sprites and backgrounds to improve visibility, but I may have to put some more work into them.
I was amazed all of the voice was from the SNES. And the intro was pretty impressive. I do think the actual gameplay is rather plain looking, but given that I didn't see 8 actual people playing it at once who knows. With 8 real people I imagine it does exactly what your target was. Either way it is quite a nice SNES homebrew and I can't think of anything that comes close to that.
I look forward to seeing what else you can produce. Something besides a figher game(sorry, not my type of game) would be awesome. And for an amateur job, for me personally it doesn't show so much, if not for the fact that you've pulled off so many things there I haven't seen from an snes homebrew, ever. Keep it up
Pretty cool. Was also a bit inspiring too, as it made me pick up my old snes project and sit up all night programming.
Well there's really no plan so I have no details I've had some plans for a plaformer for some time, but for now I'm just doing cheap demo effects to get me going on the snes again.
Yeah, my own experience is that its best to start small and work your way up slowly instead of directly shooting for a full-blown RPG or something. Nowadays, I feel that I wasted too much time on hacking and translating ROMs, which usually ranks pretty low on the difficulty-scale instead of starting my own projects from scratch as soon as possible. On the other hand, I've seen an unusually big amount of commercial code that way which tremendously helped figure out how stuff is done most efficiently. But please do tell me if you've got some progress to report, I'm very interested in what the rest of the scene is up to. (If you can call the remaining 3,4 active developers on the SNES a scene, that is.
lol. true that. I think the main problem is that there is no dedicated home for snes deving like there is for nes/gba/ds/etc. The only place I know of that have a forum for snes dev. is nesdev. And there's not much posting going on there. I think it's the SPC700 and the gigantic initialization routine that is scaring everyone away
I've just released the game, you can check it out here: http://gra.dforce3000.de/ Play it on real hardware or on Bsnes. Zsnes and Snes9x aren't accurate enough to get the audio streaming right.
d4s: I have just been reading about your other projects such as the ultra 16 , and if I maybe sent in the future, my SNES to you, and paid you the money. Would you make my common PAL SNES an Ultra 16 ? since anyway I think your work is awesome.
