Chalk 2.0

In the first release of Bilou's Adventure solo anniversary level, I had to use a caption on the blog post so that players would know they need to break one "barrier" to keep going.

Later revision replaced it with a chalk, that can break if you fall from high enough. But that wasn't properly explained to player either.

• I have sketches of training rooms to teach players chalk can be broken
• Original level design had key-and-lock there, and one of the design decision for Bilou's Dreamland is "it is okay to rely on keys and locks"
• What if a simple jump was pushing the chalk down by 1 pixel ? (in addition to everything else you can already do with it)

Bon, ça ne devrait pas être une surprise: Bilou's Dreamland reprendra le niveau-anniversaire pour la school zone. Il a l'avantage supplémentaire que pas mal de mécaniques de jeu qu'on y trouve ont déjà passé l'épreuve du playtesting, même si ce n'était clairement pas parfait. Un des éléments qui a le plus causé de soucis aux joueurs, c'est cette craie-qui-casse que Piek jugeait zelda-esque. C'était pourtant une amélioration notable par rapport à ce qu'il y avait dans la première version nds du niveau, où il fallait lire le blog pour savoir que ce crayon-là peut casser, contrairement aux autres...

It might not be bad that you could push down the chalk-gate without ever making a bigger jump, mostly because those eraser monsters will put you under pressure while you're trying to do that. It wouldn't be a big deal either if you could lower it by e.g. 8 pixels with regular jumps, but that it then lift up by 1 pixel every time you jump from it, making the next jumps useless. But at least you've seen it is interactive.

The 'tutorial' option is to introduce the chalk gate first in a setup where the player is guided into thinking that it is a 'jump-through' platform, but reveal that it actually breaks when Bilou knocks it from below.

Alors ces derniers mois, j'ai rajouté quelques croquis dans mon cahier-design que je vous renumérise ici (panne de scanner) qui étaient sous-titrés "où on apprend que la craie, ça casse". Histoire que le joueur ait déjà des informations à propos de ce type de bloc quand il va devoir réfléchir à son sujet. Je sais: j'avais donné comme ligne de conduite pour Dreamland "on s'autorise des portes-qui-téléportent, des clés, des serrures et des interrupteurs", et dans le design d'origine, c'est un simple interrupteur qu'on utilise. Mais on est tellement proche d'un mécanisme intégré dans le monde du jeu que ce serait dommage de ne pas vérifier que c'est jouable...

And once you know they are breakable, it is much easier to create a setup where you learn that they can also be broken if you fall on them with sufficient speed. Especially if I add some screen shaking when you hit plain ground with that speed... and ask my brother to give me a dedicated sound effect for that.

Sinon, une dernière option serait que chaque saut sur la craie la fasse descendre d'un pixel si la vitesse de collision est insuffisante. De quoi confirmer au joueur que oui, c'est pas interactif et que oui, c'est en tombant que ça va marcher, mais là, ce n'est pas encore assez. Elle n'exclut pas les écrans préliminaires, cela dit... Avec un peu d'écran-qui-tremble quand Bilou arrive sur le sol avec une vitesse suffisante pour casser des choses, ça pourrait faire un combo gagnant.

Being so close to actual organic gate mechanics, I feel like it would be a pity to come back with a plain old key opening a plain old lock.

Show and Birthday

It's been 10 years I've swapped jobs. It's been 10 years and yet most of my colleagues had never seen my little DS games. Working as a software developer makes it a bit harder to show hobby software to colleagues. Few of them know this blog, and those who do do mostly because of their intervention on the cxx or rongtudju categories. Most know I'm drawing things because I had some of my drawings displayed on the wall before we move to the new building.

And then a new batch of colleague joined, including one who's been doing a Flappy Bird clone on FPGA for a school assignment. They are the same generation as my S-team beta-testers, so I decided to pick my DS along at one social event, showed it to the young team... not much more than AnimEditor, but they were quite smiley about it. I did not have any ready-to-run playable demo on the device, though, and the cheese pot came in ...

That was a few months ago. Two weeks ago, I was visiting Ged's place. I clearly couldn't get there without my latest demo in my pocket. Well, not quite that version. The 'ongoing work' one, with a different tune for every world, but still needing fixes every here and there. He did enjoy it, though, and his 8-year-old son did enjoy some not-too-old version of SchoolRush. I've been told that it is a shame we can no longer catch the highest apples on the green zone, though.

Then there was my birthday, alone until 13:00 where Cyril came and play some Donkey Kong Tropical Freeze ... and check the latest progress on Bilou. And I knew I'd bring some "cookies" at the office the day after. I typically prefer to make it so people can come and meet me at the coffee machine rather than just drop the stuff and disappear... So I decided it was about time to show them Bilou as well. 

Most of my team were pleased to give a look at the game, a few of them played either 3-Rooms (.nds) or School Rush, and among those who did, none found it obvious that GRAB is GRAB instead of PUNCH. I might want to do something about that before I make a release of DreamLand... A few colleague actually tried to beat level 1 of School Rush and one even managed to reach level 2.

In other teams, there were of course some colleagues to find it odd that I do that with a Nintendo DS rather than going for Androïd or Nintendo Switch. The recent court face-off between Big N and the team behind 3DS and Switch emulators doesn't really speak in favour of retro-homebrew approach ...

Final round was yesterday with my even-younger-nephews who wanted to try 3-Rooms after I shown it to my brother for music selection approval. Last but not least, that triggered a question from the 15-y-o Tango nephew who was curious to know where he could download the tools I used to build the demo and asked whether programming was required to create new characters.

Gob3D

There are some items in the school zone that would better be done with 3D objects. This is not quite new, but if I intend to have them in Dreamlands, likely it is time to consider them more seriously. At least, to identify the questions to be addressed.

• How do we define hitboxes for a rotating 3D object ?
• How do we define events that trigger when a given angle is reached ? (e.g. for state machine transition)

Je me suis laissé quelques petites notes pour quand il sera temps d'essayer de faire des objets 3D un peu plus ambitieux que les élastiques de SpongeBop pour Dreamland. Notamment des livres qui tombent et des lattes qui tournent ... Chacun d'eux ouvrant la porte à au moins tout un niveau dans mon carnet bleu.

Il faudra que je trouve le bon moyen de lier des zones de collisions aux objets 3D, pour commencer. Puis il faudra que je vérifie que j'ai bien compris comment marchaient les "display lists" pour la NDS ... Et accessoirement, faire une petite estimation du nombre "d'écrans" que compterait la school zone de DreamLands avec et sans les objets 3D, vu que pour la green zone, je suis déjà bon avec 2 niveaux ancestraux :-P

For the objects being considered here, it might be enough if rotations always happen around the origin of the model. A smashing book always rotates around its bottom line (X position irrelevant). A bridge book, around the middle of its bottom line (Z position irrelevant). A ruler bridge around its center of mass (Y position of the origin irrelevant). Sure, this does not capture all the possible things you might want to do with a 3D object in a 2D game, but it seems to be a sufficient start to me.

Now, last time I toyed with the idea of doing more than ropes in 3D, I ended up with the issue that anything that isn't hard-coded would have to use "glCallList", but I couldn't figure out how that would work. At last, I studied the registers used to control the 3D geometry engine (which turn out to match the gl* function almost 1:1) and noted that there are "command identifiers" associated with every 3D register. A call list is essentially a set of values to be written to GFX_FIFO. Writing to GFX_BEGIN (in order to implement glBegin) would be replaced by writing the command identifier for "begin vertex list", etc.

I could use a tool to craft these and adjust their parameters so that things look properly shaped.

edit: avec le "niveau de Rémi" et le niveau-anniversaire, je suis déjà à 36 écrans (contre 30 pour le 2eme monde de Kirby's Dreamland). Il y a au mieux 6 écrans à prendre dans le niveau avec tous les livres qui tombent et 2 à 3 fois autant à aller chercher dans les niveaux sans ces livres (mais avec quand-même quelque chose comme des lattes qui tournent et des bookmarks qui pendent). Je dirais que le plus raisonnable, c'est de garder les livres-3D pour un autre jeu.

Reprendre les vieilles maps ?

Surprise quand j'avais fait le tour de mon cahier "level design", je n'ai en fait que 2 niveaux et demi candidats pour la Green Zone. Alors que le jeu en BASIC donne l'impression qu'il en comptait 5. Mais certains niveaux (dont celui baptisé "les grands arbres") ont vraiment mal vieilli.

Alors pourquoi ne pas inviter à la fête les maps de la démo 9/9/9 ? Elles auraient besoin d'un peu de vernis, mais elles pourraient faire l'office d'écran pour apprivoiser les mécaniques du jeu avant d'être lancé dans l'historique niveau 1 de la forêt ... 

The goal for the Green Zone of Bilou's Dreamland should be around 26 screens (that's Kirby's Dreamland world 1 size). I have only 2 levels of Bilou's Adventure that seem mature enough to be included ... A bit light if you ask me. But I do have 2 small levels drawn for the earliest GEDS demo back in 2009 that might be welcome, either in the 'dreamland' game, or in the 3-rooms demo.

They might feature a bit too much of Funky Funghi, but some of them are in interesting settings, like in that 2nd level with chunks of dirt here and there that are only waiting for bridges to be tested... So I went for a poll, and 3/4 responders picked "go for inclusion" while the last person would prefer those maps to be exclusive to the 3-rooms demo.

Et le 2eme niveau de la démo, avec ses petites plate-formes et ses funghi partout serait le terrain rêvé pour introduire les ponts et jouer un peu avec. Et si la question n'a pas suscité de débat remarquable sur twitter/mastodon, il y a au moins unanimité sur le fait que les faire intervenir au moins comme terrain d'exploration supplémentaire depuis la démo "three rooms" est une bonne idée.

• [done] import cube:/home/grizzly/pype/codinDS/dsgametools/schem.map 
• [done] import cube:/home/pype/hobby/R4-bakcup/GREENY.MAP
• [done] import cube:/home/pype/hobby/R4-bakcup/GREEN2.MAP
• [done] see what they look like
• [todo] bring them back on NDS so they could be fixed with up-to-date tileset.
  

Let's have more musics!

If you have tried the last demo, you most certainly noted that there are only 2 soundtracks for 3 rooms. And moreover, that there is a different set of sound effects depending on the room you're in. This is a drawback of the current sound engine, where everything is in one data file: main in-game tune, side tunes for menu and such, single-pattern for level clear, mini-patterns for 1-UPs and notable pick-ups, samples to play them all and samples to be used as standalone sound effects.

Bon, un des gros morceaux de programmation qu'il me reste à faire sur le moteur de jeu, c'est de faire en sorte qu'on puisse plus librement passer d'une musique à l'autre. Pas charger une autre musique en changeant de monde, ça c'est déjà fait. Non. Je veux dire décider que "string tracking" n'est pas la musique idéale pour la green zone et que "4U2" donnera mieux. Ou "little flower on the grass". Pour l'instant, ça pose un soucis parce que les fichiers musique contiennent aussi la palette sonore pour les différents personnages. Je voudrais donc pouvoir faire avec les samples et autres patterns ce que j'ai fait avec les images : charger un deuxième jeu de sons par-dessus la musique destinée au monde. ça fait un moment que ça me trotte en tête.

Et cette semaine, j'ai pu passer un premier cap: importer les samples. ça a l'air de marcher, mais ne nous leurrons pas: vu le type de programmation auquel on a affaire, il faudra rajouter quelques tests automatiques sous scruteur de mémoire pour garantir qu'on n'a pas ajouté une bombe à retardement dans le jeu. Et il y aura une repasse pour mettre ça au net avec des classes une fois que j'aurai validé le concept, parce que pour l'instant, ça part dans tous les sens, aucune des classes du moteur de jeu n'ayant été prévues pour ça.

So among the objectives I sketched in my 2024 notebook, there was some ideas to overlay .xm files the way I overlay .spr files... Or rather the other way'round. Here the generic "bilou.xm" containing mostly sound effects would see its samples and patterns imported over the world-specific song.

#ndsdev status last night: I could allow 2 instances of NTXM::Song to exist together.
#ndsdev status tonight: I can import instruments from one NTXM::Song so that different environment can share some sound effects.
little step for #gamedev, giant leap for game #MadeWithMyEngine.

I admit it might sound weird to add the common part over the world-custom part. After all video does the opposite. The reason here is that odds of adding common sounds over the course of the development feels higher than odds of adding new samples to an existing song. It shouldn't be too hard to tell my brother that patterns 50-60 should be kept free for sound effects, same for samples 50+, no matter what song we're using than to remap all samples of the per-world-songs to other slots because we've got one extra ooch-that-is-electric sample added in the shared bilou.xm

But yeah, I still make sure that bilou.xm is only loaded once, when the game initializes, and we don't pay extra wait time for overlaying it from the SD card. Instead, samples and patterns from the shared song got "borrowed" from the shared song and marked as such so that they aren't freed when we swap songs. Did I mention I read a bit about RUST programming language earlier this week ;) ?

edit: now also imports mini-pattern ^_^

edit: tried new songs ... some things worked, but some things look broken

edit: ow. turns out when you encounter pattern break on a mini-pattern, only the channel with the break command is discarded ^^". Seems like it was only a matter of luck that SchoolRush did work fine, and possibly explain why playing / leaving it idle long enough started producing super-fast trash sounds. Now, you'd have hard time dumping the ROM with that ... not as "easy" as with a runaway audio channel on a GBA.

edit: fixed

Demo: Scorpeye, Apple, Water and Sand

A new demo appeared. At last, my checklist is complete (and sure, there are still many more things to write for a next list). The demo is still based on the "three rooms". Don't expect much more land to explore. I still have a few concepts to prove before I can do that.

Enfin direz vous, et je ne vous contredirai pas. Voici la nouvelle démo de mes travaux en cours sur Bilou's Dreamland. Toujours limitée à 3 salles à peine de 2x2 écrans qui servent pour expérimenter les nouvelles mécaniques sans passer trop de temps à courir jusqu'à la nouvelle fonction à tester. Mais pour la première fois, vous allez pouvoir nager, affronter les sables mouvants, lancer des carapaces. Et puis il y a toujours le rodéo d'éponge et le saut en encrier. Allez, quoi. Sortez votre linker et faites-vous plaisir :)

Compared to the previous demo, you can try

• the new appleman animations
• the collapsing platform (pyramid)
• the scorpeye shell (jump on the scorpeye, then grab it like you'd do with a blador)
• flowing sand, pushing you down the slopes
• improved swim mechanics, waterflow
  

tested on NDS Lite, desmume 0.9.11 and desmume 0.9.6

Feel like playing a real game ? Try my previous titles ;)

Tools update

It'd be fun to try your editors! I'd probably do any serious development on a computer, but it's still cool to have an opportunity to try something I would've loved to have as a kid.

(Nova Storm, 7 February 2024)

I told you about Nova's work on NES and SNES already. Earlier this year, she shown interest into NDS homebrew and linkers, so I proposed her to try the dsgametools, and she replied with the heartwarming sentence above. My last tools release dates back from 2021, and while there are not that many things that have changed since, some annoying bugs were fixed nonetheless. So I went for a new package with some README, example files and PERL tools in addition to the .nds files proper. 

Salut les neveux. Si vous voulez tenter de faire des jeux sur Nintendo DS avec mes outils, vous êtes arrivés sur la bonne page. Téléchargez le .zip en utilisant l'image-lien ci-dessus et copiez les fichiers *dlta.nds à la racine de la carte-mémoire de votre DS. Tant que vous y êtes, vous pouvez aussi créer un répertoire nommé "moving" à la racine de la carte mémoire et déposer les fichiers présents dans Demo/efsroot/ du zip. On fait bien attention à ne rien effacer, on éjecte en toute sécurité, on remet tout en place dans la DS et voilà.

Level Editor: 

• fixing bugs with meta buttons;
• add support for special tiles used in conveyer belts and flowing water
• cosmetics: buttons with shadow and show when they are pushed
  

AnimEditor: 

• fixing 'apply to all previous frames' and 'apply to all future frames' buttons.
• only store thumbnails when the animation is used. 

runME:

• cosmetics: buttons with shadow and show when they are pushed 

SEDSdlta est votre éditeur de graphismes. Il permet de définir des palettes de couleurs et des pages de blocs 16x16 ou 32x32 qui seront sauvées dans des fichiers .spr. Ces fichiers peuvent ensuite être ouverts dans l'éditeur d'animations MEDSdlta ou dans l'éditeur de niveau LEDSdlta. Les niveaux créés par LEDSdlta seront sauvés dans des fichiers .map

Deux points communs dans tous ces éditeurs: maintenir L enfoncé pendant qu'on touche un bouton/une grille/une image à l'écran permet de faire une opération différente. Et appuyer sur L+R donne un peu d'aide.

These tools seem like they're very compact and full of features, maybe to the point of feeling a little bit cramped or unintuitive, though it's tricky to do something about that with this sort of screen resolution. I do appreciate the manual that you can access whenever to find out how to do stuff, and I'd rather have all the features than have a simplified tool. I liked the "scan" button in the sprite editor; that's not something I've really seen in pixel art programs.

I can certainly agree with that. It isn't rare that I have to dig my own blog -- or worse, the source code -- of AnimEDS when I want to do something a bit less frequent like copy a frame to a given position, create a new skeletton or adjust hit boxes. I'll have to complete the "L+R to get hint on how to use things" but it's good news that someone noticed it and appreciated it. Maybe it could be completed by a "please explain that control" mode where you can touch something on screen and learn about it rather than use it ...

I feel like it would help a lot to have buttons that bring up menus (especially on the animation editor, which needs more explanation than sprite editors do), where you'd have more room to make it clear what each option does or avoid needing button combos so you can fit more options on-screen, but that has to be weighed against how much it would slow down a user who knows what they're doing. You *could* have quick shortcuts with small icons alongside a button that brings up a menu that's less compact, though.

I have started something along these lines for 'monsters edition' in LEDS... That will be motivating to push it further

As you may have guessed, that lovely avatar for Nova comes straight from her website ;)