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Dr. Ludos

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A member registered Jun 15, 2017 · View creator page →

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As a SNES lover, I'm happy that you made a game for this console, and kudos for coding it in 65816 assembly!

I know the game isn't finished, but I really loved this prototype / demo. The Zuma / Puzzloop game mechanics twisted to use the various buttons color of the SNES gamepad is a great idea, especially when played with the SNES controller! :).

Regarding aiming, I like that you could change angle with left/right, but the speed is a bit too high, sometimes it's difficult to aim precisely.

I made it to 4105 points before quitting realizing that levels were looping endlessly. I love the level complete animation btw, simple but efficient.

This is a very promising entry, please keep working on it by adding sounds, some kind of audio / visual feedback, more levels, etc. as your game concept is a great fit for the SNES and it's 4 colored buttons!

Woaw, I never heard of this machine, thanks for shining some light on it!

The game itself is interesting, albeit very challenging.  The concept is interesting though, and I love the overall graphics and sound of the game.

Congrats on keeping lesser know machines alive and making us discover them through game jams like this one!

A multi-platform entry, very impressive!

The game is quite cool too, simple to understand by fun to play. The levels difficulty is very well balanced. I tried the Megadrive version, and I think it would be better if you could map the "jump" to a button instead of "up", but it's still very enjoyable in its current state.

Graphics looks nice, and I'm amazed that you managed to compile it so many platform at once in such a short time-frame, congrats!

A promising start for a dark cave exploration / metroidvania game!

I love that you used the Abuse main character, it bring back a lot for memories of this (scary!) game! The graphics overall are good, and the large cave was interesting to explore, with a lot of jumps and ladder.

Regading platform movement, as another comment noted, I too fell that the main character is a bit "floaty". I think the jump is maybe too "long", or maybe by having a stronger gravity I would like it better, but this is a bit nitpicking, and I know platform movement is very hard to design.

The game needs music the add to the already great atmosphere of being lost and lonely in a large cave. I'm looking forward the next versions of the game!

Nice start of a Pang remake / clone! 

The game plays quite well, altough it's quite challenging because the character is quite big and shoot only little bullet! I love the main character looks. I hope you keep working on the game, adding sound would greatly enhance it. Keep up the good work!

Nice start of a Pang remake / clone! 

The game plays quite well, altough it's quite challenging because the character is quite big and shoot only little bullet! I love the main character looks. I hope you keep working on the game, adding sound would greatly enhance it. Keep up the good work!

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Woaw, a very unique entry for the Sega Mega Drive!

The mood is wonderful in this game, and I really love the music and the graphics. It's interested the graphics were AI generated, I don't think many homebrewer have used AI generated content yet! :). The monster look really good, and the whole game have a spooky mood that I loved.

Gameplay-wise, as others have noted I really enjoyed the map, it was very helpful to avoid getting lost. The difficulty is brutal though - I know it's part of the genre's DNA, but this can be a bit frustrating when you discover the game. Oh and I noticed a small typo on the word "inventory" when displaying its content during the game.

That being said, overall it's a very good game, congrats!

Very cool game, I love it! The puzzle are very creative, and the difficulty is well designed (very easy at first, and quickly become more challenging).

I like the overall graphics / mood, the only thing lacking is maybe a background music.

Anyway, it's a very solid entry, and the roots of full fledged game with a lot of puzzle (or maybe a puzzle editor? ;))

Hi fellow Atari 2600 developer! :)

This is a very interesting entry, quite an ambitious Zelda-like game!

Like others, I had quite an hard time figuring things out at the beginning of the game, but then I enjoyed the many screens and "story like" events inside the game (like the knight saving you), very cool!

I did encounter a bug where the orc pushed me outside of the room border, and I could no longer reentry inside the room. I had to wait there to die (see screenshot).


Other than that, quite a promising entry, I hope you keep working on it and polish it further. I think more hints or more detailed written instructions could be useful, especially in the beginning. For example, it took me about 15 min to figure out that you could enter the blue house on the third screen form the side of the house and not only for the door that was blocked. (and it happened by sheer luck as I was wandering aimlessly). If can somehow avoid such cryptic puzzle at the very beginning of the game I think it would easier to keep new players on the game :).

Hi! The day has come, we have a Kickstarter campaign for the physical release of GB Corp, with some very unique items and goodies inside the box: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/yastunagames/gb-corp-a-new-physical-gameboy...

Hi! The day has come, we have a Kickstarter campaign for the physical release of GB Corp, with some very unique items and goodies inside the box: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/yastunagames/gb-corp-a-new-physical-gameboy...

Hi! The day has come, we have a Kickstarter campaign for the physical release of GB Corp, with some very unique items and goodies inside the box: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/yastunagames/gb-corp-a-new-physical-gameboy...

Thanks a lot, I hope you'll enjoy the game! :)

Thanks a lot for your kind words! :)

Yeha!

As promised, here is some news: DMG Deals Damage is now available again in physical format, and so does Sheep It Up!

The games are comes in a beautiful fully boxed edition (cart, box, manual), or as a single cart like before. And of course, if someone  bought the "cart only" version before wants to upgrade it, we are also selling a "package only (manual + box)" version too!

You can get the new physical edition of DMG Deals Damage from here:

https://yastuna-games.com/en/nintendo-game-boy/51-59-dmg-deals-damage-gb.html#/28-gb_cart-grey/33-packaging-box_booklet_inlay

Good question! I honestly haven't found the time to start working on this game again, but I'll do it someday :)!

Hi again!

I'm happy to hear that you have a SNES project in the work too! The SNES needs more and more homebrew titles, so I'll be happy to answer your questions on this topic too.  You can contact me directly through email: drludos AT ludoscience DOT com

Hi, thanks for feedback!

Your analysis is right, in many games you usually recycle the enemy sprite to make an explosion, and reduce the total sprites count  . But for Yo-Yo Shuriken, it wasn't possible, because when an enemy is killed, its sprite is reused to display a coin (or a bonus). The enemies always drop a coin or a bonus, because it's the only way to score points in the game.

So I had to use an extra set of hardware sprites to display the explosions :). It was more convenient because killing an enemy can now trigger more than one explosion at a time (like with the bosses).

So yes, for this game I do have up to 24 enemies (16x16 pixels) + 10 explosions sprites (32x32 pixels) on screen.

Thanks a lot

And yes, the music in a very cool public domain resource file produced by a member of the talented GB Studio community, so it's used in several games :).

It's titled "In The Town" and composed by krümel (crumb)#0723, under a public domain license (GB Studio Community Assets):  https://github.com/DeerTears/GB-Studio-Community-Assets/tree/master/Music

You're welcome :)!

Hi! Thanks a lot for your interest! 

Yes, I'm currently working on having this game (and also my other GB games) available on another shop.

It'll take some time as I'm working on having a fully boxed release available alongside the "cartridge only" one, but they will definitively be available again as physical format.

I'll make a post here again when it's available so you can get the information :)

Woaw, thanks a lot for your interest and your support!

I'm definitively planning on expanding / enhancing the game, and try to make a physical release for it in the future :)!

Hi!

To be honest, the low level hardware detection is performed by the SDK i use: GBDK-2020 https://github.com/gbdk-2020/gbdk-2020

The test itself is made at startup: https://github.com/gbdk-2020/gbdk-2020/blob/develop/gbdk-lib/libc/targets/gbz80/... (see __cpu variable)

Basically, the boot rom is slightly different and leaves the values of some register in different states at startup, and that's how we can detect which GB model we are running on (for DMG / Pocket / Color / Advance detection). For the detection of SGB, it's different: we ask to enable some SGB only features (such as mutliplayer support). If the machine replies a with specific value, then it's running on a SGB, else it does nothing meaning it's not running on a SGB but on another Game Boy model.

Yes, I do plan to try to add SGB2 support too in the future :)

(first I need to get an actual SGB2 to test if everything is working well :p)

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Hi!

I never tried to do large SNES games (for now), but from what I've read the maximum "standard" size for games is 4MB (32 Mbits): https://problemkaputt.de/fullsnes.htm#snescartridges

But by using special chips inside the cartridge, you can go way larger: the two largest SNES games from the commercial era (Star Ocean and Tales of Phantasia) where 6MB (48 Mbits) each. And nowadays, using the SD2SNES / FXPAKPRO Flashcart with the MSU-1 mapper, you can go up to 4GB in size: http://nerdlypleasures.blogspot.com/2018/01/sd2snes-and-msu-1.html

But honestly, with the way the SNES stores audio and graphics data (very efficient formats = small sizes), 4MB is quite a large amount of space to make cool SNES games :)

Thanks a lot for the kind words! :)

Thanks a lot, I'm glad you enjoyed it :)!

Woaw, thanks a lot for your support, it's motivating! :)

If I manage to push this project up to a physical release, I'll announce it on my newsletter. You can subscribe to it from here: Dr Ludos releases newsletter

Also, I post early beta versions and in progress information of all my homebrew projects for my supporters on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/drludos

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Hi, thanks for the kind words, and for the warning!

I only have an Everdrive GB (1st model) at home, and it doesn't have any issue with this as it saves the SRAM content on SD cart only when we are loading a new rom. But if you have a Flashcart that writes directly the SRAM contents on the SD card, yes, it definitively can be an issue I guess.

The current version of the game doesn't have a pause feature, but I'll add it for a next version so people with such a FlashCart can "disable" the SRAM writes to avoid corrupting the SD card.

Regarding the EZ Flash Omega, can it run GB/GBC roms? (as it's a GBA flashcart if I'm not mistaken). If no, I don't think this device will be able to run the game: to run this game on a GBA you should run it from a "Game Boy" Flashcart so the console switches to the "GBC" mode instead of the GBA one.

Hi, thanks a lot for your interest! 

I do intend to keep working on this game (for example, adding new GB models), and then yes, I'd like to make it available in physical format. I've already released 2 GB games on cartridge  in the past few years, so I'll try to do it for this game too!

I've checked the latest version, and there is indeed a is_gba variable now. Thanks a lot for the heads up, I'll definitively use it to add GBA support in a future version of the game :)!

Woaw, thanks a lot for your feedback, it's really motivating to keep doing such games :)

This is a very good idea indeed! I wasn't aware the newest GBDK did have this feature, thanks for telling me, I'll look into it! The game is compiled with the 4.0.4 version of GBDK-2020, as I didn't want to update the SDK a few days before the deadline to avoid "breaking stuffs, but now I'll take time to update and explore the 4.0.5 version!

Thanks! I hope you'll enjoy it on real hardware too :)

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Hi, thanks for the mention and i'm glad the comments in my HTML files could be helpful to someone :)!

To restate them here, I used a HMTL5 port of RetroArch SNES9x core made by Toadking (https://toadking.com/retroarch/snes9x-next.html)

I set various options and modified the HTML page to embed a specific rom so it's easier to release a homebrew game on itch, so It might be easier to take my customized files and simply edit them and replace the rom file with your own game :).

@BennySnesDev: do you also have issue playing KeepingSnesAlive through HTML5 emulator on your computer? From the HTML5 SNES emulators I've tried, I found this port of RetroArch to be the fastest (I use a fairly low-spec / cheap pc myself too, and the game is running smooth for me).

I like the concept, it's quite original puzzle perfectly suited to the GBA! The presentation is top notch, the music is great, and it plays smoothly!

A very great entry, the only stuff I lacked is a "pause" button! :)

Very cool and unique entry, I love it! The music is wonderful and helps you get "in the zone" while playing. It would be even better with sound effects, but even without it the music compensate for them!

I love the "triangle" art style and the overall polish. Gameplay wise, it's easy at start but become quite challenging once you reach level 3!

One suggestion would be to reduce the number of hit points of the enemy on the lower level, especially on level 1 - as the game is meant to be played over and over, after a while it get tedious to restart knowing that you'll have to kill them all again has they have a quite large life bar!

Anyway, great work on this game, and I hope you'll keep working on it!

Woaw, very original and literally mind-twisting puzzler! :)

The game is very challenging, but I enjoyed it once I got used to the controls. The music is great too, and set a great mood.

Congrats on this great entry!

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Woaw, my jaw dropped to the floor when I saw so many 3D polygons rendered at a solid 60 fps, with outstanding music playing in the background and very fun game to play!

Congratulations, this is a VERY impressive entry, and it feels like a commercial game!

The game is already complete (and challenging), but I had an idea that maybe you'll like to make it a bit easier: how about making players only bounce/slow down when they hit a wall instead of exploding, unless they have a turbo activated?

That way, you'll a have nice risk/reward: you can go faster, but you risk losing precious seconds if you crash because you'll explode. And if you hit an obstacle without using a turbo, it'll be less frustrating to just being slowed down that exploding right away.

Also, wouldn't it be cool to be able to activate the turbo after the timer reaches 0, but the car isn't slowed down yet? That way, some players may be able to complete a race at the very last second (I lost a couple of time right being the finishing line with a turbo still available). Of course, if the car is stopped, triggering a turbo won't save you because it's too late.

Anyway, these are just random ideas because I spent lot of time crashing into walls :)

This would definitively be worthy of a cartridge release!

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Woaw, 462 points is an incredible highscore!
Are you some kind of Jedi who can see the near future? ;)

More seriously, congratulations, I'm not sure wether anyone will be able to top 462 points!

And BPCore-Engine is a really great engine (its author Evan Bowman also submitted the game Skylands for this jam, a very impressive entry), I honestly think this is the most "newcomers friendly" way to make GBA games. It's also very fast to compile new roms so it's a breeze to make fine tuning on the gameplay.