Ah I think I posted something misleading. I mean I took elements from the arcade game Nemesis for the game's powerup design. Progressively better powerups as you collect tokens.. you can choose which one to use at any time. I think in the end it was too complex though, actually.
The original was first of all an old mobile game, I think. I was aware of it cos I know Pascal, I'd seen his games many times, though I'd never played this one. It was pretty clear from playing the first level that it would be fine, (with some restrictions on the number of sprites at once)
Actually I hadn't played it all the way through before starting the conversion. I wasn't really aware of all of the bosses. Thankfully none of them were too bad for converting. I guess I'd just have changed them to fit though if they proved difficult to do.
I've got 6 music tracks in Gunslugs now, and trying to get that version out (plus much smaller file size) But I seem to have broken my music player on real hardware.. oh dear :)
I am not sure I'd call Gunslugs a demake.. it's pretty much identical to the original really. To the extent that it's a shame, cos the game itself could look much better if designed around the Genesis (bigger sprites etc).
The reason I like doing these conversions though is because I have all the art already made, so without an artist I can get so much more of it done. Nice to have a fixed goal to aim for as well.. you know if something is right or wrong :)
Oh thank you , it's nice to get feedback on these little games! Definitely a 'Tapper' feel to that one. "Outpost" on Apple II is the one I had vaguely in mind when I made it. (edit: whoops, I'd already written that in the main post)
I was worried about Firebird being too similar to Rocket Panda. Desperately tried to come up with some different enemies, but without much success :)
Great to hear about Wacky Races being played.. you may be the first people ever to have actually played a two-player game without being paid to do so!
Yeah, just a different approach.. for me it's about keeping enough energy throughout to give yourself a chance at the boss. Actually I was going to put health pickups in there, but totally forgot to :)
(the crazy colors are there to make my gfx look less bad!)
haha I was trying to do a pun with coffee grounds.. the beans are under..ground. and you need to grind them. It was a lot of work for a pun which didn't work 😂
Thank you so much. Definitely a good point about the exit collision, thanks.
There's still a bit of debugging to do, I think. But it's nearly there. I'm actually waiting on music (the same with Gunslugs) before I can release it properly. Always good to test on different devices, thanks for that!
Well it's a conversion, and Pascal (OrangePixel), the original author, really wanted the original music, if possible. Getting the music done is taking longer than everything else in the game put together!
Oh you don't need to buy it! Your help has paid for it many times over.
Firstly, for the other ones, i wasn't setting up he SRAM info correctly in the header. Which is odd, cos I had it working fine in a previous game, so I assumed I hadn't changed anything.. but somewhere along the line I'd deleted it!
But for all the others, I remembered vaguely that you have to pad the game out to the cartridge size, so I wrote a little tool to do that and patch up the header. I also fix the checksum in there, but I don't think that's used by anything. At least Kega Fusion doesn't complain about an incorrect checksum now though! :)
I suspect there are a few bugs. I also need to fix the balance a little. The second boss is too hard! And the one major thing remaining is the music. I'm still waiting on the midi files from the original composer, so I can translate those in to my system. There are six tracks in all, I think.
Argh, that's crazy :) This is very strange. I think that the updated version worked for some people, when it didn't work before.. and both worked for me on my hardware.
I will try to fix this, of course. I don't understand the mapper thing at all, there's nothing about it in the ROM headers, as far as I can see. Could you try the latest version of Gun Slugs and see if that works for you? https://spacepantsgames.itch.io/gun-slugs
Oh, getting somewhere. I don't understand the save thing, as that works on my hardware and - i think, I'll have to check - in my emulators. It's a real strange one. I wonder if it could be some header settings I haven't fiddled with.
Yep the music is too loud, I always manage to do that before having another pass at it, doh!
Thanks for the comments. I don't have a pad with more than 3 buttons though, so I could not test this configuration. It's made to be played on a standard 3 button pad :)
Thanks very much! My Everdrive has finally arrived, and I fixed a 9 month old bug in music playback which I didn't know existed (only broken on real hardware). I also added in the controls as you suggested, and you're right, it's MUCH better, thanks! I have a Model 1 as well, but annoyingly it's only PAL.
I'm waiting on some MIDI files as I need to convert the music to FM, but after that I'll be putting up Release Candidate 2.
