Topic: NES-Style Castlevania Belmont Engine for GameMaker! (Version 0.3 UPDATE!)

[Jorge D. Fuentes]

Mine's a combination of all Trevors I know.  He's got the dark hair of CoD Trevor, the headband from CV3 Instruction Booklet Trevor, the armor plates of ZombieTrevor/Greatest5Trevor, and the gold colors of CV3 BoxArt Trevor.

[TheouAegis]

I wouldn't mind sprites like that, but I would want sprites like that for EVERYTHING. ... It'd be nice because I could use sprites from the 16-bit games with all their colors (even though I've already gone and done up 4-color sprite sheets for such beloved enemies as Behemoth. (Contrary to what may be popular belief, many enemies from recent games are still close in size to the NES sprites, so pitting Trevor against Behemoth isn't a farfetched idea.) I did a recolor of the sword skeletons in CV3 so their armor is brass, and a couple other 6-color edits. I was planning my game out while I was recoloring sprites, trying to think what two palettes I would be using in each area (because typically you have 2 palettes for Trevor and 2 for enemies and 4 for the background ... Although I could be wrong about that and if I am I'll be pissed).

Currently hung up on Holy Water. Worked on it for 4 hours this morning but it's still buggy. I'm not going to mess with half-steps like the original had (meaning if you threw a holy water right next to a ledge, half the time it would pass under the ledge and the other half it would hit the ledge), but the collision box seems too small for me to work with, even with my block object set at full bounding box. Oh wait, I didn't spend 4 hours on the holy water, I spent half that time working on the font and putting the NES palette in. ... Cuz I wanted the font color to match the palette. I'm thorough, dammit. Then I had to work out a bug with my hearts system (stupid if-then brackets). Restructured some stuff. The usual.

I'm going to be working full time and on a shift that won't let me have my computer at work, so I won't be getting as much done from here on out it would seem. But it seems I've got most of the difficult stuff out of the way (aside from the holy water), so maybe progress will be smoother. I'll post a video update soon.Won't be pretty, though, because I can't be assed to make nice backgrounds for Trevor to walk around on.

[abaldwin360]

Wow.

I have been working on a remake of the original Castlevania using SOTN/ROB sprites and backgrounds.

I started having issues trying to program the "stun" effect when Simon (re-colored SOTN fake Trevor sprite) fell too far, I was also having issues programming walking up and down steps.

Are you going to release your code to the public? I would definitely give credit!

[TheouAegis]

Yes, this will be shared publicly. I'm typing up (and revising as I go) an info sheet/instructions for how to work with what I"ve programmed.

To Do List
Finish Holy Water
Look for formulae for parabolic motion in order to get rid of timelines (minor issue)
Status window drawn at the top of NES games
Make Vampire Killer upgradable (about halfway done)
Make torches
Make hearts
Make relic drops
Make a Skeleton
Test item and whip hit detection on above Skeleton
Make rotating/trap floors


For now that's all I have planned on adding prior to release (originally was going to release with a lot fewer options).

[TheouAegis]

I want to cry. I just looked at the PPU again. You're allowed one palette for enemies. The whole reason for Blood Skeletons is that's one of the only ways to have more than one palette for enemies in use in a room at the same time. One palette for Trevor. One palette for the relics, money bags, and whip upgrades. One palette for hearts, torches, and explosions (from torches and death animations). And then one palette specific for enemies. But it's not SPECIFIC to enemies! The whip flashes all 4 palettes -- meaning the whip won't flash the same colors from room to room. I'll have to go back and recolor my sprites.

[Jorge D. Fuentes]

You'd have to swap in different graphics for the whip, as if it were a new object.  That'd be the only way to get it to flash.
As for enemies, you'd have to have a shared common palette.  Thankfully all of the enemies use generally the same palette if you're going NES-style, so they'd be 12 colors at most, but you 'could' make a large common palette of 256 colors and add duplicate sprites/tiles to the sheet so that you simulate the flashyness of the whip.

[TheouAegis]

Wait, what? What was that last part you said?


Currently, all I had planned for the whip was 3 frames for the sample engine (each frame of the whip's animation is actually a separate sprite, which makes sense because it doesn't proc when Trevor's arm is all the way back at the start of the animation). But in my final version, I was going to have a variable in each room called room_palette which my obj_Whip would cross-reference in its Create event and then when the whip reaches the 4th frame it uses whatever sprite matches that palette. Of course, to keep the file sizes down, I'd have to limit the number of enemy palettes I'd have to choose from.

And currently, since to my knowledge I'm stuck using multiple tile sets and duplicate sprites for breakables, I'm kind of already looking at having a lot of wasted memory just in sprites and tiles. Unless of course there's some way to pull off a palette swap with a greyscale base sprite and tile set. I'm open to suggestions there.

I have to go back to CV3 and look at the Name Tables some more to see how they pulled off some things. Breakaway floors seem to clearly be in the tile layer, but rotating trap floors appear to be sprites based on where they're located in the ROM data.

And I'm QQing about the palette limit because I wanted that plant lady in my game and I had her down to 6 colors (2 sprite sets), but now I can't use her or I can't use those colors at least because neither palette I gave her can be substituted with one of the constants. Unless of course I make her a background (which I'm doing with Behemoth, who only uses 3 colors per layer -- 3 in the background part and 3 in the leg/mouth sprites). I'll admit, I may have had an unrealistically diverse palette assortment in my sheet, but I tried to keep it small and in fact a couple of the palettes I could have merged together because they're not too different. But still... *wipes away a tear*

[Aridale]

why are you so worried about it? Its not like its gonna run on a REAL nes so why go outta your way to try to make it all match nes specs? As long as everything is 8bit the actual palettes arent gonna matter to 99% of the ppl that play the game. Same for the whip flashin. Make your sprites for the whip have the different color frames in the animation and be done with it. No one will notice. As for memory concerns... the GM exe is gonna take more memory than all your graphics combined most likely and unless someones tryin to run it on windows 3.1 its not gonna matter anyway

[TheouAegis]

YOU DON'T UNDERSTAND!
*runs back to his room with tears streaming behind him and slams the door shut behind him*

And some people will notice. People complained about Mega Man 7 FC and Mega Man 8 FC and even Mega Man 9 and Mega Man 10 because they didn't stick close enough to NES specs. There are picky people like that. Just look on these forums even. People bitch about Trevor's and Simon's clothes even.

[Jorge D. Fuentes]

Only jerks like Uzo would notice that sort of thing.
Ha ha!  I kid, Uzo, you know we're pals.

[uzo]

You're completely right though. I analyzed MM9 and 10 for their authenticity seeing how far they deviated. It's not as much as some people would have you believe though. People sometimes underestimate the NES.

[TheouAegis]

Like I said, I supported the MM8 FC guys. And like, I was under the impression you couldn't change tiles unless you changed all the tiles, but obviously in CV3 they wouldn't have made spiked ceiling traps. I'm just wondering how backgrounds really work on the NES. I read about it but I forgot. But I could tell MM8 FC was pretty close to the NES's power.

[uzo]

MM8 FC is a complete sack of garbage. Not only do they completely ignore the NES limits, they changed many things in game cause they fail at properly replicating it in NES styled terms.

[Jorge D. Fuentes]

And yet, it's still a pretty alright game.  If they really wanted to mimic the NES, they should've made it a NES ROM instead of a PC game.  It's just fine as a PC title that happens to have retro graphics and sounds.

It's no big deal to 99.9% of the populace, so the developers shouldn't give half a frozen shit about that last 0.1%.
If that 0.1% is stopping you from pushing the title out, then it's but a trifle.

[TheouAegis]

The palettes looked a little off in some places, but other than that, what else was wrong with MM8FC? I downloaded it but haven't played it much yet. I try to Google complaints for them but no one ever says what the games do that couldn't be done on a real NES. I'm not talking about the intro movie thingy. I mean actual gameplay.

... I know we're getting off-topic but this is my thread, so it's ok.