Decided I'd spend the weekend debugging Neon64, so I could put out a new beta sooner or later. I managed to fix Qix, finally, that crash had been bugging me for a long time.
There's a lot of other stuff to do, probably going to have to wait until next weekend as I'm exhausted right now. Good to know I can still make progress.
Spent most of today getting two of my old Flash games working in Ruffle:
A Change of Plans - not a whole lot to this one, you edit levels to make them solvable; the edit mode looks interesting
Master Exploder - this is an action-y puzzle mechanic, made over a weekend for Ludum Dare 18
The vast majority of that time was trying to figure out why Master Exploder wasn't rendering most sprites, turns out my redundant setting of _width and _height was tickling a Ruffle bug. There's a quick workaround, but I went the distance and implemented a test case and submitted a pull request , we'll see how it goes.
TIL: Central Point Software, maker of PC Tools, was so named because it was located in Central Point, Oregon. I happened to see it on a map today and thought "huh, that's a unique name for a town, I wonder..."
PC Tools for Windows had a scripting language documented in an extensive paper manual (as I recall it had a mostly red cover), that and a dBase IV book are what introduced me to programming as a kid.
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Here's the book, I got chills when I saw that cover again. I wore that thing out carrying it to school every day, reading it at recess.
edited 2:57 PM EST December 31, 2021
Neon64 2.0 beta 4 by hcs at 2:30 PM EDT on April 6, 2022
Neon64 2.0 beta 4 is out with a few more mappers (nothing exciting), 2 player support, auto-PAL detection (with NES 2.0 header), lots of little fixes.
I accumulated various small things the last almost two years, the last few days has seen me wrestling with video timing issues and unofficial opcodes. I don't think I'm going to get the timing stuff fixed without a major rework, but I don't know if that's ever going to happen and in the meantime I want to get all these other features and fixes out for those who can't/won't build from source themselves. So here it is, reasonably well-tested but there's probably still some new bugs.
My first attempt at a metroidvania, for Metroidvania Month 16. It's more of a puzzle game than an action game, but I think I captured some feeling of exploration. I've got a few more days to polish, but it's substantially complete. No audio unless I can work up the might to debug a bunch of Web Audio stuff that I've left out for now. Bug reports welcomed.
You might be interested in what's come to be called "metroidbrainia", where the upgrades you collect are a better understanding of mechanics that were available all along (though some prefer "knowledge node puzzle"). Some of Speleomorph is structured that way, and I think it has some of that feel, but there's a definite series of pickups that are followed in the early game.
My favorite example which is close to Metroidvania in play style is Toki Tori 2, though arguably The Witness is my favorite game that fits the description. The Zachtronics "design puzzle" games come at it from another angle, and in Sokoban block-pushing land, there's Stephen's Sausage Roll and A Monster's Expedition.
As foone recently observed "reverse engineering is a metroidvania", which captures the feeling I've gotten from that as well. There are probably some good explicitly RE'ing games but none are coming to mind.
Been playing and rating games for Metroidvania Month, ends in less than a day. I took a break just now to play The Looker, which is about as perfect a parody of The Witness (which I loved) as I can imagine. It's smart, it's stupid, it's free, check it out!
Today I learned that Rick Cook passed away January 13th, 2022. He's best known to me as author of the Wizardry series (not related to the games, the books starting with Wizard's Bane). These books colored a lot of my thinking about a game where programming is magic (I'd blogged on this in 2010 and more recently last December), and I think it's where I first heard of Forth and the Dragon Book. Obituaries mostly come from his Society for Creative Anachronism friends, he'd founded the branch in Arizona. Thanks for the inspiration!
I finally released a rip of an old Shiro Hamaguchi BGM demo disc I've been carrying around since 2005. I bought it at Amoeba Music in Hollywood, while visiting a cousin in LA, thought it was oddly interesting, though I didn't know much about anime. I've been told that all these tracks are on other releases, except maybe Dinozone. Thanks to a friend who transcribed and translated the track list.
That's a good question, I don't know how to play USF on a Linux system these days. I started using Windows for work, and that's what my main laptop is still running. Though these days I'll usually use ZXTune on Android.
You might search for lazyusf2, that's the mupen64plus-based decoder library that's most likely to have a package somewhere.
Linux Leads by DeadAwake at 10:40 AM EDT on October 1, 2023
Thank you for the reply and tip. It seems that lazyusf2 still has architecture requirements, but it does look like a step in the right direction:
https://github.com/derselbst/lazyusf2
I found another interesting lead with software that claims to support USF via Audio Overload:
https://github.com/Greedysky/TTKMusicPlayer
But official Audio Overload documentation makes no mention of such support:
https://www.bannister.org/software/ao.htm#compat
I will check these out. In particular, lazyusf2 seems to have an opcode translator, which is a promising concept. In the meantime, I agree with sentiment here:
https://vgmpf.com/Wiki/index.php?title=USF
“Desperately needs a simple C based USF to WAV open sourced program.â€
EDIT
... Well, that was surprisingly easy. Using lazyusf2's included converter program, dumpresampled, I just listened to a USF file for the first time in over a decade. It sounded great. (I bet you can even guess the song.)
Thank you again for the tip, hcs, and thank you to everyone who has contributed to lazyusf2. Today was a good day.
I had an idea for a puzzle game where you have to figure out the rules and tell the game what you think they are. Finally got a proof of concept implemented, here's a sketch:
Testers have struggled most with the first two puzzles, might be relatively easier after that once you have the general idea.
I had hoped that the rule specification would be integral, there's some fancy logic for choosing the next puzzle to disprove your current guess, but the current set of 8 puzzles doesn't really take advantage of that in an interesting way. You might not notice it in a single playthrough anyway. So it ends up not being much different from other puzzles that don't tell you the rules, except it's easier to have the menu of possibilities known.
Trying to decide whether I should try to develop this more, put it back on the shelf until I figure something out, or just try to post it widely now for fame and fortune.