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.