NEW game: Assembloids

[agradeneu]

Excellent fun! 

[enthusi]

We have a new short recording of Assembloids:

 

[Iwantgames:)]

If only I was good at art I could could make a full on Assembloids Arcade....ah well this works well enough

[enthusi]

Surely warms my heart

[enthusi]

Has anyone revealed the second hidden many-color-image yet?

[+karri]

Yep. A long time ago  

[enthusi]

Ah, good

So which of the two 'hidden' images did you like more?

[+karri]

Perhaps the first one as it is has more warm colours:

This winter landscape is a bit blue and hard to see on an old Lynx screen. It is blueish by default.

[+karri]

I believe that Assembloids would be a good candidate for a real cart release.

 

Most of the time Assembloids was running in one of my Lynxes during the show. The game is also very easy to understand. Within 5-10 seconds a player gets the idea.

 

I found out that casual players have difficulties with 2 button games. The concept of "grow tie/cut tie" or "choose weapon/shoot" was too difficult for the new mobile phone generation.

 

The Lynx Quest is also excellent as it use one button only. Also the focus: "shoot everything that moves" is easy to get in to.

[Igor]

Nicely put, though it's a bit sad that more complex games are just not very well liked. Also since you have a while Lynx, I think I need to make myself an #AA0000 Lynx ?

[Nop90]

1 hour ago, Igor said:

Also since you have a while Lynx, I think I need to make myself an #AA0000 Lynx ?

Sadly you can only have a #A00 one! More than 12bits colors is anachronistic for a linx fans.

[+karri]

That would be the red Marlboro Lynx.

 

 

PS. I got inspired by the latest Blender 2.80 release and started to make some fitting music to an idea I have floating. Silly Ventures, here we come. This time with a one button game  

...

[Igor]

Not quite the right shade. It's amazing that the Marlboro Lynxes were just cheap paint jobs (as can be seen by all the flaking).

I've actually been thinking of doing a shiny midnight purple colour Lynx, maybe one day.

[Turbo Laser Lynx]

On 10/24/2019 at 9:08 AM, karri said:

I believe that Assembloids would be a good candidate for a real cart release.

 

Most of the time Assembloids was running in one of my Lynxes during the show. The game is also very easy to understand. Within 5-10 seconds a player gets the idea.

 

I found out that casual players have difficulties with 2 button games. The concept of "grow tie/cut tie" or "choose weapon/shoot" was too difficult for the new mobile phone generation.

 

The Lynx Quest is also excellent as it use one button only. Also the focus: "shoot everything that moves" is easy to get in to.

 

It's indeed a very good candidate! I do love simple games, but hopefully all this one button stuff wont discourage people to create a little bigger games for the Lynx too occasionally.

We recently had our "computer club" where we played California Games on the C64, and I admit that we had to succumb to checking the controls online. It's not exactly the most fun trying to figure out complicated non-standard controls for every event (or every other game back in the day).

 

By the way, was the his and hers Lynxes "real"? I thought those were pretty interesting. Reminds me of the Atari XEGS with those late 80s pastel colors.

 

 

Edited October 25, 2019 by Turbo Laser Lynx

[Igor]

A bit off topic, but your mention of non-standard controls hit a spot with me...I've recently got a copy of Shadow of the Beast on PS4...and boy does that have non-standard controls! X button to return, instead of O, a few other crazy choices that take time to get used to.

 

Back on topic again. Single button games are always fun but they should not be the only games, I would really like to see more deeply involved games on the Lynx and I can't wait to get the full On Duty to play with. I think this size of game (On Duty, Wyvern Tales, etc) is what really makes homebrew development on a 30 year old console worth it.

[+karri]

@Igor is your Silly Ventures game going to be a one-button game? This time I am trying the one-button approach. Actually Nutmeg was a single button game but for some strange reason it was not so popular. I wonder why? Too much to memorize, perhaps?

[Igor]

At the moment it’s a no button game ? If I get it done though, the answer is it depends. Do you consider the use of the d-pad as 4 buttons? With moving house I’ve not had time to really work in this, but the initial intent is to get directional movement and fire (A) working. Using the B button may be an option later if I add switchable weapons.

 

I keenly look forward to your one button game!

[DragonGrafx-16]

2 hours ago, Igor said:

A bit off topic, but your mention of non-standard controls hit a spot with me...I've recently got a copy of Shadow of the Beast on PS4...and boy does that have non-standard controls! X button to return, instead of O, a few other crazy choices that take time to get used to.

X is the back button for Japanese PlayStation games... I don't know about this game but I do know that X and O is reversed in Japan for confirm and back...

[drludos]

On 10/24/2019 at 8:08 AM, karri said:

I believe that Assembloids would be a good candidate for a real cart release.

 

Most of the time Assembloids was running in one of my Lynxes during the show. The game is also very easy to understand. Within 5-10 seconds a player gets the idea.

 

I found out that casual players have difficulties with 2 button games. The concept of "grow tie/cut tie" or "choose weapon/shoot" was too difficult for the new mobile phone generation.

 

The Lynx Quest is also excellent as it use one button only. Also the focus: "shoot everything that moves" is easy to get in to.

Thanks a lot Karri for demo other's people game, including mine, during the compo!

 

Although simple / one button games perform better at shows, it doesn't mean we should forget more complex games! I mean, when you are playing at home with a couple of hours at your disposal, you can dig in longer game, while during a show you don't have time to complete a level before "zapping" to another booth.

 

That being said, huge congratulations to the Assembloids team as the game is really to pick up, but fun to play in longer sessions too

 

 

[Fadest]

I'm not sure it's a question of buttons but more about immediate fun.

Growing Ties use 2 buttons but you got a smile on your face right after you understand the goal (which means less than 10 seconds)

Nutmeg uses only 1 button and a very good first impression but it is more a game of frustration and die & retry. So if you have 10 more new games to test in the 5 minutes you can stay at a stand, you will swap to another one after the second run. But as the game has a learning curve, you really enjoy it once you really jump into it...

 

It is really tough to judge all those games. First, my intention would be to say which game would I like to play the most.

But I just cannot say which one I'd prefer to play as my number one. It depends of the time I can spend playing. If I have only 5 minutes, I would rather play Growing Ties, Sky Raider, Assembloids, Inside World, Undergrounders. 15 minutes and it would be Lynx Quest or Find a way to my heart or 4TTude. 30 minutes or more, it would be On Duty, Nutmeg or Ynxa (but you can still play and enjoy them by small run, juste one level at at time).

Of course, as games are good, 5 minutes in first intention can easily eat you 1 hour ;D

 

[Nop90]

36 minutes ago, Fadest said:

Nutmeg uses only 1 button and a very good first impression but it is more a game of frustration and die & retry. So if you have 10 more new games to test in the 5 minutes you can stay at a stand, you will swap to another one after the second run. But as the game has a learning curve, you really enjoy it once you really jump into it... 

What to say... Nutmeg is a hybrid, it borns as a nice small HTML game for mobiles in the style of Geometry Dash (that is a top selling game of some years ago, tailored on the taste of new generations players), than was adopted by Retroguru that likes the old amiga philosopy of "hard to play games" (ever playes Sqrxz games?). A sort of Frankenstein project that now I love as a child because Super Nutmeg (the big brother of Nutmeg for Lynx) is the first Retroguru project that I worked in as main deveoper after 2 year of porting existing games.

 

I'm an old gerk who likes technology and coding, but never liked playing videogames, so probably I lack of experience and taste forr making a hit title.

 

But I'm very satisfied of my work with Nutmeg for Lynx because had to find a lot of tech solution to make it as i wanted (like tuning the low FPS, play PCM samples without interferring too much with Chipper and the other interrupt based routines, making comlynx work, that I decided to not use for Nutmeg but was planned in the beginning).

 

Maybe I'll never get a 1st place in a game competition, but I always share my crappy code if not covered by someone else IP and I'm happy if I can contribute to the growth of the community.

 

 

[LordKraken]

Quote

Maybe I'll never get a 1st place in a game competition, but I always share my crappy code if not covered by someone else IP and I'm happy if I can contribute to the growth of the community.

The coding world would be a better place if we would all have your mentality Thanks for sharing and helping!

[drludos]

2 hours ago, Nop90 said:

Maybe I'll never get a 1st place in a game competition, but I always share my crappy code if not covered by someone else IP and I'm happy if I can contribute to the growth of the community.

 

 

I don't think you can call your code "crappy", on the contrary, you are an excellent coder! I mean it it wasn't for you and Karri creating and sharing a CC65 template, I would have never been able to make an Lynx game! And without you, my game wouldn't be able to use SDcard and EEPROM save, because frankly, I don't have the skills to write such complex hardware related code!

 

Regarding Nutmeg, it is a technical masterpiece on the Lynx, and it shows (loads of moving objects, loads of color, sound samples!). And overall the game is great. But yes, the game is also very challenging :). I don't know if you are going to update it and push it onto a cart release (I think you should!). If you do, maybe you should try to ease down the difficulty on the first couple of levels (for example don't make more than 1 pit that you can fall in in the first levels, or less moving obstacles at the same time, stuffs like that), so people have more time to discover and learn how to play the game before hitting the first difficulty spike. I think that could increase the number of player that play the game longer.

[Nop90]

Probably Nutmeg will have a cart release, but there will be a lot of reworking on it.

 

The first 5 levels are almost the same of the original HTML game, so probably we'll not change them, but maybe a training mode with a simple level and on screen hints could be nice.

 

The value of Nutmeg foe Lynx is that the new designd level are nice and we are going to add them to the Classic Mode of Super Nutmeg (it's the Runner mode that works like in the lynx version).

 

Adding the platform mode (where you can move Nutmeg with arrows key) to lynx could be challenging, mostly for memory size, but I'll try.

 

This will take a lot of time.

[Fadest]

7 hours ago, Nop90 said:

Maybe I'll never get a 1st place in a game competition, but I always share my crappy code if not covered by someone else IP and I'm happy if I can contribute to the growth of the community.

 

 

Don't get me wrong, I love Nutmeg, and it got 2 points from me in the poll.

But I an understand why people try it and say, we will go back later, because a noisy show is not the best condition to enjoy it.