It's hard to believe that Matt, Luke and Jason have now recorded 50 episodes of The Lost Art of Podcast. The guys talk about their favorite episodes and favorite moments from episodes past. Don Knotts and James Brown stop in for a visit and the guys confuse each other on video game release dates as they talk through their favorite video games of 1986. Wordpress Site: https://thelostartofpodcast.wordpress.com/ Facebook Page: https://www.facebook.com/TheLostArtOfPodcast Matt's Video Game Blog: h
Every once in a while when you design and then program homebrew video games like I do, you think you have a great idea, but when you actually go to program it, it actually isn't great. Such is the case with my Zyx game. I tried this morning to make the graphics a little better, but I doubt I'll be working on this for much longer, because, frankly, it isn't all that a great idea after all. I could add a tomato, but what would it do? I need to make this game really interesting. It needs something.
For a little change of pace, I worked on a new Channel F game.
This is a zyx. Its favorite activity is eating blueberries falling from the sky. Its least favorite activity is eating cauliflower falling from the sky. Today a zyx is on an island in the Green Sea where reports of blueberries falling from the sky were reported. So this adventurous zyx went to check it out. It was true! But unfortunately so were cauliflowers. There's always a catch.
As you can see, I put in a score and
So what I was trying to do was make a circle using the least possible amount of tiles. I thought a simple circle would take, oh, about 16 or so. Not so. So I drew a picture of the planet in M$Paint, then entered it into NESst (a NES drawing program). Apparently it took 36 to draw a small Saturn and its rings. This is how the level looks after I cleaned things up:
I also composed some music for the level. Next to do is design level 7. I figure a desert level would be really hard and mak
I tried to draw a circular planet for level 6. I analyzed a circle in Photoshop. I really tried hard. And yet this is the best thing I can do:
It looks more like a diamond than a circle. I'm giving up the space level and on to a different place.
Discovered I had more tiles than I thought I did. So I updated the forest level and put in a song for it.
So now here is a list of stuff I need to do next:
compose music and draw screens for levels 6-10
add in taco handling code
compose music, draw screen for, and code for ending.
make it so 50 enemies go through and then end level.
The last one I decided the game would be more interesting, and the score would be useful, if I make it so 50 enemies get th
I was pretty unhappy about my Atari 2600 game I had been making, so I decided to return to something that I was happy about: My NES game. I "drew" level 5 that is in the game now.
So this is a one-man production. I'm doing everything here. I have total control over it. The goal is to fit a 10-level burger shooting French fry game into 40 kb. I'm almost up to #B000 out of my alotted #FFFF. But the game is only about 50% completed. The nacho-shooting pizza is now in the game. He shoots n
A Homebrew Draws Near!
A blog series by @Scrobins
Episode 14: Doodle World
Introduction:
If Twitter is any indication, inspiration is a fickle thing when designing a game. Crafting characters, gameplay, and a story, among any number of other elements can be a challenge when trying to create something new and fun. But sometimes out of the mouths, or in this case markers of babes come forth ideas that make even the most seasoned game developer smack themselves upside the h
I got some help with the score. I added a lives counter to the left of it. I also made the onion rings move at different speeds.
I also made a few other minor changes. Now that there's lives, I added a death to the burger if it touches the onion ring.
I've been working on this a lot for a few days, so I'm on a this-game-programming break now.
Something a bit different from the usual arcade repairs, recently I picked up a Street Fighter 2 pinball machine (my first pin). It was a wild ride fixing up that, but that's a writeup for another day. As the title states, the big problem at hand was that the table was not putting out any valid sound, there was buzzing but none of Guile's theme or whatnot.
So in Street Fighter 2, it utilized the Gottlieb System 3 boardset. This utilized two different sound boards, a large main sound board
I have been busy this past couple of days on a new Atari 2600 game I'm making called "Flying Hamburger." It's a lot like my NES game only it's on the Atari 2600. Because of that, I had to make some changes.
Milkshake now an onion ring. Onion rings cannot shoot. But they will eventually speed up and go in different directions.
The backgrounds will be something like this:
I like having purple mountains with white tops in my game. Once I get the rest of the game figured out,
Another episode of Homebrew in Focus! @M-Tee and I take a look at The Cowlitz Gamers' Series, a NES homebrew trilogy of games, in this long play and commentary video.
Genre: Action
Publisher: Data East
Total time played: 2 hours
Short review: An early beat em up that plays similar to Double Dragon but doesn’t have quite as much charm.
Interesting links related to Bad Dudes
Speed Run (15min 07sec) Soundtrack Video Review (TheHeineHouse) Memories
I have a vague memory of playing this as a kid. I’m pretty sure that there was an extra lives code that we used to beat the game. The only things I remembered were that the Level 1 boss is Karno
So I made a mountain.
And I thought to myself "What is the point of all these level changes?" So I thought some more and I thought perhaps different enemies could be introduced the further the game goes along. But what enemies? I thought and got "taco". I tried to draw a taco. While failing to draw a taco, I thought "perhaps a pizza." So I drew a slice of pizza. The pizza shoots nachos downwards. It will be introduced in level 5. The taco will be introduced in level 8. It won't shoot a
Yesterday and today I was having so much trouble with the game and bugs kept popping up everywhere that I had it. I deleted all the in-game code and started over again. This time I tried to keep things very simple. And you know what? I think it worked. I haven't had any problems (well, except for the triangle noise being too loud, but I don't know how to fix that. And why call it a triangle noise? A triangle goes "ting!" when you strike it, but the triangle sounds like when you pause in Super Ma
So I added the milkshakes going different directions. And I worked on level 2. It took a few days but I finally got the seaweed green and the score color white.
I had to learn how to use multiple palettes in order to do this though. And earlier I made a new song for the second level. So now I need to link level 1 to level 2, so when level 1 ends it goes to level 2. It starts on the level I have been working on.
I also got a chance to play Doodle World for the NES. It has a little
A Homebrew Draws Near!
A blog series by @Scrobins
Episode 13: What Remains
Introduction:
Video games can aspire to be many things. They can be a playful escape from the world, and they can be a new lens for seeing the world and how we exist within it. Not many games use their medium to weigh in on substantive political discourse, but today’s game, with its themes of health & environmental policy, truth & disinformation, and archival institutions and the protectio
The guys sit down to discuss one of cultural icon and one of the most dominant athletes of all-time, Bo Jackson. Starting in Bessemer, AL through his childhood, high school, college and professional career Bo impressed everyone he met. Jason wasn’t as familiar with Bo Jackson as Matt and Luke so they try to convince him of Bo’s greatness.
Genre: Action
Publisher: LJN
Total time played: 10 Hours
Short review: Does a decent job of hitting all of the beats of the film of the same name but it fails to make a video game worth playing.
Interesting links related to Back to the Future
Speedrun (17min 11sec) Soundtrack Video Review (Angry Video Game Nerd) Video Review (LJN Defender) Where Have I Been?
It has been a while since I posted a review which means it has been 3 months since I have beaten an NES game. This
Today's task was discovered after I tested my latest 40k version of Hamburgers En Route To Switzerland on my NES Everdrive and discovered it didn't work. I was trying to make it more than 24k. So a few hours later, after changing stuff I don't know how many times, it finally got working. I also made the milkshake look more like a strawberry milkshake.
Looks much better, don't you think? I was also working on trying to add some sort of randomness to the milkshake's y position getting ro
It took a couple of hours, but I finally made the milkshakes shoot onion rings. Just like in the Game Gear versions, the vanilla ones always shoot, the chocolate ones shoot sometimes and the strawberry ones never shoot. I also added a bunch of new sound effects and other minor changes as well, like adding more clouds. It's amazing though that I can fit all this into just 24KB. What if I need to make it bigger? Will it just automatically grow bigger or do I have to do something? I'm using C and c
I have been working on this a lot. I've made a website where you can get the latest version. So I will keep working on it until I get my NES Everdrive, which should happen on Monday, but the USPS already lost one of my packages recently.
Among the changes:
pressing start pauses game
added score and lives to the game
added a couple of sound effects
milkshake now moves
Pressing B makes the burger shoot the French fry out. I finally figured out how to make multi
