We are still waiting on a suitable Amiga AGA emulator with robust recording features before tackling such games.Zooming Secretary (Homebrew)
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Screenshot |
Player's Review
A fresh new homebrew game is a pretty uncommon thing on a vintage console like the NES compared to it's home computer cousins like the Spectrum and C64. So its good to see a new game released for the system to see out 2011.
Zooming Secretary is made by the same guy who ported over the brilliant Alter Ego to the NES from the Speccy, Shiru, in collaboration with Pinwizz and it marks his first 100% original NES title.
Development notes from Shiru for Zooming Secretary
This project was one of our many collab attempts with PinWizz, and the only that was successful. It has been started in July 2011. We were working on another, larger NES game for some time before, but it progressed very slowly, just like usual in our collabs. I proposed an idea of making a smaller and simpler game first, in a week or so, something with gameplay that is similar to Game & Watch and early Nintendo arcades, in order to finally get through the development process from start to finish for once. Even this, simpler project took way longer than a week - half of a year, with long pauses. Sometimes I thought it is not going to be finished.
Game concept with a secretary and phones was proposed by me as the very first random idea for this smaller project, and we decided to stick with it. Unlike all my previous NES game projects, this one turned out to be an original, not a clone or remake or upgrade of existing game.
My part of work was mostly code, gameplay design, sound, and sort of direction to keep the project consistent and not overblown - PW wanted to bring dragons, aliens, lava and more in there. PW's part was visual design and graphics, he done most of it. Some design ideas were result of joint work, these mostly came out from few brainstorming meetings we had. As the graphics was provided in GIF and BMP formats, without alignment and strict control over the colors, I had to convert it and arrange in the CHR ROM in a certain way. I also made a minor part of graphics work, including ending screen background.
Tools and programming process were similar to Alter Ego, which started a bit earlier than this project. The game is written in C. Low level part of the code was written for the initial idea, then improved and used in Alter Ego, and improved again for this project. Tools also were upgraded. High level code was done from scratch, as not much was possible to reuse from previous projects. There are more than 2600 lines of handwritten C code, plus about 1400 lines of sprite definitions, animations and palettes, mostly generated with NES Screen Tool and then edited by hand.
One unexpected problem was running out of PRG ROM space near the end of the project, when it only lacked bonus level and text messages, although I expected to have free room in finished project. As it otherwise was fitting into NROM, I decided to not use a mapper and save some memory instead. It was done through omiting some unneeded things like multiple NPC support (not used in the actual game, saved 3K), brightness table (no color fades in this game) and DPCM support, and rewritting some parts in certain ways. Another saving was replacing postincrements with preincrements where possible. I thought it can't make major difference, and thus used postincrements everywhere, but actually it saved 700+ bytes.
There is not much to say about the sound part, expect that the game has a lot of sound effects - 21. Music was composed very fast, because there is just few jingles and short loops. It was more like placeholder music pieces that were improved a bit for the release.
The text messages with some random facts for every call answer was proposed by PW in the very beginning of the project. My opinion about this was that they are redundant, and either will distract player or will be ignored by him, but PW insisted that it is cool, so I agreed to add them. The text for the messages was written by PW just prior to the release.
Label art was created by PW. I vectorized his original sketch, and also manually restored editable multilayer file after PW's edits, because it was lost in the very last moment.
Few words about the license. Although it is not recommended to use Creative Commons licenses for software, we had to find a compromise between my will to release this (strictly non-commercial from the beginning) project as PD, and PW's understandable will to keep the right to being recognizeable for his work, at least. I also wanted to avoid viral licenses and those that require to redistribute the project with long messed texts that no one wants to read. Also, I don't consider this project as software, as I think that code is not the most valuable part there, but the design and art are.
Updates history:
v1.01 28.12.11 - Initial public release
v1.02 30.12.11 - A bug fix, unavailable topics were requested on early levels after playing latest levels
Download Game ftp://ftp.untergrund.net/users/shiru/nes/zooming_secretary.zip
Review http://www.rgcd.co.uk/2011/12/zooming-secretary-nes.html
Zooming Secretary is made by the same guy who ported over the brilliant Alter Ego to the NES from the Speccy, Shiru, in collaboration with Pinwizz and it marks his first 100% original NES title.
Development notes from Shiru for Zooming Secretary
This project was one of our many collab attempts with PinWizz, and the only that was successful. It has been started in July 2011. We were working on another, larger NES game for some time before, but it progressed very slowly, just like usual in our collabs. I proposed an idea of making a smaller and simpler game first, in a week or so, something with gameplay that is similar to Game & Watch and early Nintendo arcades, in order to finally get through the development process from start to finish for once. Even this, simpler project took way longer than a week - half of a year, with long pauses. Sometimes I thought it is not going to be finished.
Game concept with a secretary and phones was proposed by me as the very first random idea for this smaller project, and we decided to stick with it. Unlike all my previous NES game projects, this one turned out to be an original, not a clone or remake or upgrade of existing game.
My part of work was mostly code, gameplay design, sound, and sort of direction to keep the project consistent and not overblown - PW wanted to bring dragons, aliens, lava and more in there. PW's part was visual design and graphics, he done most of it. Some design ideas were result of joint work, these mostly came out from few brainstorming meetings we had. As the graphics was provided in GIF and BMP formats, without alignment and strict control over the colors, I had to convert it and arrange in the CHR ROM in a certain way. I also made a minor part of graphics work, including ending screen background.
Tools and programming process were similar to Alter Ego, which started a bit earlier than this project. The game is written in C. Low level part of the code was written for the initial idea, then improved and used in Alter Ego, and improved again for this project. Tools also were upgraded. High level code was done from scratch, as not much was possible to reuse from previous projects. There are more than 2600 lines of handwritten C code, plus about 1400 lines of sprite definitions, animations and palettes, mostly generated with NES Screen Tool and then edited by hand.
One unexpected problem was running out of PRG ROM space near the end of the project, when it only lacked bonus level and text messages, although I expected to have free room in finished project. As it otherwise was fitting into NROM, I decided to not use a mapper and save some memory instead. It was done through omiting some unneeded things like multiple NPC support (not used in the actual game, saved 3K), brightness table (no color fades in this game) and DPCM support, and rewritting some parts in certain ways. Another saving was replacing postincrements with preincrements where possible. I thought it can't make major difference, and thus used postincrements everywhere, but actually it saved 700+ bytes.
There is not much to say about the sound part, expect that the game has a lot of sound effects - 21. Music was composed very fast, because there is just few jingles and short loops. It was more like placeholder music pieces that were improved a bit for the release.
The text messages with some random facts for every call answer was proposed by PW in the very beginning of the project. My opinion about this was that they are redundant, and either will distract player or will be ignored by him, but PW insisted that it is cool, so I agreed to add them. The text for the messages was written by PW just prior to the release.
Label art was created by PW. I vectorized his original sketch, and also manually restored editable multilayer file after PW's edits, because it was lost in the very last moment.
Few words about the license. Although it is not recommended to use Creative Commons licenses for software, we had to find a compromise between my will to release this (strictly non-commercial from the beginning) project as PD, and PW's understandable will to keep the right to being recognizeable for his work, at least. I also wanted to avoid viral licenses and those that require to redistribute the project with long messed texts that no one wants to read. Also, I don't consider this project as software, as I think that code is not the most valuable part there, but the design and art are.
Updates history:
v1.01 28.12.11 - Initial public release
v1.02 30.12.11 - A bug fix, unavailable topics were requested on early levels after playing latest levels
Download Game ftp://ftp.untergrund.net/users/shiru/nes/zooming_secretary.zip
Review http://www.rgcd.co.uk/2011/12/zooming-secretary-nes.html
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