NovaSquirrel

NovaSquirrel, 3 months ago to random

Having another go at trying some DS flashcarts (actually following a guide for advice this time) and hopefully I can get one that works reliably, unlike the one I currently have. I ordered four different kinds since they're so cheap, to try and raise the odds that at least one turns out to be good.

I wanna play with MoonShell and DSOrganize again and maybe play around with writing a program or two. But I need a flashcart that I don't have to insert a few times in order to do that.

NovaSquirrel, 1 year ago to random

I saw "The Care Bears Adventure in Wonderland" with some friends yesterday and I liked it a lot. It had some really nice songs and it was nice to have a story put an extra big emphasis on Swift Heart Rabbit. It's a shame the Care Bear Cousins don't really get used in stuff anymore because they're my favorite characters in the series. (Probably unsurprising if you've seen Rosy Sky)

NovaSquirrel, 11 months ago to random

Had an early birthday celebration with family and it went surprisingly well, probably because there were actually things to do this time. We played Mario Party (but didn't finish), Mario Kart, took a walk, and played Connect 4 Spin. I had never tried Connect 4 Spin before but it seems like my sort of thing, with being easy to explain and quick to play but quirky in a neat way.

NovaSquirrel, 11 months ago to random

I think one of the big obstacles to finding communities I'd like is that for a lot of the things I'm passionate about, the communities are going to be like, 95% kids, and that's not an environment I want to be in.

It feels like there's a big lack of communities that are both sfw and adults-only (or where people at the very least act maturely).

NovaSquirrel, 2 months ago to random

Since I'm playing Animal Crossing: Wild World regularly at the moment, it could be fun to try and make a homebrew program that does a little bit of save editing for some things that aren't necessarily cheats, but that just make the game nicer to play? That kind of area feels under-explored.

It'd be nice to have some expanded item storage (with a "sort" button), and a tool for making it easier to decorate the ground with patterns (and help with patterns in general). Maybe the ability to move rocks and trees around? And it could help with keeping backups.

NovaSquirrel, 11 months ago to random

I keep thinking about wanting to try playing with virtual pets again but then think about how I dunno if I want to give myself additional responsibility.

I feel like the ideal one for me would be something I can check in on occasionally but don't need to monitor throughout the day. Like a houseplant.

I've thought about making a "virtual pet" that's more like, a relaxing hangout where you can check in on a character, and I was going to make that for Thumby at one point. Maybe I will someday.

NovaSquirrel, 8 months ago to random

Thinking about it more, I'm not actually sure how much I actually want to make a virtual pet versus just wanting to play with one that has the features I'd want. The Tamagotchi Pix Party already has a lot of nice stuff and it had an actual team and budget behind it.

So I'd have to figure out some angle to approach it at so that it's not just a zero-budget version of what Bandai already did. I do have some direction on that but I'll have to think about it some more.

NovaSquirrel, 10 months ago to random

I feel like one of the big reasons I'm more into ROMs of new retro console games than carts is because I think it's actually a really big improvement that modern games can continue to get better after release now without having to buy the game again, and in that medium they actually can.

Lots of old games have really serious bugs (like the initial releases of Castlevania and Animal Crossing: Wild World being able to just crash) that, due to their medium, are just going to be there forever with no resolution aside from tracking down a later version, and that sucks.

NovaSquirrel, 10 months ago to random

Finally got a shipping notice about something that was supposed to ship in January or February, but only for part of the package haha.

I'm just kind of hoping it's the whole thing but the shipping was marked wrong. Either way at least it's something.

NovaSquirrel, 3 months ago to random

I hope there is actually an audience out there for things that try to be like a better version of a MUCK/MUD and use better tech. I don't know if people are adamant about sticking to sending/receiving raw text or not, or if MU* directories are strict about servers needing to work that way.

If they are... I could be very silly and make a gateway. That sounds like a fun and easy project that could potentially actually be useful in some circumstances so I should probably actually do that.

NovaSquirrel, 4 months ago to random

Laptop mysteriously stopped doing anything at all when the power button is pressed, and I don't see anything obviously bad when I open it. To make matters worse the screw holding the SSD in was very stripped, though thankfully my brother was able to get it out with pliers.

I can probably just switch over to treating my Steam Deck as my main computer while I decide what I want to do next (and when my enclosure arrives I'll have all my data too). It's a 2018 laptop so it could make sense to upgrade (which would require researching) but ideally I could get it fixed because it worked fine and I want to keep using it because that's more environmentally friendly.

I vaguely feel like desktops might work out better but that would require a desk.

NovaSquirrel, 7 months ago to random

I added a feature to Tilemap Town where a player (or other entity) can define its own small tilemap (probably with tiny 8x8 or 4x4 tiles) and display it above itself. That way you can make an entity that runs a little minigame or other activity, or you can have a computer screen that displays a small amount of text.

https://github.com/NovaSquirrel/TilemapTown/blob/main/docs/protocol.txt#L318

Could expand it later on to let you draw sprites on top, but I think just having a small grid of tiles is fine for a ton of games. Now it's just a matter of time until I make Tilemap Town within Tilemap Town using this.

NovaSquirrel, 4 days ago to random

I want to make game dev into a more social thing, but it's hard to find people wanting to talk about engine design and algorithms outside of an NES-specific context. Also a lot of people are very secretive anyway.

NovaSquirrel, 11 months ago to random

While looking around at different personal sites I managed to find some pretty big directories of roleplay forums, but at this point I've already made posts on so many sites looking for people to play with only to get ignored every time (or just directly told that no one will be interested) so I've gotten really defeatist about it.

NovaSquirrel, 1 year ago to random

Realizing that the 10 minute time limit that early Sonic games have actually would have potentially helped with technical stuff a little bit. If you're counting the number of frames that have gone by in a 16-bit variable, that can only go up to about 18 minutes before wrapping around.

So I'm currently writing code to work around the wrapping juts to be extra safe, whereas a time limit means you just, wouldn't have to care because the level would be over.

NovaSquirrel, 8 months ago to random

I wonder how the idea got started that making a game without a premade game engine is so difficult as to not be worth doing, considering people had been doing that for a long time, especially in the form of things like Flash games (or PICO-8, LÖVE, various versions of BASIC, etc.)

It does feel like there's been an overall trend in computer stuff where people who have something to sell you nudge people away from learning how things work and toward using their stuff. That could be part of it.

Or maybe it's just people going where the tutorials and other resources are (and things that don't have a lot of tutorials are Too Hard)? Or people thinking engines have to be complicated (instead of just the bare minimum features their game needs)?

Though a lot of my feelings are probably just caused by wishing that I had people to talk to about game dev haha. I can never relate to or understand anything anyone's talking about in game dev chats.

NovaSquirrel, 8 months ago to random

Heck yeah my e-paper and LCD gadgets are here, so I'm gonna have a lot of fun playing with them after work! I really want to see my virtual pet project running on an LCD screen.

NovaSquirrel, 7 months ago to gamedev

I'm exploring adding more polish to the mode 7 levels in my SNES game. I made it so that the player zooms out a bit when the camera does, in order to make it make more sense visually. I also adjusted the camera so it doesn't zoom out quite as far, because when I had the player scale with it how it was she got really tiny and it looked super silly.

I've been exploring trying to figure out how to make it look visual sense that you can't jump over walls even though they're flat, which has been tricky. Ultimately it might just be fine anyway because people will have to take into account that it's a SNES game and I'm dealing with a lot of technical limitations.

I am definitely getting the impression that polygonal 3D is probably a lot easier to deal with than this sort of thing haha. Eventually I'll play with Godot and try to do this kind of gameplay with polygons...

#gamedev #snesdev #snes

Gameplay footage of an anthropomorphic running around and jumping in a "mode 7" 3D world

NovaSquirrel, 7 months ago to random

I'm working on trying to get my virtual pet thing running on that 128x64 LCD screen I bought and it's been super annoying because the build process is really complicated, which makes it worse when I have to go in and fix stuff because of course the example code doesn't work out of the box.

I'm not a fan of CMake.

NovaSquirrel, 9 months ago to random

I'm actually not sure what kinds of things make a virtual pet fun for me, so I dunno what I should do if I wanted to make one specifically so that I'd have fun with it too. Though there's always the chance that I'd need something outside the scope of what I'd want to do by myself.

Though the kind of stuff I want to explore with Tilemap Town bots and stuff sounds fun to make even if the end result doesn't turn out to be extremely interesting.

NovaSquirrel, 11 months ago to random

I'm glad game dev can be in a spot for me where I can just make what I want to make and put it out there for people to enjoy, and it doesn't have to be a business thing and no contracts have to be involved, except things like the itch.io terms of service (which don't bother me).

NovaSquirrel, 1 month ago to random

I'm using Animal Crossing: New Leaf's "talk to random strangers online" feature and everyone is so open about talking about Pretendo and custom firmware and everything.

I guess there's no reason not to be; what's Nintendo going to do, ban me from the service they're shutting down tomorrow?

NovaSquirrel, 2 months ago to random

I got a bundle of GBA SP accessories because I wanted another headphone adapter, but it came with an FM radio cartridge that seemed interesting until I got it and it turned out that it just uses the GBA for power, so it just displays the boot screen forever.

But it is kind of cool in the context of playing tunes while playing something on a DS, where it does still get power and still work. Not that I would realistically do that, though?

NovaSquirrel, 5 months ago to random

I think the novelty of seeing new games for old consoles has actually worn off for me at this point, or at least it's not enough to make me interested in a game I wouldn't buy if it were just a PC game.

And occasionally I do see homebrew games that actually look really interesting to me (I really need to get around to Goodboy Galaxy and Tanglewood and Micro Mages at some point) but most of the ones I've been exposed to are just like, generic action game.

NovaSquirrel, 3 months ago to random

I tried out using the SNES's 0,1,2,3 DMA pattern to let me just blast out an arbitrary list of tilemap changes during vblank (alternating between writing the address and data registers) and it's over twice as fast as what I was doing before.

It already wasn't taking much time to do this, but saving any amount of vblank time seems helpful. And this also opens up the flexibility to queue up any other sort of tilemap changes I want instead of just 2x2 updates specifically for level blocks.

#snesdev