New game : Alter Ego

Hi all !

A new game has been published ! It's a port from the Alter Ego NES game (with reused graphics but the code is entirely new). It runs on the bitbox micro as well as the bitbox (as every micro game).

have a look at its gameplay

• The original (non-opensource) game is featured here : www.retrosouls.net/?page_id=614
• The page for the opensource NES port, upon which this project art is based, can be found here : http://shiru.untergrund.net/software.shtml#nes
• Of course the game is opensource : https://github.com/makapuf/bitbox-alterego

 

A longer is also available on youtube 

(The game has currently no sound but that shall be improved upon soon !)




To port it, the steps have been the following :

• Make a script to export the PNG tileset from the palette files and the character data to a png
• Make a script to export the tilemaps of every levels
• Export sprites from the tilemap and integrate them as separate animations on the tiled tmx files
• Build a new project from exports of those data, create a simple tmx export makefile 

and then start writing code in more or less that order :

• displaying tilemaps / tilesets in a VRAM, setup main objects
• making a small intro steps
• load the initial positions of monsters from the in a tilemap with specific tiles from the TMX file
• mak the skulls move and animate sprites
• define character movement and interaction with tilemap
• define sprite collisions

Total port time is difficult to estimate since I worked on the export scripts, looked at the original source code, then this project has been dormant for a long time then I decided to write the code in about a week end but without adapting the first one - not that it's not a good one, but I was feeling like re-doing it since it's quite optimized for the NES.