Now with levels!
Thanks to a compressed password format and aggressive review of cc65's assembly, SLAUGHTER is no longer a single-level demo! Now there's four!
Also performance improved, diagonals render properly, and sprite projection is much smoother, but that was all in the previous upload. The logarithm tables are quite nice. 35 cycles for A*(B/C) on 6502 still feels like cheating.
Enemy debris now works properly, in a delightfully excessive fashion. Honestly it might get toned down. But at least the kill indicators scale with distance, via stupid sprite tricks. This is an NROM game - there's only 512 tiles. Ironically those tiles are underused for level textures. I have a few decent additions, but integrating them is complex, because I cleverly optimized a bunch of behavior that's now wrong. As you do.
What didn't work at all are the new renderer and mid-frame scrolling. I rewrote the whole geometry renderer to be simpler and more array-driven. It was slower and took more space. Hooray for already being fast and small, I guess. Scrolling the HUD almost works, but the NES is just an awful machine. There's no scanline counter. You get one sprite collision check, and it's not an interrupt. You have to sit and wait. So with the HUD on the bottom, where it belongs, the best trick available is misusing the sound hardware to time out shortly above that and minimize waiting. Or: time out shortly below the HUD and make the first row of tiles boring. I got that working... but then playing real sounds can screw it up... sometimes.
I am responsible for every byte on this cartridge and an alarming portion of it is straight-up witchcraft to me.
Fortunately you'll soon be able to help with part of that: levels will be sharable. You can already create levels the same way I did. (It's a lot easier with a mouse - which is also supported in-game.) The inevitable password system will allow transferring those spaces between players and machines... and possibly platforms.
Files
Get Slaughter
Slaughter
An NES FPS. Seriously.
| Status | In development |
| Author | Mindbleach |
| Genre | Shooter |
| Tags | cc65, Game engine, Homebrew, NES (Nintendo Entertainment System), NES ROM, Open Source, Singleplayer, Split Screen |
More posts
- SLAUGHTER your friends!Dec 18, 2022
- So much blood!Sep 19, 2022
Comments
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The new levels are great! I Got genuinely excited when a new area opened up in I think level 2.
The level layouts, especially level 3 so far, make extended use of the glide jump mechanic which is very cool. I'm still stuck on level 3 trying to find the exit door. I had to get much better at judging the edge of platforms to make certain jumps :)
I noticed some neat blood spatter and apparently enemies bleed out over the ground now which permanently colors the floor area around them. Very cool effect.
I loved the idea of a next level portal/door. It was a lot of fun finding it and wondering what the heck it is until I walked into it. It's very dark and ominous.
I noticed items disappearing where I don't remembering them doing so before but I may be wrong.
Things seem a bit more difficult this time, almost like doom, where I seemed to walk into traps and had many enemies firing many projectiles at me at once. This made the disappearing items more noticeable as I was running past enemies desperate for health pickups.
I still almost never use the bombs as they don't seem to work as well as digging in with my pea shooter. Maybe there's no AOE?
In level 2 I thought the pillars area with the enemy sniper cubby next to it was a room of portals thanks to the similar texture and waited around for them to change so that was a little confusing.
I had no issues this time discerning sky from ceiling. Yay!
Level designs all around are fantastic. I still hope to see the one from the multiplayer release make a comeback. I'm still on level 3 so I'm looking forward to seeing what levels 4 and 5 are like.
Some of the jumps in the last level are downright buggy. You can climb the towers off to the left... but it's frame-dependent, because gravity only happens sometimes.
Player rockets have AOE, but it's janky. Most notably: no height check, no visibility check. There's places you can blow up a dozen enemies in one go. But actually hitting anything is nontrivial because fireball aim is hilariously imprecise. (And Select+B remains a so-so choice of trigger.) Combat in general needs tweaking, but that'll wait until hitscan stops relying on rendering. Enemies might even get to shoot you in the back.
A lot of features have been around since 2022. They just work, now. Like the wobble effect when you shoot at portals.