40 KB NES Game!

1

An indie game called Micro Mages just had a successful Kickstarter. A new NES cart is supposedly on the way. It should be, since they hit 10x their goal. I find this fascinating for many reasons.

One, wow, the NES is over 30 years old. It’s wild to see there’s going to be a be new game for the system… and the game looks good. Second, the game is being crammed into a 40 K space. A single image can be bigger than that, so it’s refreshing to see such focus on optimization. Supposedly, this could have been a launch title for the NES. Third, there’s a video that explains the development process…

…and if you look at the numerous comments, the people love it. They like the game, they like the craftsmanship, they like the game. I think this is the kind of thing that Tumult Hype needs. It’s just short of being an amazing game development platform. Hype is a great replacement for Flash, except that Flash had strong gaming action. Maybe it will happen one day. But right now, the video might be fun to watch.

2

One of the main shortcomings of Hype is the missing dynamic features for games… like attachSymbol and createTimeline. Although I think for starters … attachSymbol would already make a huge difference as one could for the time being prepare timelines beforehand.

Apart of that one can create simple games with fixed levels built in the IDE beforehand.

About the 40KB aspect. That was also a think under Flash with Actionscript that popped up now and then. One should forget either needs a runtime.

3

Well, heh, the point of posting this was not to compare with the Hype runtime. Tumult put a lot of work in optimizing it. That’s why I like Hype.

It’s more of a question for the community. Morphcat games put a lot of work into making the game run on old hardware. Even as is, Hype can make web games. So what is it? What’s missing to get that energy going?

Is this simply a case of nostalgia?

Thinking along the same lines, maybe I’m remembering the past and not thinking of the future. Do people even play web games anymore? I don’t know for sure. I’m thinking probably not as much. It’s mostly apps.

So, I think that’s one problem, exporting to app. I can fix that part. I should work harder on getting Wrapping back online. :smile:

———

As for attachSymbol, do you mean like spawning bullets, power ups, enemies and that kind of thing? If so, maybe there’s a way around that limitation. I’m not at my main computer right now, but I’ve been thinking about how I could do this. (I’ve been thinking about making games with Hype for a while. Ha ha!) Couldn’t a symbol be kept off-screen, then copied?

The cloned node would have to be turned on as a moving game element at that point, but theoretically it seems possible.

Also, going back to optimization, I was thinking about the graphics. Couldn’t this stuff be done with Hype? I’m thinking yeah, probably. Maybe the only thing that is missing are some good examples. I’m not a NES developer, but after watching that video, I felt like getting into that. Ha ha, but no, it seems like it would be more productive for me to focus on Hype game development.

1 Like
4

Don't get me wrong … even if I criticize Hype I keep coming back to it. I did work with Google Webdesigner recently again and it has some major quirks (one needs to learn) but it's much more closer to the "metal". But here I am again as Hype is convenient and has a nice community.

To me, yes and no. It also is a great exercise in minimalism and understanding limitiations and working within them. In that sense Hype offers more then enough to run a minimalist low kb challenge.

I do ask that myself too. I was developing Flash games for a while and remember very fancy webpages with illustrations, game concepts and experimental navigation. Much like a CD-ROM made with macromedia Director in the early/mid 90ties this playfulness spread on the web everywhere and I loved making stuff like that. Although I am happy about it disappearing too when researching nowadays something, too. In our mobil first day and age it's all about 10 second attention span and sales funnels. Occasionally on can bring a artists page to live but mainly it's about efficiently selling stuff.

@MarkHunte wrote an extension for that. That is doable but the Hype runtime doesn't know about the cloned symbol. It's just a "empty" HTML skeleton without registering timelines, events etc.

I was playing with spritesheets and efficiency in this area as there was this discussion using Texturepacks and I experimented with my old software version of Texturepacker but it has a lot of quirks see … https://forums.tumult.com/t/interactive-sprite-hype-4/14143/7?u=maxzieb

1 Like
5

Where things are happening these days that go into the future is Unity 3D. It's amazing what the shaders and plugins can do these days. You got app export... bridges to VR/AR and a lot more like 2D, Pseudo 3D and true 3d with mind blowing shaders. And if the future arrives as many suggest as a metaverse then AR/VR will be the sandbox we will all have to play in (chat, apps etc.).

6

This resource does things along the lines of the topic:

1 Like