Last week I found that SDL was ported to Nintendo DS, so I tought that it would be a great thing to port Rockbot to it – I would love to recreate Rockman 9 and 10 to play on my DS once Capcom do not port it. Actually, the first reason I decided to create the whole Rockbot project was because I was angry Capcom did not wanted to port a game that is NES like to old platforms such as Playstation 2 and I do not have money, nor desire, to buy a new generation console.
But well, once settled the idea, I had to build all the DS SDK and SDL libraries, that showed to be a chalenge, because the SDL port was to an old version of the devkit and I had to fix some bugs before having an working dev enviroenment to build some tests. Once it was done, phase two started, I have to diminish memory usage from 46 MB to less than 4MB, that is Nintendo DS limit.

Now comes the fun part, most programmers today are just lazy to optimize code and take as much memory as he can get, and often people find that the good games are the ones that need a complete upgrade on your system, so you can have and ultra modded PC with internal lazer lights, water cooling and other pimp foolishes. Gladly videogames are not plagued by this upgrade-often fashionism. So, first thing is to use smaller variables, as I’m dealing with values under 64k, all integers were converted to short. Next step is to limit color usage to 256 colors, using web-safe palette, that is nice because looks more like old NES 8 bits style. Finally, we can’t load the whole stage in memory, because it is the thing that uses more space, as the program core footset by itself is very small. So, I’ve lowered the size of the map, and now the game uses only just around 5.1 MB in RAM!
But we need more, so I plan to use the same tricks old NES games used: breacking the stage in parts. Remember how slow was the scrolling when you changed screens on a starircase? Always wondered why some games had a middle-boss room? This is why, in that moment, you just freed one map, and loaded a new one. So, I believe soon, we’ll be able to reduce the memory usage to 3MB.

Next step is learn how to edit the makefiles from SDL+DS examples to compile Rockbot to Nintendo DS and test. But as holidays are near, for now I’ve work on intro and graphics.

In other news:
– you can skip intro by pressing enter
– started to work on a tileset to build a scenary
– made a build to test PS2, works OK but still have bugs with delay/waiters
– PS2 needs adjustments to load necessary drivers according to the unity is is running from, also, set the FILEPATH with it.
– needs to re-work the animation frame delay – for some reason I’ve lost part of code
– must implement staircase and map “teleport” to another map
– implement sound using SDL_mixer and doomsdl_mixer (PS2)

Durante o fim de semana, foram feitos os últimos retoques no editor básico, que já conta com boa parte das funcionalidades do editor antigo e no motor do jogo para suportar o novo formato de mapas.

Uma desvantagem do novo formato, é ao contrário de idéia inicial de termos um arquivo por mapa, que decidimos por ter um número fixo de estágios e tamanho de mapas unificado em um único arquivo, para simplificar a programação do sistema. O problema reside exatamente no tamanho, um arquivo de jogo possui 34 Mega bytes, o que não é exatamente um problema hoje em dia, mas ainda desejamos diminuir, se possível, este valor, usando compressão via zlib ou outras alternativas.

O que está faltando são ferramentas como desenhar uma linha ou fazer preenchimento com um tile, para o usuário não cansar de clicar o botão do mouse. Além disso temos que começar a organizar e implementar suporte a objetos mais complexos como NPCs, objetos móveis (implementando um segundo nível de tiles) e outras características para poder finalmente produzir um pequeno jogo na versão 1.0.

I am no good ate creating pixel art, but slowly we get there:
Eu não sou muito bom em criar arte em pixels, mas devagar chego lá:

Some time after submitting the code, we uploaded a windows build of the engine. It is very basic, contains some bugs and is just a proof of concept, but we would like to have feedback about it, so go grab it and comment about 🙂

While Betabot is already very different than original graphics, Rockbot just looks like.. a mod over Megaman graphics. And that is what it is, for now. We are working hard to create character design to be distinct from the original Megaman series. First drafting in paper with pencil, then Aris creates Corel Draw versions (soon to be posted here) that we change until decide it is good enought and simple to adapt to pixels; then in the last part, we try to create pixel art based on the designs, and this is the part we have most difficulties and need help. But I hope by the end of the week, we will have a original version of its graphics, or at least a version moddified enought as betabot is.

History is a different animal. It is very easy task and we already have good ideas of things we can improve over the original megaman series:
– an intro stage like megaman x4 before selecting on of the 8 bosses
– dialogs in key parts. Like in megaman x series or megaman anniversary collection: other characters talk and explanin things
– tokyo 20xx ad enviroenment (based in the same kind of universe)
– bosses will talk, like recent megaman x games
Basically, while Megaman and Protoman protect the city (in the game they are cited as “heroes” because we won’t use the names), a young scientist called Canotus, inspirated by the creations of the benevolent Dr. Light, creates two fighting robots, called Rockbot and Betabot, to help out in small missions while the big-ones are occupied. But a new raid of enemies happen and the heroes are now missing, so Rock and beta have to take the crown and fight the bad guys in their place.