Tummai Games

I mentioned in my previous post that I have started a new project. I learned a lot about code organization since the last time I worked on Explorer and I wanted to start fresh. This project isn’t as ambitious as Explorer is, so I should be able to complete it more quickly and build my nesdev skills.

Ramses Game

The new game is tentatively titled Ramses Game. It’s a single screen action/puzzle game with a cutscene-driven storyline. I’m using ca65 to assemble and the UNROM mapper.

Story

The story of the game goes like this:

Ramses (the hero) was kidnapped from his home by space pirates and sold at a slave auction in the Artajian system to a cruel master named Bonehammer. Now he finds himself on a monster-infested planet, trapped in a strange prison with a bomb strapped to his chest. He sees a hammer in the corner of the room. Curious, he picks up the hammer and the game for his life begins…

Gameplay

I got the idea to make Ramses Game while I was playing Dragon Quest V on the DS. There is a mini-game in DQV called Slime Smack, which is basically a touch-pen version of Whack-a-mole game with slimes:

Ramses Game has a very similar concept. The flow of gameplay looks like this:

There are a series of HOLES. CREATURES come out of the holes. You whack them in the SEQUENCE indicated before the TIMER runs out.

Successfully whacking all CREATURES in a SEQUENCE will add time to the TIMER and bring up a new SEQUENCE. Successfully completing a series of SEQUENCES (7-10?) will advance you to the next AREA.

If the TIMER ever reaches zero, you lose a LIFE. If you lose all your LIVES, game over.

Ramses Game will differ from Slime Smack some key areas though:

1. You use an NES controller instead of a touch-pen. This is why I was working on up+B, down+A button combinations.
2. A much larger variety of monsters with different abilities. I have a design document full of monster ideas that will make the game more fun and challenging.
3. Multiple area themes, with matching monsters.
4. Possibly bosses at the end of each area.
5. Difficulty curve: at the beginning of the game there are eight holes and sequences of four monsters. By the end there will be ten holes and sequences of six monsters.
6. Cutscene-driven storyline to give the game more depth and color.

Progress

I’ve made quite a bit of progress in the few days I’ve been working on it. I have a placeholder gameboard that displays. I have input-reading routines that successfully detect button combinations. When you whack a hole on the gameboard, you get a visual and audio cue. I made some dummy monster images that display up in the sequence indicator. Everything is coming along nicely. Here is a video of current gameplay:

I’ll post some code snippets next post.