Full Quiet - A New Adventure Game for the NES & PC

Puzzles and Day Jobs
about 3 years ago – Mon, Mar 22, 2021 at 10:41:01 PM

Retrotainment Games is now our day job! The internal changes we made in December were focused on us being able to sync up as a team and work together on a regular basis again (of course remotely still but at least with synced up schedules). On top of that, in January we said goodbye to our retail store that my business partner (Tim) and I ran for over 16 years. This past year was incredibly strenuous for us and we realized it was time to let the store go and make the leap to full-time Retrotainment. Letting go of something you built from scratch and maintained for over 16 years is never easy but in the end we believe it will work out for the best. So while it's a hard pill to swallow, we're excited to see where this new adventure takes us over the next 16 years! We're extremely grateful that you've all stuck with us so far and supported this former hobby that has now become it's own official venture!! But enough with the sentimental ramblings, you're here for the update, which includes three new environmental enemies and our hidden pathway/door/warp puzzle system.

The environmental enemies are stationary on screen, for the most part, in that they don't pursue the player. It's pretty standard fare for the NES but we've added a little flare to them. The stumps are a multi-faceted enemy with several forms or attack. The vines are a pretty basic idea but instead of just bonking you on the head for one damage we added the twist of picking the player up and being held upside down until wriggling free; not so bad as long as other enemies aren't able to get you while you're being held. The other things are spore bombs which help us slow the player down and control some of the spacing on screen. One thing we really love doing is playing with foreground/background perspectives so we added spore bombs coming from both directions just to further illustrate the depth of field in the game's graphics. 

The puzzle system is a HUGE step towards finishing this game up and getting the beta testing cartridges out to those who backed them. In short, this puzzle system is the mechanism that allows us to alter the game's environment visually as well as the terrain and warps that dictate where the player can and cannot go. There will be several types of puzzles that use this system but we're just going to show a quick glimpse of the circle rings. 

In closing, plan to see more updates about future things that we're up to as Retrotainment Games officially makes its way out into the world :)

New Year Update
over 3 years ago – Sat, Jan 16, 2021 at 09:42:16 PM

We have great optimism for 2021, partly because last year sucked but mostly because we're on a roll now. Over the past couple months we've shifted some things around to be better synced up as a team and it's paying off! December was our best month in a long time even with the holidays and Covid getting shittier. We've been able to cross things off our list from 2018, that's how deep we're getting into our to-do list now - and it feels great. Some details:

Revised Enemy Behavior (Cleanup) - You may have caught some unintended enemy behavior in our previous videos... We took some time to dig into them and weed out the faulty parts as well as upgrade a few lackluster ones, e.g. the blue Duwagos that do more than just walk around now.

Map B - We've had Map A (the close-up map) in the build for a while now but to really give the player a sense of the world they're running around in we added this overview map.

Background Tile Swapping -  An exciting thing for us is animating different parts of the backgrounds. We've now reached the point where we can start hammering on these. They chew up a lot of precious memory BUT they really help to bring things to life so in our opinion they're well worth the memory cost. We hope you'll agree :)

Tall Parallax - We've had parallax splits in our backgrounds for game sections that are 240 pixels tall (the height of a single screen on the NES) but not for anything taller than that, until now. This is something we've had slated since day one and have just now finished it up. We think it really helps us portray the depth of field that we've built into the backgrounds. 

CRT vs Modern TVs - A constant struggle within the retro dev community is the ever-increasing difference between modern TVs and old CRTs, particularly their color outputs. It's a major challenge to find the right color combinations that work well on both types of TVs. Add to that challenge the subtle differences between emulation vs original hardware and things really start to get tricky. Our job is find color combinations that work well on all of them while always defaulting to the original hardware on a CRT, because that's why we do this in the first place. 

Hope everyone's 2021 is filled with wonderful things!

TOMORROW, WE VOTE!! In the meantime... New Enemies, Tools, Mechanics and Areas
over 3 years ago – Tue, Nov 03, 2020 at 12:56:02 AM

Well the laptop repair folks took several attempts to finally get things back up and running properly, what should have taken two weeks took more like five :/  In the end, it's just nice to be fully functional again. 

This update shows some much needed video footage of the things we've been working on over the past couple months. We don't want to go into too much detail about some of these things because figuring them out yourself will be half the fun, so just take a quick gander at the following:

1. Some new enemies and how they behave. 

2. New tools and the mechanics that go along with them.

3. New areas in the game that we've been able to squeeze in. 

As always, our unrelenting quest to fit everything we planned from the outset continues as we're now at 17K free, down from 27K last update. That's not too bad considering we fit about 10 new background sections and a couple new enemy sprites. Next update is slated to include a few more enemies that should be the last ones needed besides the bosses. We'll also be polishing some of these new mechanics and adding a few more. Hope everyone is staying safe out there and if you haven't done so already, VOTE!

Pre-Update Update
over 3 years ago – Thu, Sep 17, 2020 at 09:38:47 PM

We've had a lot going on the past few months and while putting together a video to showcase the progress my computer decided to completely shit the bed. It's going to take 10-14 business days to get it fixed so in the meantime we're doing this quick pre-update update to show an overview of where we're at in the process of finishing the backgrounds. 

Before getting to the following images, we're making a few internal changes with our team, shifting some roles around to expedite things. Additionally, we've made some changes to our day jobs in order to free up more time to work on this. These changes are kicking in this week!

As we've been stating throughout development, backgrounds have been the hardest part and by far taken the most time, and since everything stems from the backgrounds everything else has been delayed along the way. We've taken a few steps to work around this but by and large we had to stick to the plan and finish the majority of the backgrounds before we could move on to other things. To give you an idea of where we're at, here's a screen capture of our level select screen in our development build. Circled at the bottom is FREE LIN. 27K, meaning that we have 27 kilobytes of total free space in the ROM right now. Back in July we only had 3K! So our main focus over the past couple months has been retooling things to be more efficient and it's paying off. By our estimates we need about 35K to fit everything initially slated for the game, so we're very close. 

 Additionally, to give you a sense of how many sections are in this game, this gif shows all the current ones:

Section sizes range from 256 x 240 pixels (one TV screen size), to 2048 x 240 pixels (8 screens wide) all the way up to 2048 x 2048 pixels (8 screens wide by 8 screen tall, i.e. the Cliffs). 

In closing, expect a video update in a couple weeks once my computer is fixed and I can resume making the video.

Calling All Pap's Ham Radio Buddies
almost 4 years ago – Thu, Jun 04, 2020 at 11:20:26 PM

Radio Buddies - Please DM me an image of yourself (or friend or loved one) so we can work that likeness into the game. We've carved out enough space to fit these in and before we go any further we want to make sure we lock down these likenesses. 

The Last Two Months - Well they've certainly been a whirlwind. For us personally, we've been staying safe and helping others do the same while continuing to chip away at the game. Admittedly, it's been tough to sync up, especially now that we can no longer safely meet up, but we're battling through it. We hope everyone is finding a way to stay connected and pull through these uncertain times!