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

Gameplay - Southern Loop of the Rocky Forest
about 4 years ago – Thu, Apr 02, 2020 at 04:27:41 PM

First, we hope that everyone out there is staying safe and separate, together. We'd like to thank everyone in the healthcare industry, first responders and anyone delivering packages, giving blood, stocking grocery shelves or helping out in any way you can!!!

Second, a quick shout out to a live Kickstarter campaign for our friend Derek Andrew's new NES game called Trophy. It's a Mega Man style game that's really smooth, polished and super fun! Check it out here.

Third, realizing that pretty much every previous update has been video snippets of different features in the game, it seemed appropriate to show a couple minute run through where you can see continuous, uncut footage. This is the southern loop of the Rocky Forest area after the initial descent from the Plateau where the game starts. This is exactly what we showcased at PAX East and it really seemed to convey a nice vertical slice of the game. Keep in mind that enemy and item placement is just for this demo, not the actual placement for the full game. In short, this is what's going on: Before midnight, you need to find a fuse for the radio so that you can tune it to the proper station in order to open the path to camp where you can safely rest for the night. 

Backgrounds - Quadtree Compression
about 4 years ago – Sat, Feb 01, 2020 at 08:55:06 PM

Our progress continues to be steady as we come out of the holidays and move into 2020. Over the next few months we hope to finish the majority of the remaining work and send out the test carts. In this update we wanted to provide a little info on our backgrounds in hopes that it sheds light on what we have to do to cram everything into a 512K ROM.

Backgrounds:

By far the biggest time sink is getting the backgrounds to look and feel right as a contiguous, 3D world while fitting them into the hardware constraints of the NES and our engine. For each 'section' of the game (backgrounds between cuts, akin to Super Mario Bros. world 1-1, 1-2, etc...) our engine can handle 256 unique 8x8 pixel background tiles. This may seem like a lot but when trying to make organic looking backgrounds it's extremely restrictive. Aside from a few, rare occurrences, nature doesn't do straight lines and right angles. I guess nature didn't have the NES in mind when it started to take shape :/

At this point we're on what is essentially our third iteration of all the backgrounds; some have just been tweaked to reduce their unique tile load and some have been completely redrawn several times over.  We have a chunk of memory set aside for tile sharing across different backgrounds when the same tile is used in more than one background but the real savings comes from combining similar backgrounds onto the same 'sheet'. A sheet is in essence one very large background image that gets divided up into smaller in-game sections. This means that the entire sheet must consist of 256 unique 8x8 pixel tiles. Here's two examples of sheets:

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Quadtree Compression:

In addition to this we use a technique called quadtree compression to further cram more information into a smaller space. This means that we have to monitor our unique tile load at three additional levels: 16x16, 32x32 and 64x64 pixel metatiles. Each of these levels is capped at 256 unique metatiles and the more we reuse entire metatiles the more savings we see. The downside of this is that backgrounds start to look monotonous so the trick is to balance larger metatile usage with some unique 8x8 tiles. Here's an example of the four tiers of compression:

Our hope is that this is the final round of revisions needed for the backgrounds to get them to fit so that all we have to focus on is boss battles, a few more standard enemies and our puzzles.

Switch, Sniping Implemented, Weapon Upgrades, etc...
over 4 years ago – Tue, Nov 26, 2019 at 09:25:29 PM

We've got a few new things to show but first I'd like to address the recent delay in updates. Over the last couple months we ported and launched our previous game "Haunted: Halloween '86" on Switch: (https://www.nintendo.com/games/detail/haunted-halloween-86-switch/). 

The chance to bring a new NES game to a Nintendo platform was something we absolutely could not pass up. We never thought in our wildest dreams that one of our NES games would have an official Nintendo release, on a Nintendo console... It's still insane to us that it actually happened! Admittedly, it chewed up a good bit of our time over the last few months but in the end we think it was worth it, even at the cost of further delaying this project. This may not mean anything to some backers and that's completely fair; you didn't back this project so that we could spend time/effort on a previous project. You have every right to be upset and make your opinions known, we fully support that discourse. Our hopes are that most backers want to be along for the ride with us as a growing video game development team, which sometimes includes getting derailed like this. I can assure you that the derailment was temporary and that we are now full bore on Full Quiet and will get this game finished. 

Now onto the actual update... Here's what we've been able to accomplish recently:

Sniping - We had the stand-alone sniping engine built a couple months ago, now it is fully implemented into the game build. At the time we only had the scope view with the blacked out screen and crosshairs; now we have enemies spawning, enemy behavior functioning without the hero present, bullets, recoil, reload and enemy clipping at the scope edges (this may have been the trickiest part). On top of that we can now reuse backgrounds from other parts of the game as sniping backgrounds, so sniping spots can now look back at places you've already been to in the game or will be going to later. The hope is that this continues to add to the feeling of being in a 3D world.

Weapon Upgrades - Besides your basic rifle you'll be able to upgrade to burst fire, a shotgun and a few other weapon upgrades. You can see in the video that the burst fire is three shots in quick succession. This will aid players when kiting enemies and will have different reload times than the standard gun (did I mention yet that we added reload time to the standard gun??). We also implemented a shotgun that has a 90 degree spread and area of effect directly in front of the muzzle. In the video you can see that bullet clusters shoot out straight ahead and at 45 degrees above and below the aiming direction plus an area of effect near the muzzle, each dealing separate damage. So if you get right up on something and hit it with all four of those you'll do maximum damage as you can see with that tall fungal wall. This will be especially effective against enemies like the fungal wall that heal themselves over time. There's also some kick to the gun, it'll knock you back a bit when firing. 

Ammo - Each weapon's ammo is managed separately in inventory... pretty straight forward.

Inventory - Those weird, green enemies are called Rhyllekks, their husks can be collected after you kill them. It's fair to assume that Rhyllekk husks will have value so be sure to catch them as they fall. Additionally, health pickups go into inventory for use when you need them. There's several options for healing, sometimes you'll just need a little pill and other times you'll need a full health pack. These are just a few of the things that can be added to inventory.

Enemy Respawn - Some of the tougher enemies (like the fungal wall) won't respawn if you kill them. Just make sure you get back to a camp and radio in your progress or it won't save.

Next up is adding more enemies, adding dynamite and our continued effort to make the backgrounds efficient enough to fit all the different areas we want in the game (we just built a new tool to help with this). One of the things that makes this work so tricky is that in a NES game everything is tied together; in order to save space art assets are shared between different character sprites, background pieces are shared between different areas, instruments are shared across different tracks and features are programmed in a way that any time you can reuse code for something new, you do it. This means that any time you change one little thing it can have repercussions that you either learn to live with or have to find a new way to work with/around. It's all part of the joy of NES development. Some people ask us why we go through all the trouble... We just hand them a cartridge and say, that's why :)

Sniping! And other news...
over 4 years ago – Tue, Sep 03, 2019 at 12:14:05 AM

Doing a quick update from PAX West where we just got some pretty exciting news... Our previously released game Haunted: Halloween '86 was just approved for release on the Switch! For us this is a HUGE, HUGE honor!!! What does this mean for Full Quiet backers, you ask? Well, we're hoping that this opens the door for more NES games to come to Switch, including Full Quiet. While we can't make any promises at this point we at least wanted to share the news and share our hope that we can bring Full Quiet to the Switch. Yinz will be the first to know if/when we get more news on that.

Also, we just got the sniping mechanic done last night. Here's a real quick video of how it turned out:

We'll try to get another update soon with more development details that we've been working on. We just wanted to quickly share the Switch news and show a quick view of the sniping mechanic while it was fresh on our minds :)

Cliffs and Ropes
almost 5 years ago – Thu, Jun 13, 2019 at 01:40:11 AM

We again thank everyone for their continued patience. We also want to let everyone know that our friend Kevin Hanley's new puzzle NES game is on Kickstarter now with just a few days left. It's a truly unique NES experience; an NES escape room game called "NEScape!" We have had the pleasure of testing this game out and it is awesome all around with plenty of well thought out, challenging puzzles.

Concerning test carts, we had initially planned to send those out earlier in the development process in order to get feedback on general game mechanics and navigation. The only good thing about us missing our estimated ship date is that we've gotten that feedback at various conventions throughout this past year so the test carts will ship with a much more complete version of the game rather than a smaller slice. 

Since last update we've added some new features/environments that round out the mechanics and game world. Here's a few key things you'll see in the following video: 

- The Cliffs - You'll have to navigate both inside and outside the cliffs to make your way up and down them. This ties the rest of the world back to the plateau where you started. 

- Ropes - A key tool in finding your way safely down. You can jump to and from the ropes and fast-rappel down when needed. Also, you can take them with you when you reach the top platform that they're tied to.

- Wall Climb - Certain places in the game allow you to climb in 8 directions on the cliff face. Good thing Pap and his buddies made these sections scalable!

- Health in Inventory - Now you can take those health pickups with you and use them when needed.