Development notes

The project was started circa November 2010. I wanted to do a simple game that won't take too long, and expected it to be finished in 2010. It took a half of a year in the end, with some breaks and some side projects, including NES Screen Tool and FamiTone.

At the very beginning I decided it going to be a simple NetWalk-like game (the NetWalk by Gamos, 1996), but without a server and with few additional elements. I had much of previous experience with games of this kind, so gameplay part was planned from the very beginning. The first thing that was done is graphics mock up made with Graphics Gale, title screen and gameplay screen. With minor changes it became actual graphics.

The most difficult part of gameplay code, tracing, was done in C first, within the level editor. Then it was rewritten in 6502 assembly. Adding the sound was a difficult part as well, because most of the code game was done before I made FamiTone, and it wasn't designed properly. So sound update calls are really messy in the code.

The game was developed without using real hardware at all, and only was tested on the hardware at pre-release state. There are about 5100 lines of manually written code, and also data generated by tools.

One feature that I wanted to make was different palettes for levels. It was also suggested by 0xabad1dea after testing on the hardware. I actually implemented this feature, including color emphasis bits, but it just didn't look right (colors were too dark or too bright, and very different between the emulators), so it was removed.

After the release, a problem was reported by mbrenaman - the ending screen was not working properly on the real hardware, and also part of the cursor was missing if the game is continued using a passcode. Series of fixes was done in order to fix the problem.


Software used:

Graphics Gale - both title screen and in-game graphics were made in it, converted and edited with NES Screen Tool afterwards
Notepad++ - for all the code and text works
NESASM v3.1 - to compile the code, no bugs everyone talking about were surfaced in this project
FamiTracker - to make all the music and sound effects
FCEUX, Nintendulator - to test everything
Borland Turbo Explorer - to make level editor
Inkscape, Blender, CutePDF Writer - to make manual and label