Thread by @b_knox

My NES game has a kickstarter and it's live! kickstarter.com/projects/lange…

woah 2/3rds funded in under 24 hours!!

Hey, folks, I'm gonna be streaming NES playing for the next few hours on my twitch if you want to stop by and chat about GunTneR!!
twitch.tv/puke7

i can't believe we sold out in 3 days with 3 weeks left to go! 😱 should i do some course correction? 🤣

alright folks I made a new, slightly-more-expensive, slightly-less-fancy tier pledge for unlimited cartridge potential

I am having a blast with this shit!! 🎉🎉

my buddy @natepancakes sent me this last night!
waddy'all think of the concept?

I decided the "health bar" is now a "shield capacitor meter" so Starglasses drops batteries! Also optimized 1kb of code out of existence to make more room for enemies in the 16kb program rom.

a galactic space vampire appears!
...accompanied by 13 bats

all I've done for the past few days is tear apart GunTneR's enemy handling engine and put it back together -- less bugs -- saved another 1k of space -- &AND& -- now i can scale sine waves in real time!!

omg the GALACTIC SPACE VAMPIRE now has eyeballs that follow you around and their 13 BATS have new flight patterns 🧛🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇

thought of trying the Ferrari font out on GunTneR late last night in bed

I received some fan art from BotBr sean!
battleofthebits.org/barracks/Profi…

I might do DIY shirts as an add-on
…maybe need some game graphics tho 🤔

a story presented by @hiyadya

with 48 hours left to go here is a quick little update video (that i also posted to kickstarter) ;D/

24 hours left and why not introduce a proto options screen? ᕙ(^▿^-ᕙ)

earliest implementation of top tier backer @michaeldufault 's suggestion
i call it CHOMPS

@michaeldufault tfw you have exactly 32 bytes left in zero page and are already using 64 bytes of the stack

I've been working on GunTneR so hard I've been forgetting to share my successes:
Rendering the starfield with sprites so I can scroll messages up and out of the playfield!

Found out yesterday my sine scaler was returning double the target values. Here’s a test screen after I fixed that. Wound up saving another page of ram!

now i can "script" a series of arcs into repeatable enemy patterns -- this feels BIG :D

lots of cleanup still to do -- but enemies can target the player now in 12 directions and the starfield transition from bg to sprite (show a message) back to bg is actually working... been a helluva week orchestrating all of this together *phew* 🥳🤪😍👾

GunTneR newer logo finally on the title screen! Uses 62 tiles which is 55 more since the old logo used mostly dashboard tiles. Saved 80 bytes of ROM tho. Looks much better imho but I'm sure I'll tweak it again in the future. #nesdev
Before & After pictured:

GunTneR powerup drops in full effect!
#nesdev #gamedev

making velocity tables like

Decided to try and work on GunTneR in the backyard because it’s a beautiful spring day but this dingle won’t stop bothering me to throw the ball for her. 🤨🤣🐶🐕

Couldn’t sleep last night so I took the plunge on Yet Another NES Character Editor (yance). Interpreting bit planes is an interesting challenge. Not sure how far I’ll go with this project, but for now it can load and display nes graphics! #nesdev #pixels

4 NEW ENEMIES APPEAR 🥳
Ants that shoot Darts from their butts
Lassos with interpolated elongations that look better at 60fps but still glitchy optical illusion hacks
a sproingy alien thing I call Throber
an Uzi that shoots Bullets that you can shoot!
Chomps uses two sprites now

working on a SCARAB BEETLE boss
for the egyptian lovers out there 𓂀 𓁢 ⚱️

big boisterous SCARAB BEETLE BOSS fight!!
only two more bosses to go for #GunTneR

yeah ok why not
#GunTneR #nesdev

16 unique flight paths taking up 448 bytes for data
plus 434 bytes of program space
this all leans on a scalable sine table used by other aspects of the game #GunTneR #nesdev

we're really getting somewhere now!
(crashed mesen?!?)

these birbs orbiting each other is just another happy accident #guntner #nesdev

#nesdev #creepypasta

i meant to slap together a placeholder image and figure out the conversion but i think i'll keep it #guntner #nesdev #pixelart

fan meme from botbr blower5 #GunTneR

i keep meaning to post progress but i've just been so heads down on GunTneR
here we have some sort of boss death cinematics
things are really coming together right now
i can actually play through the game again

I've been optimizing my code this whole time and I finally ran out of space today. I still have a lot of smaller details to work out. Might sacrifice some things for others. I have 3 weeks left to work on GunTneR! 👾🥳😱#nesdev

I'm really happy with how this boss is turning out. I call it Moufs. #guntner #nesdev #bossfight #pixelart

one more boss cleaned up and ready to ship; pretty much only one to go; needs a lot of work; i literally have #$0a bytes free right now; gonna cut and gut points (WhoopS); #nesdev #gamedev #GunTneR #shmup

this isn't the final final sprite sheet but we're getting darn durn mighty close! #nesdev #gamedev #pixelart #GunTneR

i coulda shoulda woulda posted more than 1 palette of the sprites....

tfw you spend 1.5 days doing a tedious dreaded refactor that frees up about 100 bytes and it only has a few bugs 🤣😅😭🤓👺🕹🙈

i wrote a script last night to audit the #GunTneR code base and found 2 unused subroutines and 1 unused data table; brute forced finding every label and then checking every line for every label
freed up about 70 bytes

my iPhone fails to capture how cool these ugly pixels look on my crt

when the player has the orbiting skull shield thing they loose it and get their main shield fully regenerated instead of dying -- the skull shield graphic is meant to drift and despawn at right the edge -- but its actually a bullet with unique behavior and still does 1 damage

GunTneR has basically been done for two weeks. Inherited a large beautiful CRT from my parents’ basement. There might still be bugs to find. I can’t believe I made this crazy ass 24kb video game.

the official GunTneR box art preview as created by the very talented and inimitable @instantSonic

hey look GunTneR finally has a complete box layout!

I made a ROM that does nothing but display GunTneR sprites for photography. I think this is the best solution for the manual even if it felt like reinventing the wheel a bit. Hopefully I’ll be done working on the printed materials soon! #nesdev

if a manual needs an image of an nes controller then my manuals might as well have one that looks like this
#GunTneR @blast_lo

the GunTneR manual is basically done
but i'll marinate on it for a few more days before sending it off to the printers

it's both the Known Unknowns and the Unknown Unknowns that will get ya

The past few months have been a whirlwind of me grasping at product roadmaps, business licensing, tooling, process discovery, package design, parts acquisitions, supplier relations, manufacturing pipelines, social media strategy and marketing content.

This is what 510 partially transparent blue NES cartridge shells looks like. Can’t believe each one comes with an individual 3 screw bag inside. No signs of breakage, just a few stress marks. 🎉

GunTneR is featured in the
2023 NES HOMBREW CALENDAR
snag yourself a copy (i'm getting 2!!)
homebrews-in-focus.myshopify.com/products/2023-…
#nes #nesdev #homebrew

Picked up the printed GunTneR manuals today!

Holy crap the first game they talk about is GunTneR and I loved every second of it!!

GunTneR is all setup at the Magfest Homebrew booth!! Come check it out and get free stickers! Big shout out to @megacatstudios for helping me get here!! 🎉♥️🤩

the test apparel that came two days too late to wear at magfest

sending samples to the box printers so maybe they get it right this time — print being too dark seems to be a theme and I wonder if I could better prep the files

I think getting the PCB done has been the most intimidating thing while making GunTneR. I can see getting used to KiCad eventually. And, of course, the edge connector pins go right-to-left THAT MAKES SENSE no problemo