I’ve been working on a project called Fish Bone.
Thunderstuckt was making a litle demo of it.
Thunder… please insert in her. ;D

VIRTUAL_BEN

Ben sent me a demo of a PC game he is working on. It actually looks pretty cool.

He ask me to do a little VB demo so that he (or someone else) has a starting point. I just took some demo from this site and changed the sprites (if Nintendo can do so can I). I don’t have time to take care about this project but I would like to see it becoming a real game.

Ask Ben for the PC demo if you want to see the game in action.

Attachments:

1. fisch.zip

Here are the sprites of the player.. ehm Fish.
Hope it helps.

VIRTUAL BEN

Attachments:

1. 

   font-3.png
   

[thunderstruck]

OK, as I usually use Vide to do the image to VB-header conversion the sprites need to have certain colors to look right on the VB. For me it works like this:

black (0,0,0) stays black (transparent)
white (255,255,255) converts to the brightest red
light blue (76,185,254) converts to the medium red
red (255,0,0) converts to dark red

I added an example pic so you can see how I do it. The left version is the sprite. The right version is how it looks on the VB.

The problem with the current fish sprite is that the parts of it are black which is always transparent. The player would look trough the fish onto the background. Changing the black parts to red would fix this. Only the background should be black. The white lines between the sprites aren’t need and only waste memory. Just remove them.

• This reply was modified 12 years, 2 months ago by thunderstruck.

Attachments:

1. 

   videcolorexample.jpg
   

Btw, I really liked the PC-Demo of your game. Maybe you can do a video and post it. I know you are looking for developers who help you making a VB version of your game. Maybe if people around here see your vision in action you find someone who helps out.

I will try to help out as well whenever I find some time. I just can’t do the game for you right now as I am pretty busy with an other project.

This is the background I hope it helps.
If you wonder why the wafes arent on the finished picture, that’s because there up under the scoreboard.

By the way if someone want the Demo just send me an private message. Do not e-mail it’s broken by me i have no idea why.

THANKS !!

Virtual
Ben

Attachments:

1. 

   bg.png
   

OK, there are some issues with these sprites. I can’t use them in the current state.

1. First of all there is green in there. The color will not convert to black. You HAVE to use one of the colors described above (black, white, light blue, red). My preferred format is jpg as png can’t be converted by VIDE.

2. Another problem is the size. The picture is to small. The max size for a collection of sprites is 512 x 512 pixel. The resolution of the VB screen is 384 x 224. You have to resize the image accordantly.

3. Finally, as black will be transparent I need you to redo the fish sprite. You can read in my previous post how it has to look like.

4. One more thing. If you want me to do your game you have to agree that everything we are doing will be public domain. I probably will publish the sources using Apache License 2 (or similar). This basically means that everyone is allowed to reuse your sprites for whatever he wants.

If you fix those 4 things I will start programming your game. It will be a simple game and you will have to assist me with allot of stuff. It will also take some time until we are done. However, eventually you will play your game on the VB. If you stop working on this I will as well.

Thanks for the demo, Virtual_Ben! I sure hope that you and thunderstruck do end up making this a full game that can be played on the Virtual Boy. It looks like it will be a lot of fun.

Attached are some pictures of the game that I made from the PC Demo that Virtual_Ben sent to me.

Attachments:

1. 

   fish-bones-1.bmp
   

2. 

   fish-bones-2.bmp
   

3. 

   fish-bones-3.bmp
   

4. 

   fish-bones-4.bmp
   

5. 

   fish-bones-5.bmp
   

6. 

   fish-bones-6.bmp
   

7. 

   fish-bones-7.bmp
   

8. 

   fish-bones-8.bmp
   

OK, just to give you guys an update on this one. Virtual_Ben and I are going to make this a VB game. While I do all of the coding Ben will do the sprites. Ben already sent my all of the sprites that exist so far. However, he will have to make some more so that we have a variety of different levels and enemies. Even though this will be simple game it will not be rushed or released until it has a certain quality.

I will be quite some work for me and take some time as I’m pretty occupied right now. So if someone wants to help he (or she) is very welcome. Especially someone who can create some music and sound effects would be great.

Ok… so I have been working on this one this weekend. I got all of the awesome sprites of the PC demo from Ben. I took the Engine I am build right now for an other project to produce a very first demo.

Please keep in mind that this is the work of 2 days. I didn’t really put much effort into developing the game itself but into the making the engine work.

There is no sound, no stats, no saving and no real gameplay right now. It is just you the ocean and 4 fish. Let me know what you think about the results so far.

Attachments:

1. fishbone-2.zip

That’s pretty cool I for one would like to see the fish sped up a bit I think it moves too slow. And I woulld like to see a fin on the side of the fish that moves w the opposite direction that you are moving to make it look like your moving through water. Just for criticisim sake I also would like to see a blinking animation of the fishes eyes to make him look more alive and less static. And it would be really cool if the bones could scale out on the z axis when you chomp them. But as far as compliments go I must say I do love the scrolling and the backgrounds and the sprites And Thunder you’ve done a great job w the programming.

In the PC Demo i made the fish was blinking, but there where a total of 50 pictures for the sprites to make it look normal. I don’t know if Thunder could make this but I will ask him. And It’s good to hear that you like the “game” so far.
V.B

50 sprites only for the player is certainly too much. However, the demo shows a pretty early version. We will polish the game before it goes live. My engine provides a pretty simple way to extend/change existing animations. It shouldn’t be to complicated to a blink or a fin or something as long as there is some space left on some map.

I really like the progress made on the Virtual Boy game. I can already envision what the final version might look like, and it looks great.

thunderstruck schrieb:
50 sprites only for the player is certainly too much. However, the demo shows a pretty early version. We will polish the game before it goes live. My engine provides a pretty simple way to extend/change existing animations. It shouldn’t be to complicated to a blink or a fin or something as long as there is some space left on some map.

From your post I assume you’re loading all animation frames into a BGMap and cycle through them? The problem with this method is that you’re dependant on the size limit of the BGMaps, plus at any moment, you’re holding many sprites in memory, which you don’t need in that particular moment, because they’re not displayed. Basically, you only need to have the sprites in memory, which you’re showing on screen in that moment.

So the better way to do this would be to point the map to only one location in character memory and reload the animation frames directly into character memory. VB Wario Land or the vbJAEngine are doint it that way for example. 50 animation frames should be no problem with this method, the only limitation would be the ROM size. 🙂

KR155E wrote:
From your post I assume you’re loading all animation frames into a BGMap and cycle through them?

Yeah, that’s how I do it. I have read all about the other method but never really tried it out. We promised ourselfs not to kill as with the overall development so that the game can be finished in rather short time. It will have a decent quality in the end though.

Right now I focus on making the overall game development easier. However, it shouldn’t be too hard to integrate map pointing method in the future. I will not do it for fishbone though.

I drawed a little pic for the game.
I know it’s a little bit to early but i think i post it.
By the way how far are you actually with the game thunder ?

Attachments:

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   hni_0090.jpg
   

i have not been working on this since the demo. I won’t be able to do anything until the weekend.

No Problem.
But you will continue
if you have time, right?

sure, the game will be done by Christmas.

Btw, I like your box design. I would make the Fishbone logo bigger though.