Hello all,
I just released the first public beta of a game that I have been working on with my kids based on the characters from the famous Miyazaki movie.
Catch the acorns before the timer expires, avoid poison berries and look for the apples which give you extra time.



The game is fully functional and playable 1 and 2 player modes. It is open source (mixed C and asm) and fits in a standard 16k cart.

It can be downloaded from github:
https://github.com/gorlik/totoro64/releases/tag/v0.35b

I'd love to hear feedback and in particular I am looking for help/suggestions on the following:
1- Sound effects. Right now only the acorns have sound. I am really bad with the SID and I am having difficulties coming up with interesting sounds for the poisonous items and the extra time item.
2- Music (see #1 above about my lack of SID skills). I have a 2 voice track driven by a homebrew irqplayer. The instruments however are super dull and boring. I have looked at both sid wizard and goattracker but I can't create any good sounding instruments.
3- General playtesting. The game has currently 15 stages of increasing difficulty. A new element is introduced every 3 stages. Suggestion for additional stages is also welcome
4- Final sequence. The game currently goes on forever. I am planning to have it end after the last stage is cleared and the totoros are picked up by the catbus.

thanks in advance!
GG

I haven't taken a look yet since I am away from C64 equipment at the moment, but I'll reply about the music.

The SID is an analog synthesizer with knobs you can turn. You can turn the knobs while the note is playing and this is the key to constructing good instruments. The main knobs you can turn are the pulse width, filter frequency and... also the frequency of a note.

I would advise to take a look at a few osclilloscope views of songs of some SID grandmasters. Here is for example Cybernoid from Jeroen Tel:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3kgzdAfz0AE

You can see there that the pulse width and filter frequency changes as the note progresses, in a consistent way. The consistency of the pattern creates the impression of an instrument that behaves in a certain way.

Another thing: The filter is often misunderstood by SID beginners: "It just takes away some frequencies". The SID is a substractive synthesizer where the basic waveforms are rich in tones. You need the filter to make a selection of those tones and create a rich variety of waveforms. The filter cutoff frequency should normally walk with the melody, i.e. if you transpose by one octave, the cutoff frequency should be twice as high in order to keep the same waveform shape.

Many beginners don't see the musical value of the filter, it doesn't easily map to anything what you learn during piano lessons. However, the musical opportunities it creates for composers are rich.

Control feel of character, braking / sliding animations etc. are spot on! Well done.

SID instruments just take a lot of time experimenting and learning from existing songs. dmantione's advice is solid. About the filter, be aware that 6581 SIDs behave individually, so the sound will be darker (more filtered) on some machines and less filtered on others.

looks nice. and plays flawlessly.
can you elaborate why C? I'm curious as I develop my game (Robot Jet Action) in C too. I use KickC compiler which works great for me. Here I see you use cc65? right?

anyway great project to work on with kids!

I have taken a quick look. Graphically and animation wise, it looks really promising. The difficulty seems quite low, I had no problem to finish the stages well in time.

For the music, IMO the melody is okay, it is the accompaniment that consists of long tones and this doesn't work, at time even sounds off-key. You may want to look into a counter melody rather than long tones. Classical SID arpeggios may work too, but a counter melody seems most promising to me for this song.

carrion wrote:looks nice. and plays flawlessly.
can you elaborate why C? I'm curious as I develop my game (Robot Jet Action) in C too. I use KickC compiler which works great for me. Here I see you use cc65? right?

anyway great project to work on with kids!

thanks for the feedback.
Most of the game logic is in C because I find it easier to write and debug. Critical sections are enhanced with inline assembly or complete assembly procedures.
I am using cc65 as I have used it on other projects before. The code it generates is not great even after applying every suggestion from https://github.com/ilmenit/CC65-Advanced-Optimizations
I thought about investigating other compilers but I haven't had the time.