BlasNESmous (or Blasphemous for the NES)

It's 1989, you are playing Metroid on your NES and you get a call from someone saying they work at The Game Kitchen. They start pitching a new game, sounds like a platformer, a bit like Metroid, a bit like Castlevania, but with a twist: more andaluz than something coming from outside. You even get an offer, 200k pesetas a month until the the game is production-ready. There's not a lot of NES developers in Spain, but damn that's a very good offer. In 12-15 months you could even get a flat in Málaga, hopefully in Huelin. 

Time to take a decission:

1. Hell yes
2. Nope, I prefer to get my paro

About the development

Now, this is just early work, around 100 hours of work. I took the sprites from here, and used a modern approach to software development and modern tools:

• git for version control
• Gimp for tile editing
• NEXXT Studio for the title screen
• MapFab for palette, metatiles and level edition
• NESFab for programming
• Mesen as a software emulator
  • with LUA as a scripting language for debugging
• NESTang as a hardware emulator

The game is so far just a platformer, it's not yet a Metroidvania, and it's far away of being a soulslike. But again, this is just a prototype.

The whole point of this project is to have something that works on hardware, taking NES hardware limitations into account and seeing how far this limits can be pushed.

Why the NES?

Basically, because I know its architecture, with its tricks and limitations. Also, NESFab is truly fabulous. The sprite colour limitation could be solved easily in the Master System, but I don't know the whole architecture and never programmed for it.

Something different would be developing for the PC Engine. It has an 8bit CPU but a 16bit GPU, 512 colours, 16 colours per sprite and 16 sprites per scanline. This would be closer to the 8bit version of Blasphemous. Sounds good for a future project.

How to use

Download your preferred emulator, use bombanet or run it on your everdrive!

Sprites

As I said, I took the sprites from papaco (thanks), but due to NES limitations (3 colour palette per sprite) I had to use double tile sprites and simplify some things (I removed all tiles having 4 or less detail pixels). I also had to optimize tiles and reuse them. Also, walk animation had too many frames, so I had to choose only two, and then only use the waist and legs. All these simplifications and optimizations make things weird sometimes, but hey, it's a prototype.

Also, the original 8bit sprites where too tall (3pixels I think) so I had to cut off some pixels, which sometimes makes the capirote a bit weird.

The Boss

The Warden of the silent sorrow is a big boss (sprite-wise), like almost all bosses I've played (sofar) in Blasphemous. The NES can handle up to 64 sprites in screen, and up to 8 per scanline, after the 8th sprite, they won't show, which is unfair to the player if that sprite damages the player. One solution is to cycle sprites, which causes flickering. 

So, the least tiles per line that the player sprite takes is 2 (primary + details), leaving only 6 for the boss; and the most it takes is 5, leaving only 3 for the boss (without flickering). The boss is also big, so I had to compromise a bit, make the boss background tiles and not able to move, and had to use my imagination a bit to change the attacks (the sprites are also temporary). Leaving us with a rather sad boss to fight, but good enough as a prototype to test the mechanics. The boss is there so that the player can learn all mechanics.

The art is a bit sad to be honest, I didn't want to work on it. I will do eventually.

Mechanics

So far, the Penitent One can:

• Stay idle (one frame tho, no fancy squatting)
• Walk right and left (animation is odd)
• Dash right and left (it replaces sliding)
• Attack (no fancy finishers, no combos)
• Parry (the animation is weird tho)
• Jump
• "Climb" platforms and some walls
• Heal itself

Levels

- Warden of the silent sorrow

- The Holy line

-  Albero

- Wasteland of the Buried Churches

If you already finished the game, start a new game and try smashing those buttons until something happens :)

Music

None. I will not even try to convert Blasphemous' music into chiptunes. 

About me

I'm an Audio Embedded Engineer/Developer/Person, I don't do Software Dev or Game Dev, so I'm still learning. But I do have experience with the NES since I've done some development for the NESTang.

I'm not an artist, I did my best with what I had. I do love getting every optimized bit, byte and pixel, so I like reusing tiles and removing unused pixels.

⚠️AI was used for:

- Instruction/User Manual 

- cover.png

- NES and FamiCom cartridge images

- Internal scripts in Python, shell and batch

- Title screen

- Internal debugging tools in LUA

- Temporary music (just to have some sound)