Machine Cave
A downloadable game
This game is a rom for NES (Nintendo Entertainment System) emulators. You will need a NES emulator to play this game!
In this game you control a space ship through caves filled with various obstacles. Your mission is to destroy the 'machine heart' and escape the caves. There are various weapons and power-ups scattered about to improve your ship. It is a short but difficult game. Your starting weapon is an airbrake that stops your movement.
Controls:
A button accelerates, B uses weapon, LEFT and RIGHT turns the ship, UP and DOWN changes weapon, SELECT is used with a certain item and START pauses the game.
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Comments
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Hey, I enjoyed the game and did a speedrun of it. Couldn't find another video of a playthru so it was pretty fun to figure out, check it out if you want,
Wow! Amazing! Clever clipping into the wall. That should not happen... >u< I worry it may be possible to clip into walls in just about any suitable inside corner of tiles if the conditions are just right, but I could not reproduce it. I predicted the game could be beat in 5 minutes, you were even faster! Congratulations!
The wall clipping only happens in a handful of spots, where the seams of the screens don't line up. So when you screen transition you spawn within a tile and can fly thru it. You can see where I do it, the bottom screen is 2 tiles wide and the top screen is 4 tiles wide, so I can spawn in there and go.
Yeees, I encountered that issue when making the game. Some screens just don't quite align perfectly so there are ways to clip into walls with the transitions. However.... there were times when I'd clip even without screen transition by colliding with 2 surfaces on the same frame. I may have fixed that issue but due to difficulty of testing such edge-cases I can't be 100% sure it won't happen. The worry is that if it were to happen, the player could fly outside the intended memory area for level information. I believe this will crash the console and I worry it could potentially maybe possibly damage the console? But maybe I shouldn't worry too much since other games have similar unintended behaviors and I'm not aware of anyone's NES getting bricked from a game glitch.
Interesting, I never happened to clip thru any normal tiles. One time I clipped thru a spike block and that must have been what happened, hitting 2 spike blocks on the same frame and one just got ignored.
Ok Just bought it,
LOVE it. These games just keep reminding me why I love the NES, and home-brew. Passion all around.
Machine Cave physical cartridge release is now available! Get it from Mega Cat Studios!
A slightly updated version, 1.16 is now available. A map layout was reworked to allow easier backtracking and make those 3 screens more interesting. Also, a physical release of Machine Cave is in the works!
Version 1.16 had a tiny little error in it's code, so I made some changes. This new version 1.18 has another revised map, a door skip was fixed and the title screen changes color now!
New version 1.19 has slightly changed water mine layouts, adjusted title palette change timing and bombs now make explosion sound if they hit ground.
Machine Cave is quite the impressive work of art! Did you do all of this yourself? How long did it take?
Yeees... It took me about 3-4 months to make everything. I had to learn a lot of new things from tutorials and nesdev wiki online. I wanted to make more content but writing the game in C limited me to using small cartridge types. I'm quite proud of how well I optimized and structured the program code. Some of the program code is 3rd party, such as the audio engine.
Any plans on doing a physical release with the project?
I have no such plans...
https://megacatstudios.com/collections/8-bit/products/machine-cave
A physical release indeed happened after all. Get yours before they're out of stock! uwu
It's a NES homebrew made with NES maker?
This game was written in C and compiled for the NES using cc65. The sound was made with FamiTracker and graphics with NES Screen Tool.
wow complex!