Topic: [ ON-HOLD ] AGS Nintendo Classics

[jamesreg]

AGS Nintendo Classics(In Production)


AGS Nintendo Classics(In Production)

Why I am doing AGS Nintendo Classics
After attempting many custom scratch games and joining other projects that for one reason or another always failed. I decided to take a step back and look at what was causing me to never get a game finished and published. I came to the conclusion that much of the reason was because I always had to big of projects set out as my first game. Or that I took on to much for my limited skills and knowledge and did not leave myself enough room to take time to learn about AGS and other creative process before jumping in. So I would get so boggled down that I would just give up along the way in frustration. So I decided to go about things a little differently this next time. Instead of worrying about the glory and notoriaty of completing the next big adventure game extravaganza. I decided I would take a simpler approach designed more at learning the ins and outs of AGS and let my progress in game creation be according to my knowlege at the moment and let it all be a learning process to me. I decided to instead of making something new and custom to rather just try to recreate something existing that I already know about and have played before. This would give me the oppotunity to spend more time on learning coding and the ins and outs of AGS and less time trying to learn every other field to like graphics, music and so on. So that was were the Idea for AGS Nintendo Classics comes from. If I could reproduce old classic nes games in ags and learn the engine better then I would be a step closer to doing other things I wanted. So before any haters out there bash on me for recreating something old and not doing something fresh or using my own graphics vs rips remember we are all on different levels here and each of us had to learn and have a starting point somewhere.

What is AGS Nintendo Classics?
Ags Nintendo Classics is an attempt to Port many classics Nes games into the AGS Editor.
The goal is to as closely as possible recreat classic NES games into ags as they were originally played on the NES.
AGS Nintendo Classics uses all the original Music, Backgrounds & Sprites from the original NES Cartridges.
All programming in AGS to make the game function as it did on the nes is custom and where the learning part comes in for me.

How many games do you plan on re-creating?
Currently the plans are to make as many games as I can before running out of AGS Resources or until Im tired of it and ready to release it whichever comes first

What is the progress so far?

---Shadow Gate---





UPDATED INFO 1-22-2014
Looking for an artist which might want to re-do some of these game sprites and make everything original. I will still realse versions with the ripped sprites and a new updated version if I find a Sprite Artist. Shadowgate is almost complete about to start work on a launcher

Will be making a Launcher which will launche these games plan on releasing one game at a time
Thanks for everyone at AGS for this great Engine.

Update will be adding for each game
BOX ART
CART ART
ORIGINAL MANUALS
SOUNDTRACKS
HINTS

Also ordered a nes usb controler and am working to see if i can get it working with ags for those who want to play with original controler

[KodiakBehr]

While I wholly agree that starting with something small is far superior to something large and ambitious when you are in those amateur stages (disclaimer: I remain both in those stages, and wilfully ignorant of my own advice), what you're proposing to do here sounds decidedly large and ambitious!

Also, this community welcomes anyone willing to learn.  The only bashing will come from not listening or learning from good feedback or misrepresenting yourself or your work.

[selmiak]

Cool Idea! I doubt anyone here will be mad at you or so, but maybe nintendo will be

But your ripped pixel art looks way too blurry, there are artifacts and no crips borders in them. Any chance that you saved them as jpg one time in the process of ripping them?

[Ghost]

Huge plans indeed, but man, Shadowgate! I played that on the original GameBoy. The breadbox, we called it! Well no harm in trying, I daresay it can be done- though usually people start learning AGS (an Adventure Game engine) by making a small adventure game
But Shadowgate! I liked that game!

I doubt anyone here will be mad at you or so, but maybe nintendo will be

About the "rules regarding remakes": That has always been a bit of a shady zone. The minute you start using original assets you are infinging copyright. Even using an existing brand (like Space Quest) and creating your own assets is... tricky, and I know of at least one promising game having a chease and desist being fired at it. But often the companies that made those games are no longer existent, and things just.. you know, work out.
selmiak is right though: Nintendo is known to protect its brands. But for such an old game, well, I really don't know if they'd care very much.

Anyway, long story short, best of luck and happy game-making!

*goes and digs out his old GameBoy*

[jamesreg]

Yeah I may have saved them wrong. I can Always go back and replace the sprites Im almost done with shadow gate and just replacing the sprites would be easy.
As far as this one being ambitious to I dont really see it as such as that I am simply going to work on one game at a time.
If I only get that one game done ill release it but if i get five or 10 done ill release that many. I am starting with something that Is simple to reproduce and going up the the next level of difficulty from there when I reach my end or patiance ill stop and release the ones I completed.
What format do you suggest I save the files in?

[Ghost]

PNG is good. JPG will compress and leave artifacts in a file, and it's terribly hard to pronounce too.

[Adeel]

I appreciate your ideas and would love to see them in action one day. My only 'criticism' is the red colour you used for the explanation-text. Currently, it's making my eyes bleed (more - they are already bleeding because I'm sleep deprived). I had to highlight the text in order to make it more 'soothing' to me.

Please change the colour to something soothing to eyes. I wish you good luck for your project.

[Chicky]

PNG is good. JPG will compress and leave artifacts in a file, and it's terribly hard to pronounce too.

Oh Ghost

Sounds like you've got a solid plan there jamesreg, i'm guessing you're not remaking the entirety of the games, but a section of them that represents their gameplay?

[Darth Mandarb]

The only rule being violated is the screenshots rule.  You have two menues (which are the same) and two "in game" shots which are also the same.  Please update to include two, different, in game shots.

[jamesreg]

Ill update as soon as possible im leaving for a 16 hr shift as I read this so please give me about 24 hrs to get it updated and ill update the text to accidently reversed the colors lol

[Monsieur OUXX]

Wow, you call that a "small, reasonable plan"?
Well I wish you the best of luck (no sarcasm)!

[jamesreg]

Actully to me this is a small scope compared to all the things I wanted to do or tried to do before lol.
Shadowgate has been fairly easy so far it was kinda set up to work with ags pretty well. Univited and deja vu will be easy to which is why I chose those three games to start with. I do need some suggestions beyound that point of what would still be easy to do in ags but up the challange level a bit any suggestions?
Beings this will be an ongoing project for awhile do you guys want me to realese a demo version after each game I add to it? And to those who have made suggestions to the developers of AGS about upping some of the limits such as hotspots, regions, walkable areas, and amount of things in rooms. I totaly put my vote in for that in an upcomming version. Looking at this alot of these games I can get programmed into taking up only one room and not tax the program at all but I find myself wishing those limits were slightly higher because some of them I will have to make more rooms out of. I really do agree with those who feel those limits are not neccesarry when the avarage 300 dollar cheap computer at walmart can handle the load. Just my two cents.

[Eric]

I do need some suggestions beyound that point of what would still be easy to do in ags but up the challange level a bit any suggestions?

Nightshade? Might be too difficult with the combat stuff.

[Ghost]

Looking at this alot of these games I can get programmed into taking up only one room and not tax the program at all but I find myself wishing those limits were slightly higher because some of them I will have to make more rooms out of.

Nothing wrong with using more than one room per game. Why the self-imposed limit? (This is not sarcasm. It's an actual question.)

[jamesreg]

Well on this project where these games are so basic each game easily could be contained in one room just making things alot more simple.
Two other occasions I found having more limits in the room would help was when I attempted to do a role playing game I had designed a map
of the overworld, one of the seas and one of the dungeons and one of towns. Ags more then handled these large backgrounds but then I figured out
pretty quickly I would have to seperate things into many more rooms or even create a tile engine within AGS instead had the limits been increased
I could have done it the way I wanted to. Also when the star trek game I was working on fell though I continued working on it and instead went
into a deck by deck walkable Enterprise project which I have been working on for 2 yrs now. Now I had originally wanted each deck layout to be
a seperate room but because of limits I had to seperate decks out to about 3 rooms apiece. Now if i wanted to turn that into a game later then I have
already used up half my rooms. My problem is my mind does not work as the avarage person I always come up with these huge projects vs smaller ones.
Now I dont want to turn my post into a debate on AGS I should have made those comments in the proper forum area and will join those discussions when I have time. But I am sure there are many others who have some good ideas and then get limited by some of those room restrictions and just go off to another engine thinking ags isnt all that powerful when in fact it is one of the best engines out there. I dont even think of going to another Engine ags is awesome as far as I am concerned just know I get frustrated with the room limits sometimes.

[DrewCCU]

While the project does sound ambitious, I think I understand what James' goal is. To better learn AGS and it's capabilities by taking classic (somewhat "simple") NES games that already exist and use AGS to recreate them.  Start with a simple game and then gradually advance to slightly more difficult games (as far as programming goes).  From what I gather, it's more of a shared learning project that may end up being 3 or 4 games or maybe 10-20.  I'm excited to see how far this goes and what games come next. It would be fun to play some recreated NES games. :-) Good luck! Have fun!

[jamesreg]

Thanks for the kind words Drew I am almost done with the first game added a few screen shots since your post.
I also am working on getting it to work with a usb nes Control pad and possible other Controlers.
Also taking a little longer cause im adding the original manuals, Soundtracks, Hints, Box and cart art to it as well.
Just about ready to finish shadowgate up and move on to doing the launcher so I can put out a demo of the project soon.

edit I have no idea why but I just noticed I put 2012 on one of my credit screens god I am behind the times lol

[skarmachild]

Is this project still going or has a complete version been done?

If you're looking for UI/pixel artists hit me up, this is exactly the kind of thing I'm looking for - would love to make a series of new games using the NES/NES-looking engine from these games. (:

[Darth Mandarb]

skarmachild - please review the forum rules before digging up threads. This thread hasn't been active in almost 4 years.

jamesreg - if you're still working on this and want to post an update let me know and we can unlock it.