Lan Master
by Shiru

Development notes

The project was started circa November 2010. I wanted to do a simple game that
won't take too long, and expected it to be finished in 2010. It took a half of a
year in the end, with some breaks and some side projects, including NES Screen
Tool and FamiTone.

At the very beginning I decided it going to be a simple NetWalk-like game (the
NetWalk by Gamos, 1996), but without a server and with few additional
elements. I had much of previous experience with games of this kind, so gameplay
part was planned from the very beginning. The first thing that was done is
graphics mock up made with Graphics Gale, title screen and gameplay screen. With
minor changes it became actual graphics.

The most difficult part of gameplay code, tracing, was done in C first, within
the level editor. Then it was rewritten in 6502 assembly. Adding the sound was a
difficult part as well, because most of the code game was done before I made
FamiTone, and it wasn't designed properly. So sound update calls are really
messy in the code.

The game was developed without using real hardware at all, and only was tested
on the hardware at pre-release state. There are about 5100 lines of manually
written code, and also data generated by tools.

One feature that I wanted to make was different palettes for levels. It was also
suggested by 0xabad1dea after testing on the hardware. I actually implemented
this feature, including color emphasis bits, but it just didn't look right
(colors were too dark or too bright, and very different between the emulators),
so it was removed.

After the release, a problem was reported by mbrenaman - the ending screen was
not working properly on the real hardware, and also part of the cursor was
missing if the game is continued using a passcode. Series of fixes was done in
order to fix the problem.


Software used:

Graphics Gale - both title screen and in-game graphics were made in it,
converted and edited with NES Screen Tool afterwards Notepad++ - for all the
code and text works NESASM v3.1 - to compile the code, no bugs everyone talking
about were surfaced in this project FamiTracker - to make all the music and
sound effects FCEUX, Nintendulator - to test everything Borland Turbo Explorer -
to make level editor Inkscape, Blender, CutePDF Writer - to make manual and
label

https://shiru.untergrund.net/software.shtml
