Dream Dog Dilemma by potatolain
Dream Dog Dilemma is an action/puzzle game made for the Nintendo NES!
You were asked to participate in an experiment by a scientist that seemed slightly off. He offered to let you play with his puppy however, and it was just two minutes, so you put on the visor.
You immediately find yourself in a new mysterious world, with no way to escape. A few days pass, and you realize this experiment may not end on it's own. It's up to you to explore this world and find a way home!
You didn't even get to play meet the puppy yet!
This is another somewhat mindless fun game - I hope it's as fun to play as it was to make!
NOTE: If you get stuck, you can restart from the last checkpoint in the start menu. (Please let me know so I can fix it though!)
A note on playing the game in your browser
The web-based emulator isn't that good. It has a bit of trouble with choppy sound, and other minor issues.
If you know how, please download the ROM and play it on an NES emulator, such as Mesen or FCEUX.
Controls
A Button (Z): Interact
Directional Pad (Arrow Keys): Move
Start (Enter): Pause
Changelog
Bugfix release 1 (#47)
- Fix crash on screen transition on layer 4 when corruption appears at the same frame as transition (Sprite 0 hit never happens)
- Fix level bug causing the player to die on respawn near the 3 key door (Collapsible tiles added where they shouldn't have been)
Initial Release (#46)
- Game release :)
Tools
This was built using nes-starter-kit - an open source game building toolkit for the NES! I maintain it actively, so please give it a shot.
I actively support it - don't be afraid to reach out if you have questions or thoughts!
Other tools used:
NES Space Checker (nessc) by Shiru
Famitracker by jsr
2BitCharacterGenerator By 0x72
2Bit Tile Generator By Me!
Screenshots
Contact
Past the close of the competition I probably won’t be checking comments on this page much. However, feel free to reach out to me on Twitter about it! If I do anything with this in the future I’ll be sure to share there too. Thanks for stopping by.
Development Time Lapse
I did a time lapse video of my development process (just the emulator) if that’s your kind of thing. Check it out
Does it really work on the NES?
As usual, yep!
Ratings
| Overall | 45th | 4⭐ | 36🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 153th | 3.676⭐ | 36🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 135th | 3.735⭐ | 36🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 153th | 3.912⭐ | 36🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 92th | 3.956⭐ | 36🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 112th | 3.618⭐ | 36🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 108th | 3.387⭐ | 33🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 79th | 3.758⭐ | 35🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 39🗳️ | 45🗨️ |
As for audiovisuals, while I think you nailed the audio aspect, I had a little trouble discerning what tiles were solid or not, but it's not that big a deal. Also, the game once respawned me on a crumbling tile which resulted in death while I was still processing where I reappeared.
Either way, another solid compo entry from ya. Pretty sure you could beat me this time, hah!
Works great on OpenEmu (Nestopia). I played with the CRT filter for that genuine 1989 feel.
Random observations:
- Good music, and nice trick messing with it to get more mileage out of the one track
- Good layer system. Was originally confused when I thought there were just 2, and I also wasn't sure what each radio would do, or if their colours had a system or meant anything.
- Game crashed when I walked off the right side of the island after the 3-key door; not sure if that's the end or not. You can never tell with a theme like this!
- The "tiny bushes" blocking my path early in the game made me think other similarly tiny things later on were solid, but they weren't. Not a big deal though, I figured it out easy enough.
Great entry.
@vectrex28, good find on that death-on-spawn issue - thank you! I just issued a bugfix version to correct it. The "idea" was to nudge the player to go back to the desert layer before going to the next screen, but that kind of falls apart with how I do checkpoints :face_palm:
@rogual, that was definitely not meant to be the en - thank you for reporting this! (There's a real ending, with credits and story and stuff.)
There was a bug where if a corruption triggered at the exact moment you move between screens, the game would crash. (For the curious, it had to do with obstructing sprite 0, so the scroll split did not work) I just released a new version that fixes the bug.
(And yeah, telling solid tiles apart is a problem - for some reason I struggle with this more than any other aspect of game creation.)
Thank you again! I'm really glad people are enjoying this.
I did notice strange whole screen flickers on Layer 4 - is this intentional? I died on the layer and haven't tried again yet, so don't know if any other layers have it.
The music is great, it's a great touch to have changed it when switching layers. The puzzles are great and you really pushed the concept quite far.
I love to see NES games made, I'd really like to make one one day, just to see how it works x) I played a game (Exapunks) in which there was a minigame, they then actually printed copies of the same minigame for NES consoles x)
Anyway the game is really well done! :clap: :clap:
@python-b5 yep, that's intentional. Things get more obvious on layer 5 - it's meant to be slightly disruptive. (and is also why I added the epilepsy warning)
@mathiouza You should! There's a pretty big community around it these days, and the tools around making NES games are better than ever. You can work with either assembly, C, or visual tools like NESMaker. (Though personally, I find NESMaker a bit more daunting than just writing code) If you like Gameboy games, there is also a fantastic tool called GBStudio that is super user friendly.
No pressure of course, I'm just always happy to see more excitement for older consoles.
Also about RusticNES from Zachery's comment, it definitely has my attention - I am glad to see more web-based emulators coming around, and that seems like a solid one. I really like that you can just pass a rom in the URL like that!
How many layers are there, 4? First game with more than one layer I play. Cool.
A bit unclear some times what the layer impacts (deadly enemies, passable tiles). I felt like some times the zombie (blinking humans) did not kill me.
I really liked the art and the music, the glitch effects on the fourth layer were also very cool.
Good job!
itzemii, there are 5 layers. Also, the out-of-phase/blinking humans pose no threat to you. (You can actually still talk to them - though they won't tell you much useful) The only enemies that can actually harm you are the weird blob enemies. The world has holes that you can fall down too, but otherwise the game tries to focus more on puzzles than enemy avoidance.
I accidentally hit my Famicom while playing and game got really unstable due bad cartridge connection. :D
Jokes aside. Great entry, good beats and I liked the subtle glitching when I was not kicking my console. Happy to see more homebrew devs at LD.
Really cool to see someone else playing it on console, on a CRT no less! (I don't have space for one right now, though once I move I'll have to get one) Thanks for playing, and appreciate the kind feedback!
But yes, it's really good job, Great game!
My one minor complaint is that it was a little easy to forget which machines did what? Usually what I wanted to know when looking at a machine was "will this take me up or down?", and I couldn't tell that without memorizing which colour machine was for which layer pair.
Otherwise, game was strong across the board and pretty fun to puzzle out.
I agree with you on knowing which machines/radios go where; I actually had the thought during the jam but couldn't come up with any way to show it that could implement quickly. That said, I wasn't thinking of it like up and down - your question actually suggests a way I could have done it, with arrows pointing up and down. Thank you for the idea, and really appreciate the kind comments.
The layers really made things interesting, and the music was great. Amazing job with this, you should be proud! I'm constantly amazed by the games this community produces!
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