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https://www.smspower.org/Homebrew/Shootagem-SMS

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Shootagem is a lightgun based puzzle game for the Sega Master System.

Shooting a gem will drop the gems above it down.
By shooting out gems, match 3 or more gems in a row or column to score!
Clearing multiple sets of gems in quick succession will add to your combo which will increase the points scored.

The timer is ticking down and it's game over when it hits zero.
Clearing rows and columns will add time to the timer and you'll get more time added for longer rows of gems.
After clearing enough lines, more and more worthless rocks will start to enter the play area which you'll have to clear them out by shooting them.

The game features dual PSG/FM music if you have an FM Sound Unit.

Controls:
The game expects the light phaser to be in controller port 1
Aim at gems and shoot with the fire button.
You can reload by shooting the status bar, or by shooting offscreen.
While in-game you can open and close the calibration screen by pressing the Pause button.

Software used (if you're interested):
Written in assembly and compiled with WLA DX
Tested and debugged using the superb Emulicious
(Also tested on Meka and Genesis Plus GX in RetroArch, as well as on SMS2 and Mega Drive using Everdrives)
Graphics drawn in Aseprite and converted with BMP2Tile
Gameplay tilemap put together in Tilemap Studio
Music and sound effects written in Furnace

This is my first SMS game and it was definitely a learning experience, I much appreciated the SMS Power documentation!
Thanks to Richard for doing some testing!

Colums with Guns ! :-)

Wow! It's a very good concept Joe to use the light phaser for a puzzle game.

The mechanics of the game work very well. It may still be missing some fall effects that would make gem destruction more visible, but I see that everything is rendered in tiles.

Adding some special effects in sprites (score, combo, fall) might add an arcade feel to this game which I enjoyed !

Thank you for playing it and for your nice comments!

I had sprite particles on my To Do list for ages but didn't get around to it sadly. I agree seeing bits of gem flying and combo popups would make it better!

Making the gems fall is a bit tricky because drawing more than one or two columns' worth of tiles was taking too much time. In the worst case scenario there could be a 5 gem match on the bottom row and that's 5 columns of 5 or 6 gems to redraw, which is way too much per frame and way too many sprites to use to move them all at once for a falling animation.

At the minute it uses a very simple option where it redraws one column every frame from left to right (unless it's a white frame, when the gun is shooting) meaning a column updates every 6 frames (10fps)

Thanks to this comment I've been playing around and if I make a copy of my column drawing code which has delays so it can access vram safely outside of vblank, I can draw another column, so they update every 3 frames (20fps)... Wish I'd thought of that sooner!

It might be that keeping a list of gems or rows/columns which need redrawing would end up being better - it's just the headache of managing that!

Very creative use of the Light Phaser. Plus, there aren't many homebrews that make use of the acessory.

Well this is going to be a cow to film on actual hardware :D

haha, better get out that CRT Dudley mate

Oh I did.

And can confirm it works perfectly on an SMS1 as well as the author's SMS2 :)

Just brilliant.

Surprisingly difficult and making me dearly wish I had some original hardware to play it with. Maybe building a homebrew light phaser will be my next project...

What a novel concept, I like this game. The graphics are pretty and the music suits the gameplay well, what a banger!

Thought you might appreciate the lengths I went to in order to film this properly :D

2023-03-31 11.45.39.jpg (4.49 MB)

Thanks for all the nice comments guys, it's most appreciated!

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Thought you might appreciate the lengths I went to in order to film this properly :D

Haha, quite a lot of effort! Looks like a much nicer CRT than the one I did my testing on (it's also a nightmare to take photos of with how much brighter it is than everything else)

IMG_20230403_211619158.jpg (383.76 KB)

Finally got a chance to setup the old CRT and Light Phaser and give this a go - the Light Phaser detection is really good - do you have any links for the source code to share? PS: If you were going to add to this project then I think an option / hack etc. for longer initial timer - this game is fun enough just blasting gems without trying to extend the timer yourself =P

If you're interested, Rapnet has a very good library that allows using the light phaser:
https://github.com/raphnet/inlib

I love match-3 games. And that one was really fun to play... on an emulator. I really regret not being able to play it with an actual light gun and a CRT on real hardware, argh!!

I like that the music comes in PSG and FM flavours.

Shooting gems actually feels cathartic after swapping them for so long haha, and the fact that you can start a new game straight after finishing one is a recipe for addiction :D

The ROM will stay on my Everdrive for the moment I get a CRT TV and a light gun!

PS: Actually nevermind all the good feedback, I just noticed the gem colours and shapes on the score screen don't match the gem colours in game. LITERALLY UNPLAYABLE!*

* not literally

kusfo wrote

If you're interested, Rapnet has a very good library that allows using the light phaser:
https://github.com/raphnet/inlib

OK cool - thanks kusfo for sharing that link

I know I'm late to the party, but just wanted to say how much I love this game. I've been playing it on a Raspberry Pi with the Sinden Lightgun. It's so rare to see a lightgun homebrew game, and even rarer to find one of such great quality.

Just wanted to add a bit more about my experience trying to run this game in different environments.
As previously stated it works perfectly on the Raspberry Pi in the lr-genesis-plus-gx emulator.
I tried running it on my MegaDrive2 using a flash cart. I wasn't sure if it was the cheap chinese MD flash cart I was using but it didn't run well at all, just had garbled graphics making it unplayable, but the audio was ok.
Later I got my hands on a Master System flash cart and tried it in the same MegaDrive2 console using a Master System converter, and I got the same result. just garbled graphics.
But I then tried the same flash cart in my Master System 1 and it worked perfectly (ruling out the MS flash cart as an issue).
So, one more experiment, I dug out my MegaDrive 1 and tried the game with the first MD flash cart in that, and it worked fine, also ruling out the MD flash cart as an issue.
So... the net result : Shootagem runs perfectly fine on my Model 1 MegaDrive and my Model 1 MasterSystem using the cheapest flash carts around, but it doesn't run on my Model 2 MegaDrive. I think it's a VA04 but I'm not certain, but something about that MD2 isn't liking the game graphcs.

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View topic - [Coding Competition 2023] Shootagem by joe

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