Topic: Digger T. Rock (NES)

[qrl]

During the past week, I have been grafting together screenshots of this game in GraphicsGale. I picked Digger mainly out of curiosity. All levels are monochromatic and the view is truncated by one of those gigantic Euro-game status bars. What have I gotten myself into?



* I haven't marked the weak enemy spawn locations because they are consistently positioned throughout every cavern. Important monsters are marked, of course.



* Supply items appear at predictable locations, but whether they are rocks, ladders, or dynamite seems to be random. (But sometimes they aren't!) Something should be at those spots, though. Diamonds appear to get their own list of possible locations. Any suggestions on what I should do about this?



* All the warp tunnels I could find are marked.



* Ceiling mushrooms and throwing stones are marked.



Only a couple more caverns to go! Here is a WIP sample:



http://sites.google.com/site/sahveyvieaahah/Home/digger_t_rock_nes_cavern_5_WIP.png

[Will]

Nice looking work. You say that rocks, ladders or dynamite are at random in certain places. In Super Mario Bros. where there is either a mushroom or a fire flower, half a mushroom and half a fire flower is illustrated, if you see what I mean. Dividing the dynamite, ladder and rock sprites into thirds would be a bit difficult. Probably you should shrink all three sprites into quarter sized graphics then put all three in one space. Hope it helps.

[snesmaster]

What I have done in the past is just pick one of the random items, If one is more common then the others, pick that, if not just pick one that you like.  Then make a note someone where in the map or in a legend that whereever that item appears it could randomly be any of the 3 items.

[qrl]

prelim set: http://sites.google.com/site/sahveyvieaahah/Home/digger_prelim.zip



TO DO: I would like to catch any missing item spawn points, and maybe mark which items are persistent. That will take a few more playthroughs...



I see that there are some dead-ends in various areas that may lead to secrets. Probably not, but you never know with these old games. There is also one spot in cavern 7 that I simply cannot reach, though I was able to capture some of it with FCEUX's name table viewer. Maybe something cool is there? It's filled with question marks for now. Cavern 4's upper area is also out of range, but in 4's case it obviously has no impact on play.



I have also read about inter-cavern warps but have never been able to pull them off. Could be a hoax.

[snesmaster]

You may be able to find a code to walk through walls or something along those lines so you can map those areas you can't reach.  FCEUX has a great code finder.

[qrl]

Good idea. I've been using NEStopia for the most part and the thought of using cheats never really occured to me. I found a patch that makes the player float at the vertex of his jump -- that should make the mystery section reachable. Thanks!

[qrl]

I found a few other item spawnpoints. I was going to mark persistent items, but it pretty much just appears to be a couple of items in Cavern 2. I figure one more play session to check for more spawnpoints should be enough.

[qrl]

Voila:



http://sites.google.com/site/sahveyvieaahah/Home/digger_t_rock_nes_MAPS.zip

[JonLeung]

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