WolveSlayer

WolveSlayer is a 3D hack'n'slash game for the Nintendo DS released in 2007. It got the 1st place of the NEO Spring Coding Compo 2007 in the category of GBA/NDS Game.

The original WolveSlayer was built for the toolchain and libraries available in 2007. Everything has changed a lot since then (especially libnds). This repository is a port of the game to BlocksDS, which has required heavy modifications of the original code.

The main difference for players of the game is that it is no longer needed to copy the wolveslayer folder to the root of the SD card. It is enough to copy the .nds file and load it with a loader that supports the argv protocol and DLDI patching.

I've cleaned up the source code of this game a lot so that it can be useful as reference for other developers. I've also fixed a few bugs that were present in the original source, and restored some features that were disabled in the original release of the game, you can read about them in the "Unused content" section below.

Guide

The objective of this game is to find and slay the boss wolf. You will find several enemies along the way.

• D-Pad: Move character.
• A: Open doors (only one door in the game!).
• B: Attack (in areas with enemies).

The original developer recorded a video of himself beating the game, you can watch it here.

Build instructions

Install BlocksDS.

Run this in the root of this repository:

make -j`nproc`

Unused content

The original source code had several features that didn't make it to the released version of the game (most likely due to lack of time to create content to make use of them). You can see a demo map in the branch debug of this repository, but it is very crude.

• The engine supports a pause menu with an inventory management system. Item attributes are loaded from a text file present in the filesystem, and they can be assigned an icon that will be displayed in the item selection menu. The actual images for the menu are missing, and no item description or icons were present in the original release of the game/

• The engine has an NPC system. It is possible to create villagers in a specific location, assign them a direction, and they can move (and collide with things and the player!). They can also have dialog associated to them. Unfortunately, no NPCs were present in the original release of the game. You can use the model of the player as an NPC, for example.

• It is possible to display messages in the touch screen (but the text frame image wasn't present in the original release). They can be shown right after loading a map, when talking to NPCs, and there was some code to show the message when interacting with a door (in case the player couldn't open it, for example).

• All game maps are marked as inside, none of them are marked as outside. Maps with the outside attribute have a day/night light cycle (which seems to be unfinished), and they are a lot brighter than inside maps.

• The engine supports ground water textures, but none of them were ever used in the original maps.

Credits

Developed by Firehazard Studio

• Code: Christian Hoffmann (Payk)
• Textures & Objects: Christian Moor (Garel)
• Menus GFX: Abel Santos (Alfatreze)
• Editor: Marcus Schebesta
• Supervision: Chris Strauss (Fire-WSP)
• Characters: Simon Klein (Pnyx)
• Music: Jeffrey Felt (DimensionT)

Thanks to:

• Dovoto & WinterMute: For libnds.
• Chishm & GPF: For filesystems.
• Liranuna: For his modplayer sourcecode.
• Webez, Gabebear & Dovoto: For many 3D hints.
• Dovoto: For hosting my page too.
• Alfatreze: For menus, graphics and webpage layout.

Port to BlocksDS by AntonioND.