Tactus
Tactus
A rhythm-based dungeon crawler for original NES and FamiCom. Explore mysterious ruins, find powerful weapons, andslay to the beat. Maps and enemy placement are randomized each time you play, so no two runs are quite the same.
How to Play (NES):
Start: Begin Game
D-Pad: Move aroundand attack enemies
How to Play (Web Demo):
Enter: Begin Game
Arrow Keys: Move aroundand attack enemies
You can move freely in any direction, but when there's enemies onscreen, everyone movesto the beat of the music. Enemies move to the groove, so learn their patterns and avoid their attacks. When you movetowards an enemy, you'll swing your weapon. Each weapon works a little differently, so try them all and find your favorite.
Your objective on each floor is to find theBig Key, then use it to unlock theStairs to the next level. If you clear a room of enemies, you'll get a chest containinghearts,weapons, or treasure. (You can also move more quickly in cleared rooms.) Should you race for the exit in as few beats as possible, or challenge all enemies and shoot for a high score? The choice is yours!
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The Action53 builds were programmed in one month for the NESDev 2022 Compo, with original music and artwork. Tactus is currently in active development forRainbow, a modern homebrew cartridge for NES and Famicom systems. Demo builds will be posted to Itch on a short delay. Follow me onPatreon for in-depth development logs and early access to test builds.
| Status | In development |
| Platforms | HTML5 |
| Rating | Rated 5.0 out of 5 stars (2 total ratings) |
| Author | Zeta |
| Genre | Rhythm |
| Tags | Homebrew,Music,NES (Nintendo Entertainment System),Roguelite |
Download
Click download now to get access to the following files:
Development log
- Now Available: Patreon v0.7 "Alakaz-BLAM" - Public v0.6 "Souvenir Shop"
- Now Available: Patreon v0.6 "Souvenir Shop" - Public v0.5 "Grasslands"
- Now Available: Patreon v0.5 "Grasslands" - Public v0.4 "Torchlight"
- Tactus Alpha: v0.4 "Torchlight"
- Tactus Alpha: v0.3 "Rainbow!"
- Updated Demo and Patreon Announcement
- NESDev Compo 2022 - Final Release
- Release Candidate 3: More difficult enemies, but also hearts
Comments
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Right now it should work in the newest builds of Mesen, which can be found here:https://github.com/SourMesen/Mesen2
Rainbow is still fairly new, so there may be some bugs we haven't squashed just yet, but it should at least boot and run. I use Mesen2 for development, as it has an excellent debugger. The older Mesen project on github is no longer being maintained, as far as I'm aware.
we brought this game to our podcast. Listen to our thoughts on it inthe most recent episode!
Delightful! Answers to some questions:
- Moving off-beat is not explicitly punished, but if you get too far off the rhythm the game advances whether you're ready or not. So the main danger is that enemies get a free hit. The timing is actually quite generous, meant to help the game work properly on emulators and televisions with a lot of display lag
- The compo version ends after stage 1-4, so you were pretty close to completing the demo content. I wanted it to end with a proper boss fight, but ran out of time to implement it
- You guessed correctly: gameplay is heavily inspired by Crypt of the Necrodancer and Cadence of Hyrule. The NES isn't fast enough to process the updates in the same way as those games, so Tactus will necessarily diverge in terms of behavior, and that's fine
- The final version is planned to have much more content, especially music tracks. Many of the current limitations were due to the time and space constraints for the compo
