Cuts for a country

A homebrew fighting game for the PS1, made using PSn00bSDK. 2D, with 2D graphics made of triangles. Mostly tested in DuckStation. The current version is the spring cleaning 2022 version.

## Story

Carrot, the King of the Cuts, is a bit tired of ruling, and has decided to make a fighting competition, and whoever wins will get to rule the country. To make sure as many people has possible have the ability to participate, he's declared national holidays for a week, which should be enough time for everyone who wants to fight in the competition.

## Characters

There's currently two characters in the game (character names may vary between languages):

- Noam, a Christmas elf/gnome who got tired of living in a farm, so now he wants a castle. His favourite holiday is Christmas.

- Carrot, the King of the Cuts, who organizes the competition, but also participates in it somehow. Doesn't like Easter, because he's a carrot, and some Easter bunnies tend to eat those. He does need them to cut his hair though.

Controls:

• DPAD to move (I'll try and get the analog stick working after the jam),
• Cross to punch (I'll try and add more attacks later).
• Circle to dash (towards the right side of the screen unless you're holding the opposite direction on the DPAD).
• Triangle: blocks (currently blocks all attacks, I'll make different doges for different attacks later.

On results screen

• Start or cross: Continue to the next fight.
• Triangle: Exit to the main menu.

On menus:

• Cross: Select the currently highlighted option.
• DPAD: Switch which item is highlighted.

Known issues (all versions):

• You can crouch in mid-air: if you press up, then hold triangle before you land, you'll be crouching/blocking in mid-air. I guess some might consider that a feature rather than a bug, but I think what you can do in mid-air shouldn't be the same as what you can do on the ground, and the way this happens it also turns off gravity until you release the triangle button.
• There are problems, apparently in libpsn00b's GPU-related assembly code, that can cause the game to show wrong in no$psx and possibly other emulators. This is why I ony included an NTSC build, and these problems are still present in post-jam builds.
• The carrot animation looks weird when dodging.
• Some animations that exist in the game data don't actually get used in the game.

Known issues (jam version):

• The Spanish translation showed wrong if player two wins due to using out-of-font characters. And it partially goes out of the screen: it's too far to the right.
  - Text didn't show correctly in DuckStation (and probably looked wrong in some other emulators and on real hardware too). This was caused by the TIM data being misaligned in RAM.
• The psxgpu issues I mention for post-jam versions also existed in the jam version.
• Language switching didn't work. This was a hardcoded reference to the English text data getting to overwrite the pointers that were set when switching langauges. It should be fixed in postjam-builds.
• The letter Z wouldn't have drawn correctly, as its coordinates were wrong and its width was negative. That should be fixed in 2022 builds.
• You can crouch in mid-air, I haven't fixed that yet.
• Player two couldn't jump.
• There were timing issues in EPSXE. I don't know if these are still present after I changed how I use VSync.

## Credits

I'm making this game myself, writing the text in the three languages I speak reasonably well.

I'm using PSn00bSDK, which is under the Mozilla Public Licence.

I first made this game for the 32-bit Holiday Jam in 2021, then made some post-jam edits in January 2022. Then added a background "image" made of three rectangles during the 32-bit Spring Cleaning Jam in 2022, where I also made some animations that I didn't have time to actually make the game display. In August 2022 I added a 3D scene, but in-game graphics are still 2D and I'm not sure how much of that I'd switch to 3D.