RHDE

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.

RHDE: Furniture Fight is a real-time strategy game for Nintendo Entertainment System by Damian Yerrick released in 2014. The object is to decorate your house with furniture and "decorate" the house across the street with explosive rockets so that you can break in and steal the furniture.

The game and its source code can be downloaded from the developer's web site.


Tropes used in RHDE include:
  • Anti-Frustration Features: The generator that pseudorandomly selects wall pieces in the build phase is tuned to make the game more practical. A piece seen recently is less likely to be seen in the next few pieces, smaller pieces appear more often than they would in a uniform mix, and the larger and twistier pieces with 5 blocks aren't generated at all in the first building round.
  • Arbitrary Headcount Limit: Only the first three beds per side attract units.
  • Armless Biped: Inverted. Polis are chubby little things with no legs who scoot around on their hands and bottom.
  • Artificial Stupidity: Unit pathfinding is very primitive due to memory limits, and units get hung up on corners unless the player moves the unit to a doorway and then moves it further from there. Perhaps this is why units can't be told to move more than about seven spaces at once.
  • Batter Up: A ball bat is the only weapon that a unit can carry.
  • Cap: No matter how many missile silos are placed on each side, only 12 can be fired from. Usually this isn't much of an issue unless you're spending all your money on silos.
  • Color-Coded Multiplayer: One side is red and the other blue.
  • Competitive Multiplayer: The game currently has no single-player campaign. The developer has hinted on forums that a single-player tutorial is planned.
  • Cosmetically Different Sides: The three playable races, Nander, Poli, and Volci, handle identically.
  • Depth Perplexion: Downplayed. Pieces of "tall" furniture (bed, fridge, toilet, etc.) can't be placed overlapping the north side of a room. But units can still walk behind them once placed, and the game displays this by exploiting a quirk in the NES PPU's sprite priority.
  • Everything Fades: A unit that takes three hits "faints" and disappears.
  • Funny Animal: Volci, bipedal canines.
  • An Interior Designer Is You: Each player can buy furniture from the shop and place it in his house. Rounds are won and lost by how much furniture is in your house and how it is arranged.
  • Inventory Management Puzzle: Because each unit can carry only one thing at a time, a smash and grab needs teamwork: one unit to break down a door with a bat and another to start grabbing furniture.
  • Kleptomaniac Hero: This game is about kleptomania the way Guitar Hero is about guitars.
  • Little People: Nander.
  • Money for Nothing: In later rounds of an "endless" match, players end up with more money than they can spend on furniture.
  • More Dakka: A player who buys more than one missile silo can fire a salvo of multiple missiles at once. It's great for spamming opponents' walls while your other units are heading in to steal stuff.
  • One Bullet At a Time: Each side can have only about a half dozen missiles in flight. Not really a problem unless you're at the silo cap.
  • Perpetual Beta: The game is open source. Even after the game goes gold as part of a collaborative homebrew multicart, a second version has been planned with a bigger memory to hold the features that didn't fit.
  • Rewarding Vandalism: Break into the opponent's house, walk in, steal furniture, and carry it back, and you can put it in your house next round.
  • Splash Damage: Destroying a wall also destroys a fence, flower, or door in an adjacent cell.
  • Starter Equipment: Each player starts with one bed and one missile silo.
  • Unstable Equilibrium
    • The more you expand your house, the more money you get to buy furniture. So if you don't expand your house much in early rounds, you can't catch up.
    • If the player fails to repair the walls of his house, all the furniture goes back into the player's inventory. It may take a couple rounds for a player to put back all the furniture, and the opponent may win two rounds in a row this way.
  • Utility Weapon: The bat both breaks doors and damages enemy units.
  • Vendor Trash: Steal more than three beds and they're worthless. Fortunately, you can sell them.
  • X Meets Y: Rampart meets The Sims (or Animal Crossing).