I’ve decided to make a many NES games as I can through 2023, ideally ~ 10 different games along with some tools to make my life a bit easier in the act of creating them, be that nicer, generic functions in ASM, ways to quickly make and import music / sfx, I’m not sure.
Most of these will be NROM style games but I am about to receive some CNROM NES cartridge boards from second-dimension.com along with standard NROM boards so it makes sense to do something a bit bigger with them, probably porting They Are Everywhere to the NES as there’s a few more tiles in that game. I began working on a robotron-like game for the NES in November which is nearing completion, along with a cool little secret game embedded within it. I like the idea of having secrets in games and, thankfully, this secret game took only ~2Kb of the total 32kb available. It’s nothing crazy procedurally generated like Flap Happy but it’s a cool little add-on, I wander how many people will find it!
I’ve began potring the sprites and tiles to the NES format for They Are Everywhere as well as get started figuring out how this pirate themed game will work, more details on that over at Socoder.
Flap Happy has also been shown to the public at MAGFEST 2023! Which is pretty cool, that’s two games I’ve had shown at festivals, the first being Super Grid Run a fair while ago by the lovely folks behind the sadly ill-fated Gamestick console. I’m hoping some people played it and appreciated it for what it is meant to be, a homebrew hark back to early 80’s NES Black Box style games and not as a more modern homebrew. The authenticness is important to me as it reflects the style of games I began playing.
I’m aiming to be soldering up a successful copy of my NES robotron-a-like game by the end of January, now that I have opted not to cheap out on the CIC Chips it’s one less point of failure for me to handle or debug.