Refresh Games

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.

aaaand no, I don’t need new features for my legit copy of CS3 Suite.

Where did that come from, huh? well, I’ve been running with mainly Photoshop CS3 and Flash CS3 for agessss, know them like the back of my hand and they’ve been useful from the off, still function a okay in Windows 10 and they’re just great to make things with, quickly.

Sure, the activation servers got switched off years and years ago but you can still use them with a bit of hidden know-how which I won’t go into here, but, it stuck me whilst I was there, over at Switch Computer Support, chatting over ideas for their animations in their advert that I’m still using software from 2007, in 2022 and it’s all there.

With the recent kerfuffles with Adobe and Pantone, Software and now apparently…Colour as a subscription service, it’s gone more insane than before. I get it, I don’t have all the bells and whistles but I also don’t have the monthly bill to just ruddy use it. I will, like i do with most things, use it until it’s broken and I can’t fix it anymore, but Flash, yeah, remember that? Cool! It’s still great in it’s older forms for producing lots of stuff and you can always export the files as executables for the main operating systems also, I’m going to stick with that method for making animations again, for as long a possible.

I guess i’m just a holder out from newer versions of stuff but, if it’s not broken, at least, not broken to use, then why upgrade?

Also, the gym was amazing today, I need to get there again tomorrow as it felt great to feel some progress going on there, hooked up a more powerful speaker to my lil raspberry pi ( lewd electronics, it’s best not to ask ) stuff today and, it’s loud enough now, just need to figure out how to get all these parts enclosed and fit into some sort of wearable, maybe a collar perhaps? I don’t know, with the raspberry pi, this is my first rodeo and Python is a pretty trash language compared to PHP, etc in my opinion, LIMITS ON LINE LENGTHS? GTFO

But still, I will persist until this project has reached it’s eventual conclusion.

Also, I bought some cute fabric to make one of the cutesy projects I mentioned yesterday, best get cracking!

So, It’s been too long since my last update and for that I apologise, let’s get into a few things.

I’ve started off on a few new projects recently and have received some good news regarding Flap Happy from my publishers Mega Cat Studios which I’ll be really happy to share with everyone as soon as a couple of details have been confirmed.

There have been some other things that have been going on in the background including the following:

NES Homebrew Game – Bee Happy

I’ve left this behind for way too long and need to get this project back on track. I WILL NOT let this project go unfinished.

Animated Retro Games buy and Sell Advert for Switch Computer Support

A friend of mine is looking into buying and selling Video games and consoles so asked if I would make them an advert to help keep customers in-store and give a good idea as to what’s in stock at a glance, with a very retro 80’s / 90’s feel.

Retro Podcast?

While this is only a slight possibility, I’m planning out a podcast with some friends about retro gaming. This may or may not happen but could be lots of fun and tie into other things down the line.

Secret Cutesy Project #1 and #2

Obviously, can’t mention much about this but whoever these are for, I’m sure they’ll enjoy it.