Monarch's Flight - my new homebrew NES demo game!

I mentioned in my last post that I was delaying working on the Steamboat Willie Rides Again game to work on a short game for the Byte Off IV, a five week competition where you make a game, or at least a demo, for the NES using NESMaker. The theme this year was New Frontiers. After wracking my brain for a short while, I decided on a game about the migratory journey of a monarch butterfly!

This is my first completed NES project, so I'm pretty pleased about it. It's really short, and occasionally buggy, but at least I finished it! It's three levels, with the first level taking place during the day, the second at sunset and the third at night. It plays like a sidescrolling shooter, only there's no shooting, you're just a monarch butterfly. You have to avoid environmental hazards as well as predators like wasps and praying mantises.

Along the way, you have a hunger meter that constantly depletes. You have to grab milkweed flowers in order to restore it. Wasps will fly in a straight line, and when praying mantises show up, they jump up and down forcing you to choose a way around. Since it's such a short game, I tried to make it somewhat challenging, which is hard when you also don't want to make it a rage quitting experience. After some play testing by my wife, and watching her just about rage quit, I adjusted it a bit, and then a bit more when I was watching a friend of mind do the same. Hopefully the gameplay is balanced a bit now so that you might have to try a coupe times, but you'll eventually be able to finish it and have fun doing it.

I hope people enjoy it, I felt like I learned a lot over the five weeks I was making it, and hope that I can use what I learned in my Mickey Mouse game now. Still, there's a lot that I wish I could have figured out here. There's no diagonal movement, which I feel would help greatly for a game like this, but the engine by default just has 4 directional movement and I didn't feel like I could fix that. Using the forms, I was able to improve the scrolling a bit, but I wasn't able to get a feature in so that you can get "squished" between the edge of the screen and the scenery. As it is, you just get left behind the screen and you've got to wait a moment for the hunger meter to kill you!

But if you'd like to try my homebrew game, it's free to download on my Itch.io page, and also free to play in-browser on TheRetroverse.com. If you do play it and have a moment, leave a comment on my Itch.io page, or right here even, it'd be nice to hear back from some players on what they thought.

Now that I've been using NESMaker for a bit, I'd like to eventually write up my thoughts on this game making engine as well, since I've talked about a few of the other ones I've used to make games before. I'm also planning on playing every Byte Off IV entry and saying a little something about each one. Submissions aren't due until tonight, and there's already over 20 entries, so looks like there will be a lot of different games to try!