Post for: #indie games ^{(12 Posts)}

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.

Hoo boy, been a while. Let me briefly say, November and December sucked personally, and I found it hard to get back into blogging and making YouTube videos after I lost my momentum. But here's my attempt at getting back into things.

As you may know, Mickey Mouse went public domain as of January 1, 2024 in the US, along with the cartoons Steamboat Willie and Plane Crazy. (For a comprehensive look at what that means, and what the public now has legal access to, check out this great writeup by Jennifer Jenkins at the Duke Center for the Study of Public Domain, Mickey, Disney and the Public Domain) Back in November I had the idea that it would be cool to make an NES game of Mickey Mouse and get it ready to release shortly after his release from copywrite. My plan originally was to start the game in November, and then with luck, since it was going to be very short, have it ready to go on New Years Day or shortly thereafter. But like I said, November and December kind of sucked, and I was not able to get motivated to make it. But shortly after New Years I started feeling like it was worth it to give it a try, and so for the past few months I have been working on the game!

Halloween is always my favorite time of the year. Starting in August, I'm drinking pumpkin spice coffee, I'm watching spooky movies and Halloween cartoon specials, and I'm playing lots of spooky games. Playing through the first Castlevania game, or at least playing one a Castlevania game in general, has become something of a yearly tradition now. So last year, I started thinking about making a short Halloween game for the Game Boy using the wonderful GB Studio engine.

So after about 120 hours or so I finally finished Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. It was a fantastic game and there was a lot to love about it, but it was also very intense and afterwards I felt like I needed a change of pace, something that I could sit back and relax while playing. Luckily right around that time there was a Steam sale going on (or maybe it wasn't luck, isn't there pretty much always a big Steam sale going on?) so I grabbed two wholesome games that had been on my wishlist, Smushi Come Home and Mail Time. I believe these were both featured in the Wholesome Games Direct 2023, and charming 3rd person platforming games in a lush forest sounded right up my alley after traipsing around, above, and below Hyrule for so long! And coincidentally, they both featured mushroom protagonists! Okay, one is a mushroom, the other is a small person that wears a mushroom cap, but still!

Ghostbusters games have been really hit or miss over the years. Sure, fans have gotten Ghostbusters: The Video Game, which was essentially a Ghostbusters 3 long before Ghostbusters Afterlife. But we've also had The Real Ghostbusters on Game Boy, which had so little to do with the license that it was actually just a Mickey Mouse puzzle platformer that they changed the character art in.

So, I thought it would be fun to take a look at a few Ghostbusters games that fans have either taken it upon themselves to make entirely from scratch or tweaked other existing Ghostbusters games to improve them in some way.

Jammin Honey is a hombrew NES game that scratches a nostalgic itch that I'm not sure too many people besides me have. There was a game in the 1980s on Commodore 64 called Jumpman, and my best friend and I loved the heck out of that game. The graphics were simple, but readable, the music was sparse, but catchy, and the action was frantic. It was a series of single screen levels where you had to collect these orby things while robots and other enemies tried to kill you. What made the levels really fascinating was that sometimes when you collected an orb, it would change something in the level, like a platform or ladder might appear enabling you to get to places you couldn't before.