I released a playthrough video and a savefile for a vertical shooter game I made in Kaite Tsukutte Asoberu Dezaemon for SNES: Video - Save file

I checked out that game briefly when I was working on the Turbo File Manager because it's a game I know uses 128K save files like I needed for the file manager, and was an easy way to check emulator and flashcart support. And then I decided to play with drawing some silly graphics and trying and the editor tools, and then I decided to go all in and make a whole silly game haha. I might refine it some more (there are some difficulty spikes) but maybe it's fine as-is. Definitely good enough for people to try out. I welcome feedback on the difficulty.

I had fun drawing lots of silly things, and it actually had me working with Genesis-style graphics limitations on SNES because, for a given level, you have one palette for all enemy graphics on the whole level, and one palette for all background tiles on that level, so you have to choose a palette that's versatile enough for everything you want to do. I used a lot of general palettes like Sweetie 16, ANB16, PICO-8 and that worked out pretty well. Mixing them up helped me make each stage look different from each other.

I found the enemy settings really limiting even though there's a ton of options. It would have been nice to have even more settings for movement (like maybe slightly moving to the side, or controls over how far to move horizontally when zigzagging, or have the ability to shoot another enemy at the player without making it continue to home in on them), or have enemies that disappear or explode after a bit. Felt like I was picking the same set of movement types a bunch throughout the game because there weren't enough. At least the goofy sprites provide variety.

Maybe eventually I could either use the graphics here and make a regular SNES homebrew game that uses some of the ideas I wasn't able to use here, or something more serious (but none of my projects are every particularly serious anyway). But definitely not for a good while, because I've been putting off more important projects for long enough.