This past while I've been working on some changes to Tilemap Town to try and get things in place to make it handle unreliable connections a bit better, as well as make it work better as an instant messaging thing, should it need to play a role like that in the future.

The game world is conceptua...

In order to play music on most older consoles, the developer needs to supply a program (an "sound driver" or "sound engine" or similar) that will gradually step through a song, encoded as a sequence of notes and effects, and turn notes on and off as needed. Typically sound effects work similarly. Th...

Back when I was working on Nova the Squirrel for NES, I thought it would be cool to add some multiplayer stuff, because back then I was hoping to make a cartridge of the game, and I wanted the cart to provide a lot of fun even if it was the only one someone had. So I put in a quick Dr.Mario clone,...

I added a feature to Tilemap Town's web client where the game can switch what graphic a tile uses based on what tiles are next to it, to make it look connected to them. I designed it in a way where if your client doesn't support the feature (like how the 3DS one is somewhat behind as far as featur...

Tilemap Town takes a short, but noticeable amount of time to load on the 3DS, which is a combination of me not implementing websocket compression yet (because wslay doesn't do it for you and it's not trivial to add, and I couldn't find examples of people doing it), and the 3DS's download speeds jus...

I've been wanting to have my SNES game deliberately do uncommon graphical stuff during levels (or at least uncommon for platformers), though for some features I have ended up realizing that they're probably uncommon because in practice it's tricky to do something worthwhile with them in this context...

It'd probably be interesting to take a look at how my game's engine works compared to SNES games that probably had a lot more planning put in before development started. Since I just figure things out as I go, I try to keep everything especially flexible while trying to keep it efficient too.

Ther...

I've been feeling like the levels in Nova the Squirrel 2 could look better, even though people tell me they look just fine. So I've been looking at different SNES and Genesis platformer games to see some good examples of how other games decorated their levels. I thought it'd be interesting to share my notes and thoughts here.

Because I do game dev as a hobby, that means it's fueled by me wanting something to exist so badly that I put in the time and effort to make it real. So with that in mind I mostly want to make stuff that either doesn't quite exist (either in the form I'd like, or at all) or I want there to be more of something I'm passionate about.

I've worked on a lot of stuff I started on and then didn't finish for whatever reason (for whatever "finished" means, which may be vague). Some of them I'd like to get around to later on and some of them probably weren't a good idea in the first place. This post covers a lot of them, but definitely not all of them. I have way more stuff I worked on as a kid that I'd have to track down (if it still exists).