Making A Game for the E-Reader using NES tools

This post tries to document the many eccentricities M-Tee and I ran into while trying to build a game for the Nintendo E-Reader using tools meant for the NES. My hope is this can help others do what we did, because the E-Reader is a fun peripheral!

What is the E-Reader?

The E-Reader was a relatively short-lived device made for the Gameboy Advance – it allowed you to scan physical trading cards with your GBA. Scanning cards allows you to unlock things like new levels in Super Mario Advance 4, or new items in Animal Crossing. The E-Reader can also scan cards to play games, such as those on some Pokemon cards of the era, a very limited number of Game and Watch games, or some classic NES games. That’s where this project comes in – since the console’s release some very smart people have built tools around this platform, enabling custom cards!

After discovering this, I started work on creating my own game using my knowledge and skills from years of hacking on NES games. After getting some of the basics down, I was able to bring on the ever-talented M-Tee to help shape the design and provide amazing graphics. The result is Dizzy Sheep Disaster: DX, an upcoming full game for the E-Reader!

Read on to learn some of the strange things we found out.

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Dizzy Sheep Disaster: EX

This has been mentioned in prior posts and social media, but Dizzy Sheep Disaster is being expanded to a full game for the Nintendo E-Reader! If you don’t know what it is, the Nintendo e-reader is a peripheral for the Gameboy Advance from the early 2000s. You could attach it to the GBA to scan cards that contained features for other games, or other full games!

Dizzy Sheep Disaster is a puzzle game featuring a magnetic sheep and tons of velc generic hook-and-loop fastener pads. It features 30 levels spread across 5 different worlds, and a completely overhauled engine. It will also feature graphics by the talented M-Tee, and a fantastic new musical score by humanthomas. For those who don’t have an e-reader around, the cards will include a link to play in your browser.

There’s no release date yet, but the goal is to have it out by the end of 2025. I’m hoping to release it in booster packs, just like the NES games released for the E-Reader in its heyday.

A preview of the game will be available for play at Midwest Gaming Classic next month! It will be in the homebrew area, alongside a station showing off Retro Puzzle Maker. I hope to see you there!

If you’d like to get emailed updates on this, you can sign up on the project’s site! 

Squishy The Turtle’s return to magfest

Squishy the Turtle made a brief return to magfest for the 10th anniversary, in the form of e-reader cards! I’ve been experimenting a lot with the e-reader over the past year or two, and this was a fun way to test my ability to print good looking/working cards. I printed up about 50 sets and handed them to anyone who knew what the e-reader was. I also left a few hiding here and there as an unofficial part of mag and seek. Here’s the result:

They were well received, and a few people seemed legit excited! It’s just the same game from a decade ago (though I did add an extra level!) but porting it was a fun challenge. If you got it and you have feedback, or run into any issues, please reach out! Note that there is also a url on the back for where to play it online, in case your e-reader isn’t anywhere handy.

I’ve mentioned it before, but I am also working on a more complete e-reader game based off Dizzy Sheep Disaster. It’s actually going to be a finished polished thing, as opposed to a lot of my unpolished game jam games. (Like Squishy the Turtle, to be honest!) It has 30 levels across 5 worlds, an actual story, and graphics by the extremely talented M-Tee. Please stay tuned for that!

Big update for Retro Puzzle Maker

It’s been two years since the last time I updated Retro Puzzle Maker, and a lot has changed. I haven’t forgotten about it, and have been quietly working on a pretty big update.

The full release notes is available over on the site, however here are a couple highlights:

Interview with 8bit-ninja

I was recently interviewed about Retro Puzzle Maker by 8bit-ninja.de! You can find the interview here. The interview is in German, so if you can’t read German, I’ve reproduced the interview in the read more section.

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Retro Puzzle Maker has been overhauled!

I forgot to post here until now, but I updated my Retro Puzzle Maker with a bunch of new features a couple weeks ago. Some of the new features include:

• Up to 64 bigger levels
• User-friendly level designer
• Gameplay animation
• Intro/story screen
• Customizeable title screen + credits
• Customizeable graphics + music
• Smaller rom size (nrom, just like Micro Mages!)
• Per-level gameplay styles

I hope this helps you make something awesome!

Try it out at puzzle.nes.science

2Bit Tile Generator

It’s been a while since the last update, but I have something new to share. I spent some time building up a little tool to make simple custom tiles, usable in NES and Gameboy games. (Or any modern engine) This might be useful to prototype your next game, or to quickly generate assets during a game jam.

Check it out here!

PS: This was heavily inspired by 0x72’s 2BitCharactersGenerator – you should try that out too!

New Code Thing: cruddie-mock

My big focus in personal projects is obviously retro gaming, but sometimes I run into an annoying problem that hasn’t really been solved the way I want to, and have to dig in.

I do web-based stuff sometimes, and to get started it often helps to have some dummy data to work with – when I looked recently I found two useful modules: Faker, which let me create fake data, and JSON Server which would create a server with real data based entirely off a json object. These both helped, but there was quite a bit of work to fit together a json object with all of the fake data. So, I put the two together!

cruddie-mock is a globally-installed nodejs command that will spin up a RESTFul server based on a bunch of json files describing your models – complete with randomized-but-believable data. If the results aren’t clear, check out the application example, which can be run locally.

If this sounds useful, check it out on Github!