IGW Games

Squishy the Turtle on display at MAGFest!

Squishy the Turtle is on display in the Indie Arcade at MAGFest this year! Thanks to the wonderful people at Babycastles, it is being showcased on a Super Gameboy, in a cozy turtle tent! If you’re here, check it out!

Of course, this warranted giving the game a little extra love – I released a special MAGFest edition featuring a high score table for fastest completion times! It also features some minor graphical/movement fixes, as well as some level tweaks to be more fair. The new version is not available on the site yet! I plan to do that after the dust settles post-MAGFest.

Anyway, that’s it; I hope some folks get to play it and enjoy it!

Fluffy Space Escape/Ludum Dare 40 Postmortem

Results just came out for Ludum Dare 40, and I did the best I’ve done so far. I won’t go into numbers here, but you can check them out on the Ludum Dare page if you’re interested. I’m quite happy with the game I created, and it’s definitely reassuring to see others scored it well.

I thought I’d post a postmortem before I forget anything more about it. I might try to do this more with game jams; will see how it goes. It’s a bit long and rambly, so click in if you’re interested.

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Ludum Dare 40 – Fluffy Space Escape

It’s been a little while since I posted an update, so here’s one! I participated in my third (successful) Ludum Dare this weekend, and created another NES game.

This one is a bit of a puzzle game- you’re a rabbit trapped in space, trying to find his way back to earth. It’s a quirky little game, but I think it came out pretty well.

There was a theme of “the more you have, the worse it is”, which led me to make gems that slow you down as you collect them. You have to get them all to exit, so plan your escape carefully.

On a more technical note, this is one of the first times I’ve successfully used ppu scrolling in a NES game. I managed to do that in the last 2 hours of the contest. The scrolling is a little quirky – the hud tears a little. I could have sorted it out, but ran out of time.

At any rate, if NES games are your thing, enjoy!

Put your NES on the internet!

I’ve got one more new (ish) NES project to share: NESNet. It’s a C library for making http requests from the NES.

You need some extra hardware originally designed by Rachel Simone Weil for her ConnectedNES project, but once you have that you can use it to do some pretty cool stuff.

So far, demos include a browser for the NESDev forums, and an asynchronous demo. Here’s a video of it in action:

My hope is someone will find this and do something really cool with it.

Another Finished NES Game (Ludum Dare)

This past weekend I built another game for Ludum Dare. For those unfamiliar, Ludum Dare is a contest where you have 48 hours to build a game from scratch. The theme this time was “A Small World”. I targeted the NES using my C Boilerplate library for the NES. As usual, it is tested and works on real hardware.

It’s a top-down action game featuring a frog in world with missing pieces. Your goal: to collect the missing pieces and restore your world.

Give it a try

Ludum Dare Site

Squishy the Turtle (Ludum Dare 34)

This past weekend I spent some time writing a game! Squishy the Turtle is a Nintendo Game Boy game written for Ludum Dare 34 over the course of 48 hours. It follows the adventures of Squishy the Turtle, who must collect eggs to advance through the world. Squishy can grow and shrink in order to better navigate the world.

See more information on the Ludum Dare entry page, or the page on the site. If you spend the time to try it, please rate it on the Ludum Dare website.

Last note: it works on real hardware!