Keeping SNES Alive! by drludos
Making new games for retro consoles is the best way to keep them alive!
So, for this Ludum Dare, I choose to create a brand new game for my favorite console: the Super Nintendo (SNES). You can play the game online through an HTML5-based SNES emulator. Of course you can also download the ROM file to play it with any SNES emulator you want, and even on a real console if you have a Flash Cart at home!
The game itself is quite simple: 4 SNES are laying around, with only 1 cartridge of a homebrew SNES game for them to play with (the game is Yo-Yo Shuriken, a SNES game I made in 2019 that was released on cartridge like the old days). Using any button you can make the cartridge "jump" so you can move from one console to another. Be careful not to miss the cartridge slot, else you'll fall and it's a game over. And don't let any SNES without a game play session for too long either, or it's a game over too!
The game was programmed in C using the wonderful PVSNESlib. The music was composed by XRACECAR. The track is titled "7049 Bytes of Memories" and is used under a Creative Commons CC-BY-NS-SA license: http://battleofthebits.org/arena/Entry/7049+Bytes+of+Memories/25393/
A fun fact about the audio: the "shlack" sound that you hear when the cartridge enters a console is an actual recording of the noise made by my SNES power button (recorded directly from my childhood console, still alive and kicking after 30 years!)
I entered the Jam as the music wasn't made by myself. Besides music and a couple of sound effects coming from my previous games, all the others parts of this game where created by me from scratch during the event! All in all, I spent about 10 hours in total making the game (I wish I could have more time, but real life isn't always as you hoped ;)).
Last but not the least, the full source code is included. I spent about 2 additional hours cleaning up and commenting the code, as I hope it'll help and motivate you to start making new SNES games too!
Enjoy!
Ratings
| Overall | 1202th | 3.505⭐ | 95🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 1627th | 3.129⭐ | 95🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 214th | 3.892⭐ | 95🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 477th | 4.022⭐ | 95🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 1170th | 3.672⭐ | 95🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 1034th | 3.017⭐ | 89🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 1408th | 3.295⭐ | 90🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 0🗳️ | 0🗨️ |
Only thing I'd have added is variable jump height by pressing the jump button longer, but it's just a small nitpick. Great job!
The source code of your game looks very much like mine from a first glance. I use Tonc, http://coranac.com/tonc/text/video.htm as a basis instead of PVSnesLib. So im devinely going to give that library you used a try, some day in the future. The source code of my code is available here if you are wondering or if you want to play it. https://github.com/timostrating/Ludumdare46
Specially the message that you got this done in 10 hours is very impressive btw. That just really shows that once you know what you are doing and understand how these old schools homebrew things work you can make things very quick.
Fun game, get a little boring after one minutes ;). Simple but effective.
I love that there's people so dedicated to their childhood consoles that they still make games for them.
One thing that was a little hard is trying to figure out which one is the lowest. might of been helpful to have something to indicate the lowest one, or possible when any gets below 40% they are red or something like that.
but for 10 hours this is a pretty solid game.
Simple game, well done and with the particularity of being a game about SNES made for real SNES. The soundtrack fits very well with the game style and games of the original console. With the addition of obstacles and difficulties, a commercial game would become very easy.
Congratulations on the idea.
Nice Concept! Sorry for my bad english ;-).
Nice music and graphics, fits perfectly together.
However, keeping the the cartridge alive seems harder than the 4 SNES.
Always appreciate a game made for an old system. Learning NextBASIC at the moment for the new ZX Spectrum.