drludos

Hi everyone, It's time for a new update! I'm very pleased to announce that the game now features a great soundtrack composed by Carl from @Songbird Productions. You can hear both the title screen music and the ingame music in this short video: And as usual, if you want to try the game by yourself, a new beta version ROM (featuring music and the latest fixes) is available for my supporters over Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/posts/52955321 So what do you think of the music?

Woaw, this is very impressive, congrats and thanks for sharing! I really hope you make a full game out of this, the engine is promising, and for a shoot'em up the "flat shaded" look works perfectly IHMO :)

Hi everyone ! It's been a long time, but since the release of the game in 2019, I've been working hard on creating a "deluxe" version. I've added new levels, new games modes, and polished the overall game experience. I've also included 3 bonus games on the cartridge: Timeloop, Fishing for Atari, and Gift Catcher. This game should be published on cartridge in a fully featured boxed edition, hopefully by the end of 2021. Meanwhile, the first beta version of the game is available right now for people who support me on Patreon: https://patreon.com/posts/47298674

And here is my entry for the LynXmas 2020 competition: Gift Catcher. Can you help Santa catch all the gifts without touching snowflakes? The game is played in vertical mode, using only the A/B buttons. At first, Santa will move on top of the screen. Press the button, and he'll dive down to catch a gift. Now you can press and hold the button again to make him climb back up to the top of the screen. Catch all the gifts, but avoid touching the moving snowflakes! If are looking for a challenge, my current highscore is 24 points! The game ROM can be downloaded from here. And here is the game page on the competition website if you want to rate it! I hope you'll enjoy it!

Thanks for your kind words, and for the issue report. Actually, the Game Over is drawn over the snowflakes, but as they share some colors (white) it can sometimes looks the other way around (although it's not :)). It's very cool that also we got an entry from a "mysterious" participant. Looking at the entries page, the game looks again very diverse, that's a very cool event! Igor, I don't how you managed to code anything (and here you just made a full game from scratch!) with a new born baby at home! I remember that during the first weeks, every "baby is sleeping" time was actually used for us to do some chores or to take a nap too!

Well, I managed to gather some tiny bits of free time here and there during the past week, so I'm happy to finally be able to enter the compo too! (@LordKraken, I'm the "mysterious" 6th participant :p). I've just submitted my entry, titled Gift Catcher. It's a single button button game played in vertical mode. Can you help Santa catch all the gifts without touching snowflakes? The game is played in vertical mode, using only the A/B buttons. At first, Santa will move on top of the screen. Press the button, and he'll dive down to catch a gift. Now you can press and hold the button again to make him climb back up to the top of the screen. Catch all the gifts, but avoid touching the moving snowflakes! If are looking for a challenge, my current highscore is 24 points! The final ROM weight 26kb, and can be downloaded from here. I hope you'll enjoy it, and I'm looking forward playing your entries! I'm very impressed by what I've seen so far - the Lynx will have a great Christmas this year!

Woaw, I'm very impressed by all your entries so far, in a record time! They all look very good, and I like the first gameplay vids posted so far! Sadly, I don't think I'll have the time to make anything before the deadline (too busy with "real life" :(... ), but I'm really looking forward playing your games! Good luck!

Hi everyone! As you may know, today (November 21st) the Super Nintendo (SNES) console turns 30! To celebrate this, I made a new SNES game titled "The Last Super." You'll play as the last SNES cartridge on Earth. You'll have to move and jump around in each of the 20 levels of the game so every SNES can play you! But don't let a SNES without cartridge for too long... The game is freeware and can be played online or downloaded from here: https://drludos.itch.io/the-last-super It’s also available on cartridge to play on a real SNES, with my previous game “Keeping SNES alive” as an added bonus: https://catskullelectronics.com/collections/games/products/the-last-super Last but not least, the game is open-source, with a lot of detailed comments in the code. I hope it’ll motivate and help other developers to make new games for the SNES! I hope you’ll enjoy it!

Thanks for the update, but there is no issue with any delay. With the crazy current world situation, we can totally understand. I hope everybody is fine and safe, as that's the most important.

Woaw, I'm really impressed by the 3D / Parallax effects for the ground and the city! It feels like a SNES game, or even a PSX one! Congrats on the great work, the sound definitively adds a lot to the whole experience.

Wonderful, congrats on these new releases! The box art looks gorgeous on both games, I really love the A Bug's Trip one!

Hi Igor, I've just replied to your email! I'm very sorry for the late reply, and I thank you again for running such a great and entertaining competition!

For those of you who are interest in a "behind the scene" look, I've just published all the prototypes (with explanations of the project creation steps) of Timeloop for my supporters on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/posts/41912761 For example, here is what the first version of the game graphics looked like: The word you are looking for is "ugly."

Count me in!

Thanks a lot Igor for the detailed results! Congrats everyone on your high score, this was indeed a close one! My hat's off to Nop90 and RetroGuru for a well deserved 1st place! I'm also happy to see that Asteroids Chasers (my personal favorite for this compo) did get a lot of well deserved praise too. And thanks everyone for enjoying my entry, I wasn't excepting Timeloop to rank up so high!

Cool! I saw that the competition reached 99 votes in total, which seems quite a lot (almost 100!).

Woaw, very beautiful screen ! It looks like a 16-bit game!

Zarlor by a long shot here too! Although I have yet to try to play Odynexus with the console rotated 90° ;)!

Thanks a lot for sharing this interview, it's a very interesting read! I wasn't aware of the NES prequel and the whole backstory behind the game. As the NES version was unlicensed, do you know how they developed the game? (what kind of toolkit did they set up?). And it's somewhat "funny" to see how the same company (Color Dreams) can be an "unlicensed developer" on a platform (NES) and an "officially licensed" one for another (Lynx).

I used the version released on day one of the compo, and wasn't aware of the updated one, thanks for the tip! (so yes, I used the version that doesn't display tutorial on startup, it's great that you modified it already) And don't get me wrong, this is a very impressive result for only 2 weeks of work! (I think I spent about 6-7 weeks to make Timeloop!) I was only offering honest and subjective feedback for the hopefully upcoming cartridge version of the game!

I finally finished to play and rate all the entries! This one is obviously a work in progress, but this is a very promising one! The art is gorgeous, the controls are smooth, and the music set a perfect "Super Metroid" mood. I'm really looking forward what you are going to make with this one, but I hope you'll make a full scale metroidvania, as the Lynx definitively needs one! I know the level are procedurally generated (quite an achievement already), so one can dream of a procedurally generated world map too! :) By-the-way, at what FPS is the game running / updated? It feels very smooth, so I think it runs at a constant 60fps (or maybe 30fps?) - if yes, I'm curious how you manage to scroll such large procedural generated maps so smoothly!) Anyway, good luck on continuing working on this promising project!

Sorry for being a bit late to the party, but I finally had the time to finish playing the all the games and sending my votes. Congratulations Fadest for this great game! This is my favorite one of all the entries, and I really hope it will be ranked in the #1 spot! I really love the board game style (I love Shangai on the Lynx, and I'm huge fan of the Carcassone board game). The game rules are simple, but they do create a lot of interesting gameplay situations. Of course luck play a big part, but that's also part of the fun. As the game are short, even if you had bad luck you'll hit the "retry" button and play another round The game is heavily polished too, I love the achievements thing, it's a "first" on the Lynx AFAIK! Really I had a great time with this one, and I hope it'll get a physical release! Regarding feedback / improvement, here are the 3 little things that come to my mind : - No disrespect to the artist, but I'm not a big fan of the default music track you chose (cornemuse). It's very loud and quite intense, so I think it doesn't fit well with a rather calm and "thinking based" game, especially for the first time you play. Of all the music, I think that Space Dance Music #A fits the game best, and should be the new default music IMHO. In any case, you should also had a "no music" option in the menu (for thinking game, no music is often the best option) - You should display the rule right after players start their first game. On my first try, I went without rules as they didn't show up, thinking I could figure the game on my own. I was absolutely honestly clueless about how the game played. So I found that you can read rules in the menu, and then I started to have fun. The rules are well explained and short enough, so you should definitively force displaying them on the first game (or even until a player have won a game, since you use EEPROM to track stuff) - This is a detail, but with time, I found a bit annoying that you have to press and release the D-Pad to move. I would have preferred the game to move right after the key is pressed, not wait that I release key (it sound like UX nitpicking, and it is, but for a highly polished game like yours I think such details matter). This is maybe a silly idea, but you should think of making a physical release of the game with a "board game" version too (print a set of tile in addition to the Lynx cart, so you can either play on Lynx, or play with real cards), that could be a nice "deluxe edition".

Hi, I finally had the time to play and rate all the competition entries. Really cool entry Igor, it reminds a lot of the Flash game Canabalt (similar gameplay, but also both game have a strong and unique mood). The game is simple to pick up and a perfect fit for the Lynx, but quite challenging in the later levels. I love the graphics, the parallax scrolling, and the ability to automatically climb some obstacle but not all does add something unique to the whole "runner" formula. Regarding improvements, like other have said, there is only two things I thought of: - A faster progression of difficulty (each level should increase the speed / quantity of obstacle a bit) - Other kind of obstacles / bonus to pick up ? Maybe you could add in some flying bonuses or bonus lying on the floor to give the player a temporary speed boost, or higher jump or something like that. And also maybe some flying obstacles could spice up the difficulty (for example a block of spikes standing over a hole, so we would need to use jetpack, but don't fly too high) Anyway, this is already a very solid game and quite polished, so congrats for making it in addition to running the competition itself!

Hi, I finally had the time to play and rate all the competition entries. First of all congrats Karri for putting such a promising game in record time. I really hope you'll keep working on it, as it have a lot of potential (the Lynx is great for shoot'em ups). Regarding feedback, I really love the artwork, very beautiful - it feels like a Bitmap Brothers game. The "sci-fi / steampunk" mood is very original, and I love your unique blend of serious shooter and humorous story. For the gameplay, I think the bouncing shots are a wonderful idea, but that isn't used at it's full potential yet. For example, you could have enemies that could be hit only from the back, or from a certain angle. Other enemies could return your shots so you'll have to avoid them. Maybe you could even set up a combo system or something like that: the more a shot bounces before hitting a enemy, the more powerful it'll be (you'll need to change the graphics each time the shot bounces so we can see how powerful a shot is). That way, people would be invited to make shots bounce, and that will make your game even more unique compared to the other shoot'em ups. You could even imagine enemies or bosses that could be hit only with shots that already bounced 1 or 2 times before hitting them. I'd also like to face weaker enemies - having one enemy that takes a ton of shots is fun once in a while, but when all the enemies are able to absorb a ton a shots before dying, it slows down gameplay and becomes a bit tedious IMHO. So maybe throw in some "weakling" in addition the though enemies already in the game (those robots are damn hard to kill and dangerous to avoid!) TLDR: great work so far, and I'm eager to see how you turn it into a full game, hopefully for the next Lynx compo

Hi, I finally had the time to play and rate all the competition entries. I don't have much feedback to offer on Xump 2, as it's already a great and perfectly polished game! The game is a faithful sequel to the first one, with even more impressive graphics and sounds. It honestly feels like a commercial release, and I'm sure it'll have a well deserved success when it'll be available on an actual cart! Congrats to the whole RetroGuru team and especially to Nop90 for the hard work, you guys are an inspiration to keep on improving the quality of our own titles!