Nova the Squirrel 2 (WIP)

It's finally happening! Or rather, has been happening for a few months as I've been working on this alongside my job. The first game released over a year ago and all the inspiration is coming back, and I have tons of ideas for things I want to do.

I'm writing a sequel to Nova the Squirrel on the SNES. It's open source like the previous game, and I intend on making it a lot more polished and making the graphics much fancier, taking advantage of the SNES's hardware. I also intend on having a much stronger story and making the engine more similar in capability to SMW, including slopes.

There is also a new level editor to go with it, backwards compatible with (and reusing most code from) the original game's editor, except this time supporting things like slopes and selecting multiple things at once.

I wanted to show off my progress on a Mode 7 minigame I intend to have! I actually don't really know what sorts of things are being done in other SNES homebrew, but I got the impression that this sort of stuff wasn't too common.

I'm planning for something like Blue Sphere (and will have a character running forwards as soon as I get a walk animation drawn for her), but I feel like I also want to have more puzzley sections where you aren't always running forward, and you can take your time to interact with things. As long as that doesn't push me into a trap of taking a long time to do level design because puzzles are hard to make, I suppose. It could be really cool to have like, different missions where different rules are in place for each one, and I think I could do a lot with this.

Very Sonicy.

I loathed Blue Spheres, but without the claustrophobic horizon effect that always had me lost within the first ten seconds, it actually looks like fun.

...and an awful lot like a certain something else. I'd suggest a racing minigame, but that rabbit hole might be a bit too deep.

Very awesome ~

I say racing deserves its own full game, rather than just a minigame! That's definitely something I want to get around to eventually, though it'd have to be sometime after this game, which itself will take at least a few years. Doubt the things I'd want to put in (car building!!) would make it suitable for the SNES, though.

If you can provide the SNES homebrew community with a tool which has a similar functionality and interface to Lunar Magic you might create a whole new community to boot.

I will check out the level editor and such. I really want to create my own SNES games as I'm sure many people are.

I'm really not too interested in making a community as much as I am just making my own games.

People are free to use my engine if they like, and I have been trying to make the codebase a lot friendlier than the first game's (a lot of tasks are a lot easier!) but you still need to learn 65816 assembly for it to be useful. They'll also have to do their own assets because I'm not making those freely usable.

Honestly, SNES development isn't anywhere near as hard as people make it out to sound, if you're not intentionally making it difficult with complex engine features. In many ways it's actually much easier than NES development! I'd encourage anyone who wants to make SNES games to give it a try, and take advantage of all of the information and tutorials on SMW Central, which are aimed at beginners.

I played the demo.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yXOp_2r ... e=youtu.be

Did you make your profile picture, because it's really good. I prefer it to the character seen in the screenshot, even if the icon looks like it's meant for the NES or GBC.

And I really like the concept of the Mode 7 minigame. About puzzles, probably the most obvious thing you could do is implement tiles that you need to walk over a certain number of times to completely convert them. That's also about the cleanest Mode 7 floor I've seen (it doesn't clip into the horizon as it does in most SNES games).

It was a commission!

Yeah, my own pixel art and animation skills aren't quite up to the same level, but I'm trying to make up for it with lots of cute animations, like the rolling I added:

This is going to be the replacement for sliding down a hill on your butt, and I have a lot of ideas.

I do intend to go back and touch up the shading and improve the animations and art as I get better at it, as well as drawing my own idle animation, but for now everything you see in the game is what I've declared good enough to serve as a placeholder while I work on the game logic.

I actually hadn't thought of that, but I really should do that. And have tiles that, when stepped on, maybe affect other tiles in the surrounding area? Ha, watch as this turns into a weird mix of Blue Sphere, Chip's Challenge, and Gruniożerca 3.

I was going to do the whole thing, but I forgot how much I loathe drawing. As you can see, I didn't get very far, lol.


I was experimenting if that animation could be transformed to look more like something you'd find on the SNES. It's just too adorable, and that's not a word I use lightly.

Or a palette swap of Mr Nutz?

I'm more than capable of managing that sprite style, myself!

In fact, I was going for something similar, for "Cotton & Candy II"
(Because of some issues with getting the first game published, the sequel is on hiatus, for now.)





This game is looking quite good, so far!
I'd offer to help out with sprites, but I'm rather busy, with a large-scale RPG project... >.>

I'm finally adding in attacking! I'm really proud of the twirl I drew and how smooth it is. I'll probably have a few different attack animations this time for different abilities, especially since I can easily afford to. Honestly I think main character animations are important enough that it's completely reasonable to dedicate a few banks to it.

Edit: Here's a build so I can get feedback on a control scheme I'm trying out. I do not want the same button to be used for both attacking and running, and I feel like Kirby-style running may feel out of place in a game that has more Mario-style platforming. So instead, how about moving the attack button to R? I made it available with X and A too because why not.

Is the platforming in The Subspace Emissary "Mario-style" enough? If so, "Press Twice to Dash" when using a Wii Remote.

Double tapping to run is implemented (but not enabled in that build) and it's definitely going to be an option. I don't think it'd make sense to have as the default, though, especially when the previous game didn't.

I really like how this is coming along.

It would be great if this could end up creating a SNES homebrew scene, because currently there isn't one.

With most of the engine done, I'm back onto having to do design work to move forward.

I've been playing around with enemy design and I've got some enemy behaviors implemented. I'm still experimenting, and I want to give the rabbit a much more interesting behavior than just following the player, for example. I don't think I'm having a Goomba-alike again unless it's very clear you can jump on them, because the previous game having different game mechanics for only one enemy was not good design. That's why I have a slow version of that fast Sneaker enemy.

I've also been putting more work on picking out what copy abilities I want. I'll be keeping the important ones, but probably getting rid of or reworking a few. Maybe I'll keep those a secret for now.


It would be wonderful if my game served as an inspiration. I feel like there's definitely people out there who are passionate about the SNES and who are willing to learn assembly (and pixel art if needed). I also still 100% believe that anyone who's written an NES game could write a SNES game if they wanted to. They have most of the required learning done.

Honestly that's probably the whole point with Nintendo designing it as they did. :p

But if you look at NES homebrew kickstarters, there are many new NES games coming out each year, but relatively few SNES homebrews. So I think that even if people who make new NES games can make an SNES game, it seems that making an SNES game is just way harder in terms of scope.

In other words, you need a bigger budget and bigger team for making an SNES game so maybe that is way you don't see them as often as the new NES games. I've been told that a single person can make a NES game if they really want to. But you could always make an SNES game look 8-bit and not have such a big budget, who knows. But you just don't see that many new SNES games.

To try to quantify this: The obstacle might be the organizational overhead in hiring others for a project whose scope exceeds six person-months, or it might be that demand from end users for a retro console game is insufficient to fund more than six person-months of wages.

Related previous topics:

• Homebrew complexity
• Why no SNES homebrew scene?
• A review of Sydney Hunter that knocked points off for underusing the S-PPU

Yeah I suppose it's saying something that I'm intentionally using SNES development to give me a longterm project that will keep me busy outside of work, alongside just passion for what I want to create. Cave Story being made by one person is a big inspiration for me, and I don't really mind taking 5 years (like Pixel did) to make something I'm really truly proud of, if that's what it takes.

There's more than one SNES project underway at Mega Cat. Not much I can say yet, but if you hit them up at conventions you can play early builds.

As for NES-looking SNES games, what'd be the point? The audience will, rightly, point out it should have been on the NES. For art-limited programmer folks there might be usable, better looking assets at opengameart to make a pretty demo, kinda like Twin Dragons the competition build was. Extending to a bigger game needs an artist again though.

I support your SNES project 100% and one day I would like to use your tools and make a homebrew SNES game too. Thanks for working on this project.

I've got some level decorations now and they really help bring out the aesthetic I wanted.


I've started on some variable-width font code. I'm planning on having rich text support with different colors (already implemented) but also different font sizes and bold/italic if I can get it. I don't know if I'll stick with this font but it was already in a useful format, which helped me get things going.


Here's a mockup for the inventory screen; it's going to have icons and descriptions unlike the last game, with Maffi riding along in the player's inventory for plot-related reasons. I dunno if I'll have this as the background or do something else either.

I've also been making huge progress on actually figuring out a story I'm actually happy with, so I'm excited to work on that too.

Love the progress that you are making with this. Again if you allow people to use your SNES homebrew tools to make their own games then we might start seeing a some really cool new content for the SNES.

I implemented most of the actual functionality for the inventory screen, and you'll notice that I added a text effect to double the size of glyphs. There's another option for doubling it vertically as well as horizontally, and I think that could be fun for representing shouting and other things. I still need a background of some sort on here, maybe a simple gradient or something cute like the animated scrolling backgrounds in Tetris Attack, as long as it's not too distracting.

Now to actually implement the concept of an item in the first place. :p

One interesting thing is I'm actually using decimal mode for the money amounts! It feels really weird to do that after having it unavailable on every previous game of mine.

The small font looks nice. I have something similar in ZX81 Hero/Beamrider (in black and white, which looks quite okay on real CRT screens).
I just wonder how it will look with PAL/NTSC composite artifacts, especially when using colored text/background. Could that be a problem?
Maybe I am too worried there. There seem to be quite some SNES games using fonts with 1pix width. When passing video through a modulator it would help to use bold fonts with 2pix width, but with composite it might look okay with 1pix width.

Proportional font indeed looks OK through composite so long as there's enough luminance contrast between the foreground and background.


Photo of TV displaying an early build of RHDE: Furniture Fight, whose text boxes use NES color $38


I mocked this up years ago for Super Bat Puncher: Left, from top to bottom: Screenshot of game, mock-up of the same font drawn proportionally, mock-up of a narrower font drawn proportionally. Right: narrower mock-up expanded using NTSC filter.

I've been working on implementing copy abilities, starting with burgers (which don't currently require you to touch the ground again before using them again, which I need to implement), gliders and a new bubble ability inspired by Cave Story's bubble gun. I started implementing the ice block but haven't gotten it to work fully. There's also a water bottle ability (with arcs I've since adjusted) with a random selection of four water bottle graphics.


I also have most of an overworld engine. Or at least everything that doesn't involve actually moving around on the map. All the decorations like trees and stuff are sprites, and I figured I'd use them to help me bypass the grid.

Love it. Keep up the great progress. It seems like there is hardly any SNES dev going on so this is exciting to see.