Retro Game Crunch is now available for everyone! http://retrogamecrunch.com

You can currently buy the collection from the Humble Store (through our website). We're also trying to get it on Steam, please vote for it through Steam Greenlight.

This collection of games means the world to me. It consumed my life for an entire year! If you ever have time to play them I'd love to hear about it. Hey, maybe we can even play some GAIAttack! or Shūten together.

The development journal is also public! If you're curious about how these games were made.

In other RGC news, I'm still hard at work on releasing the final music albums for each game. End of Line OSV is available! Getting close to finishing GAIAttack! It's taking a good amount of time, I'm re-writing every song in MML and recording audio directly from real NES hardware!

As you probably already know by now the Retro Game Crunch (RGC) project was successfully funded! See http://retrogamecrunch.com . Things are going great. We're about to start crunching on game 4 this coming weekend! If you are a backer, a huge thank you! Really it's a dream come true.

The first album (for RGC Game 1) End of Line is about to be released. I've been working hard (for awhile) on making it special. More details will be on the RGC site.

Apart from RGC I've been reading, modding NES hardware, and trying to find time to play games. I also was recently selected to be the layout artist for NintendoAge.com 's e-Zine! The first issue I designed is already available! Go check it out. Volume 7 Issue 1

If you didn't get to back RGC (and you're totally missing out, so go signup!) here's a look into my life (and some of the sweet tunes) over the past few months:

Like a lot of things in life I'm not sure how I got here. Hard work and a little luck I guess. Two of the most talented game devs (Rusty Moyher and Shaun Inman) have found favor in me. I'm lucky to call them friends. We're teaming up to work together on an amazing project.

For the past year I've been honing my composing and sound design skills with exclusive focus on the original Nintendo's sound chip (the 2A03). It's no surprise that I think the NES is the best game system. I have the most memories with the NES. Fortunately, the chiptune scene has made a lot of great tools for writing NES music. On top of all that I find the 2A03's limitations fun and challenging. It inspires me and forces me to become better.

My first "real" release was a small project with Shaun called Flip's Escape! After that, Rusty and Shaun were teaming up for the most recent Ludum Dare and I was brought into the mix. The game we made in three days still blows my mind. Super Clew Land. After the initial three day jam we decided to keep working.

We loved it so much that we want to keep doing this. We want to keep the magic alive. We want to make games that matter. We want to make six games in six months. We're already off to a great start but we'll need all the help we can get to reach our goal!

I KNOW this is what I'm supposed to be doing right now. All these years of seemingly unrelated parts of my life have collided at this intersection. The hours I spent in front of a glowing CRT television and Gameboy screen. The hours I spent everyday after school learning to play guitar and becoming a musician. The hours I spent, years later, programming. They all uniquely prepared me for this. I'm made to write video game music.

It's been a long time in the making... and I'm excited to finally announce the 8bitmatt store!

With the launch of the store I'm introducing my first line of original products. "Dimension 3", stickers and a limited edition shirt package based on the Nintendo Virtual Boy. 

If you want to get nerdy (I know I do), you might notice the entire store has a rad Virtual Boy theme to it. Not just visually but down to the tiny details. The package is $32 shipped (in the US). That's $1 per bit. Also checkout those SKU numbers for the items in the shopping cart. :)

10% of every item sold is being donated to Child's Play.

Finally, whoever get's lucky #32 of the limited edition packages will be getting an extra surprise!

Last weekend I participated in Ludum Dare for the second time. You can view my entry here, and play the game here. It almost didn’t happen. The week before, I kept telling myself I wasn’t going to do it this time because I’ve got a huge side project in the works (super excited btw!). Friday night I went to dinner with my cousin, still convinced I wasn’t going to even think about Ludum Dare. He ended up having to leave a little sooner than I thought so I was home and bored. I finally gave in and decided I should take a creative break from the side project and enjoy this weekend… and what better way to do that than spend the next 46 hours making a game. Yes I said 46. It was already 2 hours after Ludum Dare 23 had started that I finally checked twitter and the website to find out the theme was "Tiny World."

Friday

I came up with the idea for my game pretty fast (maybe 15 mins). I had a lot of goals in mind this time around. I knew I wanted to make this game more polished than my last entry. I wanted to have enough time to create music and sound effects. I wanted the game to be challenging, simple, and fun. I wanted there to be discovery and little to no instructions. To meet all these needs I had to stay away from creating a platformer or similar style game (I think that’s probably out of my skill range at this point and it would have eaten up all my time). That was fine with me. It helped me avoid a lot of cliche ideas about a tiny world. I decided to make a puzzle game. My initial idea was to have a tiny puzzle that the player had to solve based solely on feedback (if they made a correct move or not). I thought that would be too hard for most players to grasp without instructions; so, I decided the player should see the puzzle then it will shrink and they have to solve it from memory! Perfect.

I wrote down a few simple notes then started designing the first world in Photoshop at the NES resolution of 256px by 240px. By the end of Friday night all 10 worlds were designed and I had come up with the name "itty 8bitty". The game starts with memorizing an easy two moves. Each world adds two more moves. So the maximum number of moves a player will have to memorize is 20 (world 10). I played around with the idea of adding more moves per world but this number just felt right. The game didn’t get too hard too fast.

I kept the graphics simple to have an artistic feel to them, save time for other things (like writing music), and to more importantly help the player focus on the puzzle. I tried to get across the idea of a player and goal with two colors. Blue is the player and green is the goal.

To solve two design problems I included one simple instruction before the first world. "Remember This". It’s just enough to help clue in the player to what’s about to happen. This also ensures that the player isn't expecting to interact with the puzzle during the "remember phase" (before it shrinks). The simple graphic style is really important during this first experience, because even with instruction the player has no idea what they are supposed to remember and why. I think more complex graphics could have gotten in the way.

During gameplay, the arrows are positioned around the shrunken puzzle to indicate that they are related to it; they act as wordless instructions. If the player still hasn’t figured out what to do the arrows guide them; they’re the only thing on the screen for this reason (it also looks minimalist and awesome). I made the arrows clickable so they can be interacted with directly but the player can also use their keyboard keys, whichever is more intuitive to them. As a nice bonus, because the arrows can be interacted with this makes the interface perfect for touch devices. The Xs that appear when the player makes a wrong move are also positioned around the puzzle on purpose. They cannot be missed. They are supposed to distract the player. To make sure the game had good visual feedback (especially since sound wouldn’t always be available or turned on) I made the puzzle flash green or red for correct and wrong moves. This is more important for the feedback of correct moves since an X appears for wrong moves.

Another subtle part of the design is the "World" screens. I put the total number of worlds on each of them to remind the player the game is really short and they’re almost to the end! I think this makes people who would otherwise give up quickly keep trying.

To add some challenge to the game, starting at world 6, tiles around the main path are taken away. This does a few things:

• distract the player’s attention while memorizing
• appear intimidating / overwhelming
• mess up certain strategies (like counting tiles around the path)

The further you get, the more tiles are taken away.

Saturday

Saturday morning, I started development. There’s not a lot to say here, you can view the source to see how it works. It’s really simple html and javascript. There’s no object oriented code, it’s all just kind of hastily thrown together. I used the Zepto.js library for convenience when manipulating the DOM. One interesting thing I did with the js is try a new technique called semicolon-less javascript. It’s neat. Makes js a lot more readable and enjoyable to write (I’ve been spoiled lately by using CoffeeScript). The reason this works is because automatic semicolon insertion is a feature in javascript. There’s no performance hit. Read more on it here.

Mid-day Saturday I took a break from writing the game logic to create the sound effects. I wrote everything in MML. Never opened GarageBand or any other sound app, just went straight into making sounds with MML. Took about 30mins to an hour of messing around to create everything and tweak them to my liking. Luckily they all sound like they fit perfectly over the music. In hindsight, I’d probably write the music first then design the sound effects to match; I’m lucky it just happened for me automatically. My favorite sound is probably the shrinking sound.

Title Screen Move

Title Screen Select

Shrink

Correct Move

Wrong Move

Success (completed a world)

Late Saturday night I had the game finished, I think the last thing I wrote that night was a basic html5 audio implementation to get the sound effects working.

Sunday

I practically spent all day Sunday composing the music. It’s tough to write 4 small songs in a short amount of time that you don’t hate after a while. I wanted this game to feel like a real NES game so music was important. I threw away about 4-5 song ideas. I spent a good amount of time on each of them but they just didn’t "fit" the game.

Gameplay song

I don’t know why but I’ve noticed this similarity in a lot of old NES soundtracks; there’s always some jazzy/blues type song, so I needed one of those. That’s the song that plays during gameplay. The bass line is the only thing that really makes it feel bluesy. If you listen closely to the song you’ll notice some high pitched notes moving back and forth, it subtly represents a ticking clock. Makes it sound like "thinking" music.

Game Over

The game over song (if you can call it that) is a short tune that completes the blues musical idea. Just runs down a blues scale in a fancy way. Love the vibrato at the end.

Title Screen

The title screen song is a cheery tune. Similar in style to A LOT of NES title screen music. Kind of reminds me of "Donkey Kong Jr." or "Nuts & Milk" (style not melody).

The End

The ending song is one of those sad but happy songs. A song that might get you emotional while you reflect on your accomplishment. I doubt anyone has those feelings with my small game but you get the idea.

When I get some time I want to take these songs and write them in MML that way they really sound like the 2A03 and I can release a mini nsf soundtrack.

It’s difficult to talk about the music creation process. When I write music it’s more about feeling than anything. I never know what chords I’m playing, or what mathematically is "supposed" to complete the next phrase. I just feel it.

Conclusion

I’m really glad that I participated! Like last time, Ludum Dare challenged me and inspired me to work harder in everyday life. Some of my favorite moments include getting to watch people play for the first time. It confirmed my design decisions. Everyone is smart and can figure out what they’re supposed to do almost immediately. It was very satisfying to see that happen. I’d love to hear what you think of the game, and if you participated as well, go rate it!

Extras: Ludum Dare 23 was the 10 year anniversary of Ludum Dare! To celebrate this, I worked that number into my game: 10 worlds. Also, after world 6 the player gets 10 seconds to memorize.

As I’m writing this post, I just saw on twitter that "itty 8bitty" got a small write-up on indiegames.com! Rad. Check it out.

I'm probably the biggest fanboy of the iOS game "Chunks in Data Entry Sentry." (If you haven't played it you're missing out. Go get it now!) I bought it within the first few hours of its release on the app store and have had a hard time putting it down since then. If you checkout the Game Center leaderboards you'll see me at the top. I was first to reach level 99 and also first to max out the score at 9,999,999!

So to show my appreciation for the game and to share knowledge with others,  I spent two weeks (in my free time) creating a strategy guide. You can view it here. The guide is broken down into specific strategies for reaching the highest level or getting the highest score. Along with all the words and images there's 46 minutes of HD video showing you how to play. So far I've received really great feedback on the guide; everyone seems to love it, even Shaun Inman (the game's creator)! Probably the most impressive improvement I've seen come from the guide thus far was from my very own girlfriend. She was beta testing the guide while I was finishing it and took her score from 35k to over 3 million! In. just. one. game. after reading the guide. Amazing! 

If you've used the guide to improve your game I'd love to hear about it.

Behind the Scenes

I started writing in a word document (well OpenOffice doc if you want to get technical, I'll probably use Google docs from now on though). I proof read and rewrote sections of the guide probably 4 or 5 times. After that I felt pretty good about the content and focused on recording all the video. Here's my setup for recording. :)

Video camera used: Canon Vixia HF R21. When all the video was ready I just used iMovie to edit, then uploaded to YouTube. Some graphics work was done in Photoshop. From there I pasted my document's text into TextMate and added some markdown syntax for easy html conversion. Then I spent a good day or two styling the guide. I showed it to Shaun, and after talking with him re-wrote the section on how levels score. Gave it one more proof read... then published!

Short & sweet

I made my first real game! I’ve been in love with the idea of creating a video game since I was a kid and I finally went for it. The game I created is called “Far From Home”; it’s built in HTML5/javascript and everything from the initial concept to final implementation was done in 48 hours for the Ludum Dare game making competition.

Update 1/27/12: Play the latest version here. (I'm constantly improving this version of the game. You can follow its development on github. Best viewed in Firefox now! The graphics are so crisp!)

You can play the original here and view my submission here. Note: I only had enough time to develop and test in webkit based browsers, so use the latest chrome or safari

The juicy details

Some history

As I mentioned above, our story starts way before this past weekend. Like most people that grew up during the early 90’s I have a very special place in my heart for video games and I have always fantasized about creating my own. Until recently that would have seemed impossible. Lucky for me I chose a career (web development) that helped me build some skills over the last few years.

I started re-visiting my childhood dream of creating a video game back in 2005-2006. Realizing that flash was my best option and that I lacked the skill and understanding to use flash at the time, I lost interest quickly and worked on becoming a better web developer.

Fast-forward to Aug 2010, one night on Netflix I stumbled across the great documentary “King of Kong” (If you haven’t seen it, stop reading and go watch it, seriously it’s that good). After watching that movie my passion for games was back. I started getting back into video game collecting and that ultimately led me back to game development.

Earlier this year I had a brief stint with 6502 assembly and developing for the NES (more on that some other time). From there I’ve been reading as much as I can about game development and design.

Ludum Dare

I first heard about Ludum Dare through Shaun Inman’s blog (a constant inspiration). After seeing his last entry I realized that browsers had come a long way and I actually had the exact skills I needed to get started in browser based game dev. I went through a few tutorials and learned some basics.

So, Dec 16, 2011, about an hour before Ludum Dare 22 started I made up my mind and decided I was going to enter. The theme was announced, it was “Alone” and here’s how it went down…

Alone

A few minutes after the theme was announced, I headed out to dinner with my girlfriend and brought a small notebook with me to jot down ideas. I spent a good amount of time thinking about what it meant to be alone and how that could translate into a fun game mechanic. I scribbled down some ideas that I didn’t really love. Then out of nowhere it hit me. Space. This was perfect, it met all of the requirements in my mind. Almost all early video games had to do with space and because of that I feel it had a deeper connection to this theme than most people would recognize. Playing an arcade machine or even some early consoles was mostly an activity we did “alone.” Anyway, in a more literal sense, how could a human not feel more alone than floating helplessly through space?! On top of all that, the space idea let me easily use that 8bit aesthetic that I love so much.

I researched space a little and came up with some enemies. The rest of the first night I spent in Photoshop creating the space background (inspired by NES Galaga) and the 2 frame spaceman animation, pixel by pixel.

Saturday, first thing I did was study up on some of the new CSS3 techniques I wanted to use. Then I started coding the basic structure. I decided to not use canvas and just go straight DOM for this game (Here's a really good video that says it’s supposed to be more performant). The javascript framework is pretty simple I just hacked together some “classes” using John Resig’s simple javascript inheritance helper. For DOM manipulation and event binding I used zepto.js, it's way lighter than jquery and faster in a lot of ways. Finally there are a few other small helpers in there based on how shaun inman structured his games. Note: I still consider my game a very novice and naive approach, so don’t look at the code thinking you’ll see this amazing structure, I’m learning too.

Probably the most fun I had the entire time was mid-day saturday. I started to implement the player input / movement and after a few revisions I had created really basic but believable “floating.” After that breakthrough I designed the enemies and O₂ powerup then continued coding late into the night until I had this semi working prototype.

Sunday, I spent all morning coding the O₂ meter and all the game logic behind that. Then I focused on collision detection. Probably the toughest part. I’m still not totally happy with the current collision detection but it’s close enough and I was running out of time. With 10 mins to go until the deadline, I knocked out a decent intro and game over screen.

About the game

Far From Home in its current state is designed to be really unfair. You’re always losing O₂ faster than the game gives you powerups. The main goal, if you didn't already know, is to survive as long as you can.

The enemies and powerup spawn points are random. The solarwind enemy (also thought to be space bacon by some people) is totally random, they are not generated on a regular time interval like the other items.

I used my iphone stop watch to test if my item spawn times were actually happing at the correct intervals. Very scientific.

The meteoroid enemies do damage by making your O₂ meter drain faster and there's no way to recover.

The solar wind enemy exists to mess you up by pushing and pulling you. But it can also be used as a way to launch yourself out of harm's way sometimes.

There’s an exploding star enemy I fully designed but didn’t have time to implement for the competition.

While I was developing I had activity monitor opened and was really trying to optimize the game and keep CPU usage low. Some of my first attempts at things made the CPU spike but I got it fixed and a lot of the animation is GPU accelerated. Well at least I think it is, the accelerated compositing is still a grey area to me. It's hard to tell what the browsers are actually doing. The reason I think it is accelerated (like it should be with CSS transforms/transitions) is because my fan would kick on even with really low CPU usage, so I'm guessing the GPU was getting a workout.

The entire game was designed within the NES color and sprite restrictions. I didn't even fill up the available background or sprite palettes (pink = unused). If you're wondering why some colors are repeated it's because the way you're allowed to use color in NES games is really restrictive. For example, in your background, you can only use one of your available background palettes in a 16 x 16 pixel region, even though each "hardware sprite" is an 8 x 8 pixel image. My game’s resolution is also the NES resolution 256x240 so maybe it will become a real NES game one day! (Note for the die hard nerds, I know the z-index (how things visually stack) might not be totally accurate, but I'll worry about those details if and when I port this to the NES)

I wanted a short intro scene and proper ending for people that can survive for a long time, but just couldn’t fit it in.

I had plans to create music and sound effects but again ran out of time.

Tools Used

• ugmonk notebook (buy them here)
• Macbook Air (OSX Lion)
• Activity Monitor
• Photoshop CS5
• Coda (code editor)
• Google Chrome (web inspector)
• iPhone (stopwatch)
• Garageband (well not used yet, but soon)

Overview

Overall I’m super excited and proud of what I accomplished. There were times where I thought I might not make it but I overcame and saw it through. I think what worked for me was switching between design and code. It kept me from getting too burned out or discouraged in one area and encouraged me to keep trying. Ludum Dare has been one of the most rewarding things I’ve done recently. Finally, I intend to keep working on this game and improving it. I’ll leave the original untouched and include a link to the latest version(s) soon.