Hey, I'm very impressed with the whimsey and sense of humor you put into these jam games. Edgar Allan's Hole is the kind of a game my wife excels at, as she is a "Tapper" champ in the arcades. She loved it. I loved FireBird most because it feels like Joust mixed with a certain panda game demo. Under-Ground is a tour-de-force of visual effects, showing off some of your experience. Nice work all around. Side note: You told me about some of your commercial work back in the day, and the some of those games ended up on my MegaSD. A few weeks ago, an old friend was in town and the three of us were playing couch co-op together. I stepped out of the room, and when I got back, they were racing each other in Wacky Races. In hind sight, I should have warned Todd about my wife's fierce competitive side. Great fun all around, all thanks to your hard work!
Viewing post in Retro Platform Jam #6 blog. comments
Oh thank you , it's nice to get feedback on these little games! Definitely a 'Tapper' feel to that one. "Outpost" on Apple II is the one I had vaguely in mind when I made it. (edit: whoops, I'd already written that in the main post)
I was worried about Firebird being too similar to Rocket Panda. Desperately tried to come up with some different enemies, but without much success :)
Great to hear about Wacky Races being played.. you may be the first people ever to have actually played a two-player game without being paid to do so!
You are much too humble good sir. I love FireBird most out of the three. It feels very responsive. Btw, I'm the dude who bugged you about the sram not working on an earlier version of GunSlugs. (Wild9Nine) The final release came out great, and in fact I was showing the game to my wife, and she dug the art style and music. Demakes are much too rare imho, but I think they must present a unique challenge to a designer/developer like yourself?
I've got 6 music tracks in Gunslugs now, and trying to get that version out (plus much smaller file size) But I seem to have broken my music player on real hardware.. oh dear :)
I am not sure I'd call Gunslugs a demake.. it's pretty much identical to the original really. To the extent that it's a shame, cos the game itself could look much better if designed around the Genesis (bigger sprites etc).
The reason I like doing these conversions though is because I have all the art already made, so without an artist I can get so much more of it done. Nice to have a fixed goal to aim for as well.. you know if something is right or wrong :)
Always happy to answer any questions!
The original was first of all an old mobile game, I think. I was aware of it cos I know Pascal, I'd seen his games many times, though I'd never played this one. It was pretty clear from playing the first level that it would be fine, (with some restrictions on the number of sprites at once)
Actually I hadn't played it all the way through before starting the conversion. I wasn't really aware of all of the bosses. Thankfully none of them were too bad for converting. I guess I'd just have changed them to fit though if they proved difficult to do.