Thanks! I appreciate the kind comments. I think it's a good reminder to start the player off easy, even in an open world like this. Thanks for your words and I'm so glad you managed to find the QBOX.
Thank you for these comments, they mean more to me than you know. I really appreciate it and appreciate you. Your game was fun too and I'm so glad I participated this year. Your comment made my day.
I've played them all and I have three favourites: Rick Starfield, Klepsydra, Chaos Between Realms. Rick Starfield blew my mind and expectations and came out of nowhere with varied gameplay and innovative techniques. Klepsydra has cool mechanics and amazing music/art. Chaos Between Realms had the best gameplay feel, it felt natural to play in a way that's difficult to achieve.
I love the music, reggae/dub with great bass and very unique. I also liked the visual style, I like games set around beaches and I like that you throw your hat as a weapon. Cool HUD also.
Cool Contra-esque scrolling shooter and Blade Runner inspired kind of landscape. Good demonstration of a short proof of concept that is pretty unique in the pile of submissions. I'd love to play a longer game like this.
Beautiful deep sea art. I love the colors. You would expect the background to be blue but black works so much better, there's something really immersive about this. I think it speaks to the quality of the animations. Cool take on a scrolling shooter. Excellent art.
This game is very sparkly. I had some difficulty in figuring out where to go (which tiles are safe or not) but that's part of the game I think, I also kept learning how deep the game gets and how many screens you made. You have a very interesting art style that you're consistent with. I've never seen a game look like this. You took a dash of the Taito style and went extreme with it.
Great puzzle game with some classic arcade action and super cool zany spacey visuals. I felt like my skill level improved through playing so it had that "thing" that arcade style games are looking for. Fun game and good work.
This is already better than any released wrestling game for the NES. It's fun and I actually feel like my controls do what I expect. Some of the good parts of Punch Out in here, a great dash of retro wrestling vibe, and a lot of class and polish. Great work.
Holy crap! This game deserves a lot more hype. This does not feel like any of the "default" NESmaker modules. The fight in the beginning made me think this might be a pit fighter / brawler. It became so much more. The behind-the-player space battle perspective was great and I liked the rings. You're so good at telling stories through cutscenes. Some of the cutscene animations I can't imagine how you did, it seemed like there was too much going on for it to be sprites alone. This is an incredible game demo and you should be very, very, very proud. I felt like I was really immersed in the story and it sort of had the style of a modern storytelling action-adventure game (I don't know examples, King Kong? modern Tomb Raider?) and aspects of oldschool Sierra adventures like the Space Quest games.
Interesting game mechanic sort of like Nightmare on Elm Street where you switch between realms. It's a good mechanic and I think it would work well for a full game, especially with longer levels or perhaps even parts where you need to do actions on both "sides" of the world. This made for a fun and interesting game with some innovative thought behind it.
Love the 8 pixel box player, very nonstandard and sort of like Micro Mages. Which kind of shows that you bring some of the modern innovations to NESmaker. This feels like a game inspired by some of the more recent retro-modern games and has a gameplay feel sort of like mobile games. It's a simple concept but easy to get hooked into. Good work.
Hilarious game. Really makes you think about some of what could have gone on in a similar large franchise platformer if you had more options. Real thinker here. My only frustration was the lack of continue points, it's hard to be several steps in and die and have to start from the beginning. But I guess that's how Dragon's Lair does it, and that was a hit, so maybe I'm just blessed with modern luxuries and lacking the patience of an earlier era. Now you have me analyzing myself because of your reflective dialogue! Ah! Anyway mega points for originality and I think this could be a really good medium for this kind of game, especially with continue points or a way to speed through dialogue boxes a little quicker.
Cool theme for an RPG. I like the blend of wild west, animals, a single-color gameboy style art approach, and a rich RPG style adventure. You have a good consistent aesthetic as seen in your buildings, rooms, dialogue boxes. Sort of reminded me of the feel of Final Fantasy Adventure (US title) for GB.
Is anyone else running into an issue where the game perpetually resets? I'm intrigued and I'm not sure if it's the game, Mesen, or what. Am I playing it wrong? I tried pressing start rapidly and tried just doing stuff, I'm not sure what is going on. Curious based on the screenshots but I can't get more than a second into the game. I like the look of the screenshots though! Minimal art highlighting the experience of the game.
Very faithful Castlevania-style homage. Great sprites and I like the amount of exploring you can do from all angles. I like that you use a lot of yellow and blue. I can imagine you building a really really massive castle in this style and I would bust out the ol' pen and paper to map it like it's the 90's again. I experienced some glitches like the others below but I would encourage you to pursue this as a larger project.
Minotaurs are my favourite mythical creatures. I once built a very unsuccessful minotaur-themed deck in Magic: the Gathering. This platformer reminds me a little of Bill the Demon (Mac, mid 90's). The spikes are tricky. I like your tiles.
This is a fun paint game, I love the large canvas size. I immediately started by writing rude messages to my wife. It was funny. I like the variety of stamp options and found that it had a very good paint feel to it, like I was truly able to make original art. I had fun with this.
Oh, I didn't mean stuck as in a bug. I got to a cave hole in the mountain and couldn't get in, but felt like I had explored everything else. I didn't know what else to do. I did end up getting physically stuck (your option #2 in your response) going down one screen from there, but that's just because there was only one walkable tile of space before a solid, my game has a couple lingering instances of that too.
The player animation feels so crisp and smooth, good attention to detail and good bounding box. Just feels nice, good jump height. Hilarious story and classic old style platform action. Well-constructed demo.
Of course! I was like... too many to be sprites, too much going on to be palette switching. I haven't done any autoscrolling games yet but it's a great use of autoscroll.
One of my absolute favourites of the competition. Character select is so fun! I would love to know how you did it. So cool it ended up being a shooter. Incredible art and some incredible music. Honestly, I let that final song loop like six times while I jammed out to it. You're so talented and I'm a huge fan. Such smooth animations and I didn't run into any bugs at all.
The duck is a cute duck. This is such a convincing NES game, I'm surprised it's not a famicom port straight out of 1990! Seems like the kind of game I'd stumble upon in a random rom pack in a pleasantly exciting way.
Agree about the Faxanadu comments, also reminded me a little of Castlevania, the first TMNT, maybe Talespin for Game Gear? Even Prince of Persia. I had fun trying to not be lost. Good textures and art that really gives a nod to some classic games.
This game is super fun like the Little Mermaid. I like the feeling of depth and how you pass behind some objects. It was fun to explore around underwater, Ecco the Dolphin style. You're good at using curves and uneven edges to reduce the blockiness of NES graphics. I like your colours. This is a fun and enjoyable game demo.
This is one of my favourite games of the competition so far. The dash effect is so smooth, the game's physics feel so enjoyable to play. I am impressed with the art style and animations. Love all the references to stuff we know about as well. So many little touches to appreciate. Something about shooting that gate open felt so good. I admit I did end up getting stuck several screens into the monster area, is there an end to this? I am inspired by your work and love that dash mechanic. Also interested in the snare sound in your intro music, I think it uses the noise channel but I couldn't get a snare that tight.
Very difficult game but very ambitious project and I love the chaotic fighty style of art reminiscent of 80's movies. I have no idea how you did the scrolling text intro but I'm very interested. Good work. I also couldn't beat the first boss but tried a few times.
Great concept that works well. I've seen it before in a game somewhere but I can't think of where - just the idea of controlling two people at once and having to use solid objects to re-align them. Different execution than yours and yours is very fun, plus I like the design style of your art.
The world gave you the tool to make any game, so you made a breakfast mascot arena fighter. I found the first boss quite difficult but stuck through it and got to enjoy the others. I'm impressed with your ability to code monster AI, I find it frustrating but you did a great job of it. Your sense of humor shines through too.
