Interviews are CC BY-SA 4.0; Screenshots are likely fair use.
Lunar Assault 64 was danielface's submission for the jam. The gameplay follows the story of Wren Buster, a young Lunar Spotter hired to rid the moon's tech parks of Lunarbeasts. The game alternates between action and dialogue segments. In the former, the player is tasked with aiming for a satelite laser towards a rampaging Lunarbeast's weak spots. In the latter, Wren comes to terms with the dissilusionment of their dream job.
What got you into Nintendo 64 homebrew?
The most straightforward answer is probably social distancing guidelines due to the COVID-19 pandemic. I've had a lot more time to debug memory alignment issues lately!
A more emotional reason might be a talk on homebrew I saw a few years ago. In the talk, Rachel Simone Weil discusses how homebrew can recontextualize a game console in people's minds. I never owned a Nintendo 64 as a child in the mid-90s, but the occasions where I played it always felt very magical to me. When I became a teenager, a lot of the online discussion on games that I read was often written by people older than me. I noticed their experiences on the Nintendo 64 tended to have a different feeling. They approached the console having grown up with NES games, and the experiences of the Sony PlayStation suited them better as they became young adults. In the twilight years of my twenties, I wanted to inject a reflection of my youth onto the Nintendo 64.
How did you come up with the concept for your game? Was there anything about the jam's theme that stood out to you?
Going in, I knew I wanted to make something that felt closer to a Sony PlayStation game than something found on the Nintendo 64. I planned on rejecting frequently-seen elements of the latter, namely Z-buffering, texture filtering, and the controller's right-handed orientation. I knew also I wanted to lean on 2D assets or animations to give a non-cinematic impression where I could. The big character portraits in Crime Crackers came to mind.
I often find myself initially stumped with certain kinds of game jam themes, especially if they're broad and open-ended! Themes like "alone", "change", or "conflict" always leave me in a vaccum. If a jam theme is a simple noun, like "cats" or "two buttons", I find I can come up with something quickly. When the theme of "size" was announced, I was in a similar situation at first and had to think for a while.
The Angels from Neon Genesis Evangelion ended up being the key reference point for me. Creating a creature in a giant landscape felt achieveable for what I could personally do within the timeframe of two months. I was pretty conscious not to center the game around too many ingame objects or projectiles. I designated the first month for core features, and the latter month for polish.
What tools did you end up using to create your game?
The game was programmed with libultra and the Nintendo 64 SDK. The chracter art was authored in Krita and then scaled down with GIMP. The 3D models and the FMV intro were done in Blender. Some of the sound effects were made in BambooTracker. The locking/clicking noise for Wren's scope came from recording pieces of Lego snapping together. The rest of the sounds were made with various default LMMS instruments.
The music was sourced from the Creative Commons, in particular by a French musician called Morusque. Instead of traditional instrument samples, I tried to make a bunch of tones with the FM synth emulator found in BambooTracker. I think that gave the music a bit of a unique character compared to some of the MIDI samples used in other Nintendo 64 games.
Is there anything you particularily enjoy about your game, or is there something you worked on that you're particularily proud of?
I don't make any claims of being a skilled writer, but I tried to put a three-act structure into the game's three levels. The game has a nice beginning-middle-end feeling to me, and I like that the character's progression isn't a typical "triumph over evil" story. I didn't want that in a Nintendo 64 game this time around.
My Dad voiced the intro FMV you see at the start of the game, and growing up he was pretty keen on us not saying curse words. I'm very happy that I got to immortalize him saying the word "shitty" into a Nintendo 64 ROM.
If you had three months (instead of two) to work on Lunar Assault, what would you have done with the third month?
I think I would have had spent the most time making the game cover five chapters instead of three. The behaviour and art for each of the Lunarbeasts were all hardcoded C, and towards the end of development I was really starting to feel tired out. I think an extra two stages would have let me flesh out the gameplay ideas a little more, plus make Wren's feelings on their career feel less abrupt.
More minor additions might have been adding more content variety around the game. I originally hoped for each stage to have a unique song, but wrangling the N64 SDK's compressed MIDI setup can be challenging! I also wanted a third prerendered background for when Wren turned in their resignation; something like a spot in a cubicle farm where their manager toiled away.
Has your manager at work seen your game?
I hope not!
If someone wanted to get into homebrew today, would you have any advice or suggestions for them?
I think Lunar Assault could have been a lot more polished as a creative work if I hadn't made the game for the Nintendo 64. Or, I feel that using a platform like Unity or the web would have enabled me to produce something more charming and expressive in the span of two months. That's not to say I don't regret making the game the way I did though! I'm really happy to have injected a bit of my personality into something unique for the Nintendo 64. The console (in all its perks and flaws) is prettty formative to my interest in video games.
If someone's just getting started in homebrew, I'd encourage them to think about how they feel about the game console they're working on and have that guide them to start. That said, I'm not their Mom; they can do wahtever they want!
I'm really excited about Nintendo 3DS homebrew from people that grew up playing the handheld. I want to see them recontextualize their nostalgia for it in the coming decades.
Website by Daniel Savage
Interviews are CC BY-SA 4.0; Screenshots are likely fair use.