Interviews are CC BY-SA 4.0; Screenshots are likely fair use.
Sblobber64 is vrgl117 and Isabel's submission for the N64Brew Game Jam.
What got you into Nintendo 64 homebrew?
Victor: I have fond memories of playing the N64 when I was young. Mario64 was so amazing, compared to the 2d games from the previous generations.
I'm a Software Engineer and I always wanted to work on game development in my spare time. The N64brew Jam gave me the opportunity to do so on my favorite console :)
Isabel: I got into retrogaming a few years ago when I attended the annual retro game expo in Portland. I found the talks incredibly entertaining, funny and really interesting from a technical point of view.
I’ve wanted to build a small game on an old console since then and Victor being a N64 fan, it seemed natural and the perfect opportunity to join the N64brew Jam and do so.
How did you come up with the concept for your game? Was there anything about the jam's theme that stood out to you?
Isabel: We thought about a few ‘character changing size’ ideas but we couldn’t build an enjoyable and fun gameplay around our ideas at first. One of my favorite types of games are puzzle games so we started thinking about the gameplay in that way. We wanted to build something that would be fun to solve, so we made the ‘character changing size’ part of the puzzle and that’s how we came out with Sblobber64.
Victor: Due to the time constraint and size of our team, we decided pretty quickly our entry for the jam was going to be a 2d game. After playing around with a few ideas, we figured the "movement impact size" concept was the most enjoyable. We wrote a quick text-based prototype to test the gameplay and after seeing the idea in action and enjoying the game, we decided to move forward with this idea.
What tools did you end up using to create your game?
We used the libdragon sdk, writing our game in C. It's good for 2d games and is 100% free & open-source. We also used the Golang programming language for the prototype.
For the code editor we used VSCode and to edit our (simple) graphics we found www.pixilart.com to be pretty easy to use.
For the maps we now use an editor: Tiled (mapeditor.org) that is also free and open source and we convert them to our custom format with a small script written in Golang.
Is there anything you particularily enjoy about your game, or is there something you worked on that you're particularily proud of?
Isabel: I loved participating in the Jam and getting to see how creative and smart the participants' games were. I also loved learning how to use the N64 development tools that the community has built. We had a lot of fun finding an idea that will pair the theme of the Jam :‘size’ and a type of game we really like: ‘puzzle’, I’m proud that we found a way for these concepts to work together and that the idea came to life.
Victor: The thing that I’m the most proud of is that we were actually able to produce a “finished” game, including intro, music, menus, multiple (although only a few) levels and an ending. We had plenty of ideas for the game and I’m happy we were able to prioritize them so our game looks like a real game.
I’m also very happy that we continue working on the game, implementing the rest of our ideas, for example, at the time we submitted our game, we were writing the maps by hand (using the custom format mentioned above). It was pretty tiresome, that is why we only had a handful of maps. Later we started looking at well-known map formats but they were a bit too "heavy" for the N64. This is when Isabel had the idea of getting the best of both worlds, using an existing map editor (Tiled) to generate levels with ease and later when compiling the ROM, convert the .tmx files to our custom map format (more optimized for our needs).
If you had three months instead of two to work on the game, what sort of things would you do with the extra time?
We have several features we didn't have time to implement. If we had one more month the first feature we would have implemented, would probably have been adding new puzzle elements such as a potion that prevents size change for X movements (allowing you to access parts of the levels unreachable without the potion). We would have also added more types of keys/doors to make the puzzles more complicated. We are actually working on game updates, so stay tuned :)
Sblobber64's levels hit a comfortable sweet spot in terms of puzzle design. When you're confronted with an obstacle and get past it, there's a nice "a-ha! of course!" feeling. What was it like designing the puzzles? Did you have a process for making them?
When we created the POC, we knew we had to start thinking of how to make the puzzle creation process easier. It was an incremental effort where we created a map format to which we could easily add puzzle elements and visually understand what we were doing, then we realized the format was not as easy to read since the more we added types of puzzle elements and improved visuals the more crowded the format became. We improved the map building process after the Jam and now we’re able to build maps and create puzzles with an editor, which makes the process more visual and easier to understand. But map format aside, building the puzzles felt really creative, we’d start with a completely invented base and add obstacles in places where we felt the user would take some time building automatisms. The game is not a skill base game but we wanted to create a feeling where building speed around solving the puzzles could feel like one.
If someone wanted to get into homebrew today, would you have any advice or suggestions for them?
Discord is probably the best place, both the N64brew and the Discord64 - N64 Emulation Haven!! are filled with nice people happy to help. Github is also a good resource, more and more N64 homebrew (including all the games submitted for the Jam) are available over there and one of the best places to start is to understand and tweak existing projects.
Website by Daniel Savage
Interviews are CC BY-SA 4.0; Screenshots are likely fair use.