Most homebrewers keep their projects secret until there is significant progress. Nobody wants to show off buggy and very unfinished games because it might hurt their sales/image. Let's change that!  8 BIT XMAS 2016 was started a couple weeks ago and I have been recording videos every few days. The first few won't make much sense, but they have the most visual progress.

8 BIT XMAS 2016 dev #1 - first run
At this point you probably have no idea what the game is. It was ~15 hours of programming to get to this point, and this was the first time the game was actually running in an emulator.

The space ship and text is just placeholder graphics, they have no relation to the game. All my games start with graphics from another. Frequently it will be SMB. Buy a copy of the AVS launch title Solaris to see the real ship!




https://www.facebook.com/retroUSB...

My favorite time of the year! Will be fun to follow. I love watching progress. I should do bug videos, that'd be fun!

Woo! Forget Madden and COD. This is the best yearly release going!

Should be fun to follow along. Thanks for sharing.

Great idea. I'll be following.

I approve of this idea.

Exciting! This will be the first time I get the chance to buy an 8 Bit XMAS cart, so I'm definitely going to follow this topic all year.

Looks like it could be a mouse-enabled game from the way that "8" was jiggling around. Just speculation!

With rumblings of KHAN's new game and the rumor that someone is going to make mice for the SNES (or an adapter or something), I think this is a very good speculation.
 

As long as it has some sexy 8bit Christmas tunes I'm all good. Can't wait!

Nice!

MRN is still alive?!!!  

Neato. Love the giggling 8. For some reason, eights (and especially the infinity sign) always reminded me of boobies!  

  Adapting a USB mouse (even one that comes with a PS/2 adapter) to SNES would be bees knees. Should be easy enough to interface with a modern microcontroller. I have the SNES mouse but I'm reluctant to use it because cleaning mouse trackballs is the bane of my existence!!!

Shoot'em up?

8 BIT XMAS 2016 development video #2. In the previous video, all the objects on the board were actually in place, just not visible. This update starts adding animation (using more random graphics), and also sets near the correct game speed. A bit more obvious what is going on now! Yes, I did eventually pay for Screenium so that banner will go away.

https://www.facebook.com/retroUSB...

I'll take 10

I think I know what's going on!!!

Edit to add: And I love it!!!!!!!

I bet JamesRobot will like this a lot.

Looks like changing from unlisted to public changes the date on the video, so if it isn't clear these are actually about 2 weeks old at this point. Most of the programming before the first video was on the many hours of plane rides to/from HI. Once I catch up to real time the updates will be much slower!

I had an old vid from 2012 I did that with. Screwed up the screening order. I was a beta tester for Princess Rescue and demonstrated my three button Genesis controller working with both buttons during development after someone claimed two button support was broken. Turned out the Batari basic kernel was attempting to discharge the paddle capacitor, losing power to the logic chip. Three button controllers were unaffected because they used a 74157, but six button controllers used a proprietary microcontroller that could not initialize in time for the console to read the outputs. Sprybug and I were using three button controllers while everyone else used the six button variety. Anyway, a simple change of a single byte in the kernel squashed that bug. When I unhid the video url, it made no sense because the date showed that I posted it in 2014, long after the game's release and discontinuation.

Back on topic, looks to me like it's becoming some sort of ball game. The EEs are your players and the 8 is the ball. But the players are not moving, Hmmm. Obviously not Warlords because it's been done already. Maybe they're throwing snoballs like it's 2009?

Yep I do!  

Got it! Very cool!

Looks like a sexy Xmas pinball game is coming my way. Total emotional boner right here!

Haha, looks like my speculation before may have been incorrect!

A mouse + controller shoot-em-up would be great, once the mouse adapter is out.

I'm thinking something along the lines of Fire Fight, where you use the d-pad (or arrow keys) to maneuver, and the mouse aims a turret with one button firing and the other either acting as secondary fire, weapons select, shields, or some other kind of secondary function.

I think it has a ton of potential.
Before I heard about the mouse adapter concept, I'd always envisioned that type of game as 2-player-mandatory, where one person is the pilot and one the gunner, kind of like the Millenium Falcon.

 

Holy freakking crap! How did I not see that! Huge Pinball Fan right here!