Just finished World 2. Dang, you got layering music at the world select screen like Yoshi's Island!

Yup! That was my composer's idea. If it were easy to do I would have made it keep the music playing at the same point while switching songs too. Though, now that I think about it I've got some ideas I should try...

 

Nice  

World 3 is done! I'm liking the Nice cube power up and those cloud enemies are super aggressive. It was fun trying to manage them while solving block puzzles.

Nice! very clean design, I loved it. Sent you my sad PP balance of $2  

Thank you SOOO much for this! I've been going through the code to learn NES game dev and it's been SUPER HELPFUL!

Be sure to let me know if there's anything that needs explained better, because I do want the game's source to be useful for this purpose. It'd also be cool to see a romhack of it, even just to give it new levels.
 

Finally downloaded and started playing this, and I love it! And I can't wait for a cart release as well, thank you for making this!  

For a physical release, how important is a manual? The game has extensive amounts of help information in the game itself, and it personally seems more sensible to have a help webpage instead that I can update, rather than spending time and money on a redundant manual.

I'm currently in the process of getting some box/label art commissioned (WIP preview) and things could be getting closer. I kind of want to put some extra content in, whether some levels, another boss (perhaps the scrapped one? I did a writeup on a lot of scrapped stuff here), or even just some art. I still want to put in an easter egg of some sort if you start up the game with a SNES mouse plugged in, too.

I think you will find people on both sides of this but a manual goes so far in making a game feel like a real release. Plenty have opted out of it and the game stood on its own, as I'm sure yours will, but it's a great way to introduce a story arc as well as introduce controls and options. Ultimately, its up to you. It's definitely an extra expense and needs to be weighed properly. I, personally, prefer a manual with a boxed game, but it doesn't keep me from purchasing and enjoying the game.

As an alternative, maybe you could make a pdf of a manual with the design and dimensions so anyone who wanted could print it out, fold/staple it, and have a perfectly sized manual ready to go.

I think I'd honestly rather spend time making the software itself awesome than putting together a high quality manual, at least for now, especially if I wouldn't be printing it. I don't really know anything about graphic design anyway.  

Right now I'm starting on making the level editor complete. I think I'm going to have access to more than 8KB of PRG RAM and the obvious use for that to me is "user-made levels".
 

A manual is a lot of work to put together, but it makes the physical release a lot more appealing. Part of the fun of retro games was reading through the manual. It's not so much the practical nature of having one, but the novelty. Fun enemy descriptions and quirky artwork really add to the experience.
 

I suppose I can relate to that. While I'm not old enough to have bought NES and SNES games new I did catch some Game Boy Color, Game Boy Advance, GameCube and Nintendo DS manuals before things got reduced to nothing or almost nothing on the 3DS and Switch. I'll give it a try.


Level editor is having good progress, trying to polish it up with icons and such. In general I feel like last-minute polish is probably the best place to aim development at aside from finishing this feature.

"For a physical release, how important is a manual?"

While manuals are always great, I usually like it when I can just figure out everything in the game without having one. Back in the 80's and 90's since we didn't have the internet the manual was essential for a game if you didn't want to call that 1-800 Nintendo $5.99 per hour hotline number for tips!

Also while I still have some of my NES and SNES games I don't have any of the manuals. So they just get lost over time apparently.

Level editor now has basically everything I want it to have and now I guess for the software side I just want to put in easter eggs and find uses for the extra space I have left. There's two 16KB banks and two 8KB free spaces in other banks. Though I don't *have* to.

Come grab the latest build and let me know what you think! It's got several big changes, including the level editor I mentioned but also now a Dr. Mario clone too.

Looks like there's just been another update; what's different?

https://itch.io/e/2019203/novasqu...

There's a change log at https://novasquirrel.itch.io/nova-the-squirrel/devlog/78832/...  but really that update is just because I was initializing levels for the level editor incorrectly and that's an unshippable critical bug. It's intended to be final now and I'm working on a sequel for the SNES which is in its very early stages, and I'm going to try to get a cart of the first game released.
 

Thanks for the info!  Do you have any more games for the NES in the works?

 

I don't have any immediate plans. I was working on a tool to help make WarioWare style microgames for the NES, and I also definitely want to make some smaller games (like Squirrel Domino was fun to make) but for now I think I'm taking a break from the NES. Definitely don't expect another project on this scale for it again any time soon.  

 

Hey, I like the choice of characters and enemies. Pretty cool work.