In Depth Details

Micro Mages by Morphcat Games 2019

  This was a game that was made for the NES in 2019. I discovered and bought it a few years later and absolutely fell in love. It can be bought on Steam, and when buying, in the installed files is a ROM of the game, so you could bring it around with you on emulation devices. You could also buy the physical cartridge for the game itself and put it in the actual console. Morphcat Games released a video on YouTube, which you can watch here. It is a simple game with simple mechanics. And for this assignment in school I needed to remake a first level of a game of choice.

Design and Challenges

  After making a list of necessary mechanics and gameplay, production began. Sourcing assets was not too hard, SpritersResources had a lot. However, some were missing and had to be recreated by hand. Similarly, audio took a while, and after searching around and attempting to rip the assets myself unsuccessfully, I took a look at the files Steam installed and discovered that all the audio assets were included in their raw formats.

  Some challenges were making jumping feel smooth, and with that, wall jumping. I did not expect to be too challenging, but that was very wrong. Getting the right Vector force to be applied to make it snappy but not overbearing was quite a bit harder than expected.

  So much knowledge was gained on this project, yet so much was lacking during the start that it made it rather interesting throughout the development cycle to learn something that would have been instrumental a week after that knowledge was desperately needed.

Successes

  One of the big ones was easily the attacking. It was difficult to mimic the animations and sounds from the original game; But in the end I figured out how to support Firing in 4 directions, correct damage sounds,

  Items were simple and effective, and the item drop rates behaved as expected. Overall, a lot of knowledge was gained about the process of how making 2D platformers works, hit boxes, and simple pathing for enemies and animations.

Final Notes

  I would like to reiterate that none of the art or audio assets used belong to me and are all Morphcat Games'. Should you wish to go and watch their own video/trailer of the game, please do so here. Additionally, should you wish to play the small first level I made, there is a link to either a web build or a downloadable Windows version at the top of this page.