MatthewJustice

I'm the lead developer of a small team that recently released a new game for the NES on physical cartridges plus digital releases on various modern platforms. I thought this sub might be interested in hearing what it's like to develop for the NES.

TLDR: Writing a NES game the old-fashioned way is all about 6502 assembly language, memory mapped I/O, dealing with constrained resources, and building everything you need - because there's no OS, no libraries, no game engine.

A little background first… Developing a game for the NES was something I'd wanted to do for a long time, and my goals were about understanding how the NES works and challenging myself to see if I could write a

For some time now I've been working on a video game starring Jane Austen. The game just released this week, so I thought I'd share with this group about the experience of adapting Jane Austen's world to a video game.

This project began a few years ago. I'm a software engineer, and since childhood I've wanted to create a video game. I grew up in the 1980s playing the original Nintendo Entertainment System, so I decided to make my game for that old system, and to also make a version that runs on modern computers, but still looks and plays like a game from the 1980s - along the lines of the original Super Mario Bros.

The type of game was settled in my mind, but I needed a theme, something tha

I recently published a pre-release demo of a game on Steam. I'm looking at the stats that Steam provides, and I see that "Lifetime free licenses" for the demo is about 200 times the number of "Lifetime unique users" for the demo!

Steam defines these terms as:

• Lifetime free licenses - "A free license is a grant of a product to a user, but does not necessarily mean the user has downloaded the product"
• Lifetime unique users - "The number of users that have launched the app"

It sounds like a large percentage of the people who acquired a license for the demo haven't actually launched it yet. It isn't surprising that people grab a license but don't play the game right away (I do it myse

This month, Amazon's Prime Gaming content includes several Neo Geo titles, including Ninja Commando, Art of Fighting 3, Crossed Swords, and Ghost Pilots. These are all Code Mystics releases, bundling the game with an emulator.

Here's what caught my attention - I don't think these Code Mystics versions have been released before. Yes, you can get these games in other ways... there's the ACA Neo Geo versions, and you can find some of these on the Neo Geo Mini and so forth.

But have we seen these games as Code Mystics releases elsewhere? I don't see them on Steam