This was the first game I ever put together. There was a Game Boy Advance NiGHTS into Dreams minigame that you could download from certain SEGA Gamecube titles with the GBA-GCN link cable, and during a break from school, I tried to recreate it in TIC-80. The result misses the mark significantly- there's no scrolling and only a handful of items appear at a time, placed randomly. Everyone has to start somewhere, though, and it taught me the bare basics and set a bar to clear for my next project.
PLEASE NOTE: This is a fan game, and NiGHTS into Dreams belongs entirely to SEGA. No money is made from this fangame and any takedown requests from SEGA, Sonic Team, or other legitimate IP claimant will be honored.
Did you know that the MSX has native support for analog paddle controllers? It's right there in the BIOS, and can be used easily in BASIC with the PDL() command. Only one game officially supported it (ASCII Breakout), and none were manufactured- you had to build it from a schematic provided in a fan magazine. When Taito released the MSX2 versions of Arkanoid 1 and 2, they opted to use a modified NES paddle controller instead of the standard design, and by the time MSX Turbo R was released, paddle support was removed from the BIOS. Today, however, we have easy to use options like Arduino-based paddle controllers or adapters to use Atari 2600 paddles. There's also a hack of Galaga to support paddles now.
With paddles being so easy to use, yet so few games supporting them, I wanted to take a crack at expanding it's small library. Meteor Storm is essentially an inverse of the Atari 2600 game Kaboom!- meteors fall from the top of the screen, and the player navigates their spacecraft around them. The game was written in MSX-BASIC including enhancements from Club Gigamix's DM System/2, which allowed me to use the MGSDRV music driver and also provided a few other helper functions.
Note that while the focus was on creating a purpose-built game for paddle controls, this and the two games below also support joysticks, keyboards, and (on MSX2 and above) mice as well. I like to give underused perephrials new life, but no sense excluding players without them!
Because Meteor Storm was written in BASIC, it's performance is a bit choppy. I wanted to remake the game in a compiled language, and because I'm me, I chose COBOL. Unfortunately, there are some hitches that come with the available CP/M-80 versions of COBOL, but i found a public-domain language called PARASOL that is essentially a fusion of COBOL and ALGOL. Close enough! Without access to MSX-BASIC's graphic routines, the visuals are a bit of a downgrade, but the gameplay is much smoother. Keeping with the theme of supporting obscure hardware, I also wrote a purpose-built music driver that supports the enhanced audio of the rare Yamaha SFG-01/5 audio extention in addition to the more common Panasonic FM-PAC.
Penguin Catcher is based off of Crane Games, or UFO Catchers. Instead of making the crane randomly fail like in real life, I wanted things to be fair, but I also wanted it to still be a challenge, which is why the stuffed penguins are moving. I think there's still a lot of untapped potential to paddle controls, and this idea came from me wondering how you could move in 2D with what is essentially a 1D controller. The custom music engine from Meteor Storm DX returns here, with music ripping off inspired by the UFO Catcher 7 theme, and an extended version of it was actually released on an album before the game came out! This was also my first submission to the MSXDev competition, scoring 306/600 points. A post-release version introduces a fifth controller option, supporting the SEGA Saturn 3D Pad and Arcade Racer controllers with the right adapter.
Kitsune Tails is a fantastic platformer picking up design-wise from where Super Mario Bros 3 left off. It's a real good time and I highly recommend it. The game has a number of unlockable minigames, and Kitsune Games actually allows you to mod more into the PC version with a simple Lua game engine. Naturally I had to take a crack at this and the result was Kaboom! again because I do not have an original bone in my body.
I've also done sound and occasionally programming for a number of game jam games which can be found here.