Tuesday, September 2, 2008

Pixels of the past

When I first launched the Geoweasel site, I wanted to have games as a feature among the cartoons. I had a program appropriately titled "Game Maker" from the pixel comic days (I'll return to that in a moment) and I wanted to have just some cheap, quick games for the site, one for each of the main Weasels. Here's a sprite sheet of the characters in an Atari-esque form (although I guess NES form would be more accurate, since the sprites have three colors plus transparency...whatever) :
Obviously, because I'm...me, none of the games ever got made. I do remember starting Nar's game, but I can't find anything from it. Anyway, the idea of games faded into oblivion for a while, and then I did eventually go back and wanted to make some real adventure games for Geoweasel. Here was the first concept for one of them:


This "Super Coolventure Thing" game was supposed to have like...a fairly long level dedicated to each of the Weasels, and then you had to go fight Dr. Schnoz or whatever. I don't remember the plot, and obviously it went nowhere. Slightly more recently, there were two simple games on the site called "Agility" and "Bounce," and they were just simple games that were fun for maybe 5 minutes. So really, Geoweasel's never fared well with video games. Or did it?


So yes, as I said earlier in this post and countless times in the past, Geoweasel was once a pixel comic and it had some of the same basic plot as it does today, but it also took place in the Super Mario Bros. universe. And with these comics so easy and quick to make, I was able to dedicate some time to making not one, but two adventure games. Although, they are for the most part completely dead now, floating around somewhere in cyberspace. The first game was Nario's Adventure, which was just a simple, sidescrolling platformer with no real fun and tons of glitches. It was complete with Super Mario Bros. graphics, characters, and music. I don't think I could actually call any part of the game my own except for the levels and the blue in Nario's sprite. The only evidence of this game I can find today is this small conversation on DeviantArt and this drawing I did for it, years after I actually made the game. And then came the next game, Nario's Adventure 2.
This game was significantly improved over the first, at least in the realm of fun and gameplay (not originality, though). I released a demo version of the game that included a level and a boss from each of the first 5 worlds (I think it was 5). Early on, there were some annoying bugs, such as falling through slopes and Nar would always face right when he stopped moving, but I fixed them sometime after the demo release. I actually got the game about 95% finished; I clearly remember making the final levels, which were actually an easter egg if you took an alternate route earlier in the game. It was psychedelic, took place in space, and used Shadow Man's theme as the music. And I thought that was awesome. But as I was closing in on finishing it, my computer crashed. So now, all that remains is the demo. Wanna play it? You can download it here. I have been told that this only works on Windows; I'm not sure though. As for controls, just use the arrow keys. You should also know that pressing F5 will create a savestate and F6 will load that state. Since the demo still had bugs in it, I highly suggest using them, heheh. Especially on the Wiggler boss. Sometimes when you jump on him, you hurt him, but you die. I think that sums up the quality of my coding skills.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Ha! I remember this! Yes, the second was WAY better than the first. And the Weasels deserve a game more than anyone.