FLEA!

Flea for NES was submitted to the 2019 Byte off contest ran by NESmaker,but the project has been around for a while. The initial idea was around 2011 where I was looking at popular infinite runner mobile games such as jetpack joyride which automated player movement allowing the player to focus on the jumping. I took this and flipped it so that the player automatically jumps and the movement is up to the player. Why the nes? A few reasons. I grew up playing the nes and always wanted to make a game for it. Then NESmaker came along, it's a wiziwig-esk nes development software. I had the Flea idea many years before but thought its simple mechanics would be achievable on the NES. There is also a growing community for new retro "homebrew games", and there have been a few very successful crowdfunding campaigns for these projects. This niche group helped the project stand out among the many other modern games on Kickstarter. Why Dreamcast? This one might puzzle a few but like the NES community there is also a large Dreamcast homebrew community with new games being released all the time. Unlike the NES, the Dreamcast had an exploit that allowed people to play burned games making it much cheaper and easier to produce essentially a CD over a custom cartridge. Lowtek Games commissioned a local programmer "Ross Killgarif" to modify an open source nes emulator for the dreamcast to auto boot the nes game, it also has a custom vmu image. The process of creating a dreamcast playable nes game has been open sourced by Lowtek Games for everyone to enjoy. The dreamcast version will be released at a later date. Byte Off encouraged me to make a good amount of leves and I thought the project could do well, so i went to Kickstarter. The kickstarter launched on February 29th 2020 (I based my deadline on a pun based around leap day/year) and was funded in 3 days. Flea will also feature on an Evercade cartridge called "Indie Heroes Collection1" along sime some other awesome homebrews. A spinoff sequel is already in the making starring the fan favorite, Tapeworm. This will be a grid based rhythm puzzler.