Happy new year! (is it still legal to say that on 13th?)
You've probably received a notification: I'm pausing my Patreon for a month. I will be out for a two week vacation tomorrow and I cannot guarantee I'll be working on hacks until mid-February, but there are good news coming!
First of all.Thank you for the Ninja Gaiden Shadow DX reception. Honestly, considering that it is not Mega Man, Mario, Kirby or Donkey Kong, I wasn't expecting it would get so viral. NiO and I are so happy to see so many people have been playing and enjoying it. We got just positive feedback. Thank you a lot.
Let's go for monthly update and summary:
Goemon GBC translation
While I couldn't work as much as I wanted due to holidays, I've been working on Ganbare Goemon: Seikuushi Dainamaittu Arawaru!! english translation, which is another project that started before Donkey Kong DX (yes, I am aware I messed up the priorities at some point, I'm fixing that already).
As I told you in the past, this is an exciting project because it is an awesome game that remains untranslated as of today. I can understand why nobody wanted to translate the game: data is structured in a complex way, there is compression, etc.
Right now, I've got a tool that extracts the game's full script and I am hoping to implement the text editing feature soon. It will be my main focus until the tool is functional and Tom can start translating the texts by himself, without having to rely on a hacker. This methodology worked great with our KOF: Battle de Paradise translation and will alow me to focus on our beloved big ape colorization.
Donkey Kong DX
Yes, I can tell there has been some little progress lately, yay!
Once Ninja Gaiden DX was finished, I took a deserved break but, oh well, you know how my breaks are.
As I told you some months ago, Donkey Kong DX required heavy refactoring or even a rewrite from scratch (that would be the fourth time this happens) .These holidays, I've been learning and remembering how the project was structured, etc. (Because my mind decided to forget everything for some reason.) Along the way, I have fixed and refactored some code.Thanks to late projects like Mole Mania and Ninja Gaiden Shadow colorizations, I've learnt how to do better colorization code and I hope this will come handy in a future.I didn't feel like resuming the project yet, so I've been just toying with reverse engineering some parts like stage loading and data (de)compression. And I can say there was progress there.
There is hope, I might be avoiding restarting the project once again. And man, that sounds like really good news to me.
Ninjack
As you know, I plan to start developing my own games in a future. I am already working on a non Game Boy game with a very good friend of mine. But here I talk about Game Boy, right?
Ninjack was my very first real Game Boy project on 2019. It wasn't a hack, but a homebrew game. Long story short: it was my degree's final project. (And the one that started this hacking madness, for better or for worse.)
As it wasn't a videogames degree, I didn't focus on game design but on learning and coding. So while the 'game' was 'playable', it wasn't exactly a full game but a prototype.
Since then, there have been tries to revive it and turn it into the game that was meant to be.
On September, I resumed it and started building my own GB game engine made entirely in assembly. I can say that I got over the two big challenges: the actor and stage engines :-)This means, I am close to be able to start the real Ninjack experience.
Ninjack will be a very simple and tiny Mega Man-like platformer.Do not expect a huge project from this. My goal is to build a little game in a reasonable period and to fulfill my dream.I will put as much love as possible and create a fun game for everyone, but this won't become a Metroidvania or something like that. Just think of the first Kirby game, which was short but fun, and very accessible for everyone.
I know everyone here is waiting for hacking news, so I don't know if you would be interested to see progress of my homebrew game here.
Anyway, if you are curious, here you can download the 2019 prototype. It has no sound and level design is quite bad, but it has some charm nonetheless!
Download: https://www.marcrobledo.com/game-boy/ninjack/ninjack_prototype_v3.gb
Prepare for hell in level 7! :-D
Thank you everyone for you support, see you next month