itch.io

Potential for a huge hit. May I suggest to reconsider the reset-level-on-failure ? It feels quite unfair in a context where even your paddle can break down.

the almost-latest Screenshot Saturday for Bilou's Dreamland (work in progress)

(the pause is due to in-engine debugger kicking in while I'm recording the "video" :P)

Hello! I was a teenager in 1993 when my brother and a friend imagined a revolutionary platformer game featuring a smiling blue ball in a platformish world: Bilou's Adventure. Of course, we never gathered the required knowledge to code that on Amiga and the quest to make the PC version became a neverending quest for how-to-do-X with limited books and inexistant software libraries ^^"

But I'm the kind of guy who taught himself assembler with a small book when CS teachers wouldn't want to lend me a floppy with Turbo Pascal, so I went on, lost myself into designing an operating system. My brother somehow tried to wake me up in 2001 when he came back home with the reverse-engineered specs of the then-brand-new GameBoy Advance ... Bilou's adventure had turned into a mini-comic "Bilou's Book", Unfortunately, I had 0 experience with cross-platform development (yet) and plenty of exams to work on, so apart from a few sketches, nothing really happened    

I finally woke up in 2006 when I heard about the Nintendo DS. I had a bit of experience of stylus-based applications by then, and stronger skills for embedded ARM development. I was in touch with people who could recommend me "linker" hardware, so by the end of the year, I had small tools of mine running on the DS, which I could use to edit graphics. It became https://pypebros.itch.io/sprite-editor-for-ds over time.

And near 2007, I first heard about Cave Story. That was a shock. One person could make a full-featured game in a mere 5 years! All you had to do was define yourself the right virtual retro machine and stick to it. I sure could do that. And I wouldn't need a virtual machine because the 66MHz and the 4MB of the NDS was all I'd ever need to make all the games I could dream of.

Wisely enough, I did not start re-creating Bilou's adventure. Instead I assigned myself the rule of always making a game after I made graphics for a game. So I made an arcade-ish 4-screens game dubbed "Apple Assault" with my green zone graphics, then a 4-level running game dubbed SchoolRush in my school zone graphics. 

There could be much more to say, but the rest is already fairly covered on my page and in my blog. My current project is still going to feature Bilou, because I set myself that other rule to focus on Bilou whatever the game -- else I'd lose myself in endless design documents :P And hopefully, while not being the originally intended adventure, it should be a Kirby Dreamland - sized slice of what Bilou's Adventure would feature.

Oh, I'm from Belgium, in case you wonder ;)

Hi. I remember discovering and playing this game on my MS-DOS in 97 or 98 ... I recall I was baffled by the quality of implementation and likely having considered using its engine/library to build my own game, but I cannot find any evidence that there had been any such library or open source package back then. 

Was there any ? or did I "dream" them ?

I'm sure it will. Thank you for the tip ^_^

nice little game. How did you manage to make an NDS Rom play in a browser ?