Apologies for the radio silence! Bill-paying work has reared its ugly head. Progress reports on The Book of Rynn will be back shortly!

Omg, this is so fun. I need to slam this on a cart and get someone to play it with!

First look at towns in The Book of Rynn! Tileset is WIP but it's coming along great! Can't wait to see this populated with NPCs! #nesdev #jrpg #thebookofrynn #indiegames #retro #8bit

The Book of Rynn would not be complete without poison swamps! RIP Steve. ⚰️ #jrpg #nes #retrogaming #indiegames

We need people to test dev roms and make sure my shoddy programming doesn't break. The only requirements are that: - you can run an NES emulator - you've played (and loved!) the NES Dragon Warrior games - you can spend some time with the test builds and report back on your experience Send DM!

Overworld menus are almost done. ITEM use, transfer and discard are done. What's left: STATUS formation, EQUIP and SEARCH. Then we're finally moving on to the BATTLE LOOP! ⚔️🐉

Just make it exist first! Speaking of... Myself and a couple friends are making a new Dragon Warrior inspired NES JRPG exist! Check it out: sebotron.itch.io/the-book-of-... #thebookofrynn #nes #homebrew #jrpg #aseprite #pixelart

Prepare to be dazzled: completed Status Info screen! #thebookofrynn #nes #homebrew #jrpg

I am celebrating Labor Day by laboring.. on the game ofc so it's not really work 😅

Made some good progress on the battle loop. Also integrated new monsters, designed by @prettystrange.bsky.social! Do these look bad ass or what? #nesdev #jrpg #dragonquest #thebookofrynn

I copied the map editor and slowly turned it into a sprite editor! It's got basic drawing tools and canvas resize. Imports 16 indexed color PNGs mapped to 4 subpalettes, output is a CHR file of all the tiles in the canvas. I can even preview animations by specifying regions of the canvas as frames.

When my brain needs a break from coding I draw little character sprites and honestly I think it's my fav thing to do. Here is a scribe. In The Book of Rynn, scribes are responsible for saving your game, healing status effects and raising your fallen party members! #nesdev #nes #8bit #retrograming

This is more or less the final version of the map editor. Better palette, tile and map management and can import and export all the files the game needs. Also realizing I only have 4 tiles left for the overworld! I need to add a tower and I'll have 2 left. What else to add? 🤔

Added a tile editor to the map editor so I'll be able to create tiles directly and then export the binary CHR data for the game. Now I'm thinking of doing a sprite editor w/ support for animations after this. 🤔

I like Tiled but there were too many steps to export to the game + managing tilesets was a pain so I made a map editor for The Book of Rynn! Imports 4-color indexed PNG tilesets from NEXXT/Aseprite, imports NES palette files, kb shortcuts, saves projects, undo/redo, exports maps as C data and more!

Trying to think of good NES-specific "gamedev studio" names to slap on the box when the game releases.. suggestions?

Started working on the battles! To me that's the most exciting part! We have dynamic placement of up to 8 monsters and, yes, it was a pain in the rear but it works! Next: actual battle logic!

My fav thing about NES-era RPGs are their simplicity. I've been playing @skyboygames.com's Even Goblins Fall In Love for the past hour or so and the old school DQ vibes are immaculate. Try the demo!

Turns out you end up at the Bronx Zoo after defeating Baramos #dragonquest #dq3

I posted a little minute-long teaser of The Book of Rynn on the tubes - enjoy: m.youtube.com/watch?v=PioX...

I'm aiming for a very light tongue-in-cheek type of humor for the general tone in The Book of Rynn. I feel it adds personality! Here's what happens when a character tries to cast a revive spell on themselves.

Making good progress with field spell casting!

User Ceddy on our Discord server just shared these drawings they did inspired by our little 16x16 character sprites and I have to say I am very touched to be inspiring people like that, especially so early in development. 💙

In Super Sunny World 🌞, my upcoming NES platformer, each level will feature 5 hidden SUPER Flower Coins. These are designed as an extra challenge for players who have already mastered the game! Will you find all 160? 🌼 #nesdev

Small NES project I’m currently working on! 🚤 🪵 💦 #NES #homebrew #nesdev #NESmaker #indiegames #gamedev #ファミコン #同人ゲーム

Today I reintegrated RLE decoding into the scrolling functions, freeing up 16KB of RAM I used to decode the whole map into. At that point there was no reason not to move to MMC3 rather than MMC1 so I did. Now we have a much faster mapper and twice the program space for stories, graphics and music!

Turns out coming up w/ creative names for gear and somewhat keeping a balance is more mentally challenging than coding so I'm going to take a little break and play some Dragon Warrior 4!

Getting a huge nerd kick out of designing a weapons list and tweaking attack power progression curves for each archetype. In The Book of Rynn, "Archetypes" are "functional" whereas "class" is a lore-friendly denominator. Ex: "Town guard" would be a class, "soldier" would be its archetype.

Flashing screen warning (near the end)! I've been working on spell casting in the overworld. Trying to keep it accurate but will allow disabling screen flashes in-game. And yes, we have a spell called "Poof".

This is my first NES game and a JRPG isn't the easiest to start with. My code was badly organized and space mgmt was a nightmare so I decided to restructure and broke everything so I had to start fresh and reimplement better. Good news is I'll be back to where I left off in a couple days! 😅

Bunch of people posting about a sudden influx of followers. I had the same. I smell shenanigans 🤔 Anyway, back to work.

Officially back to working on the game after a 2 month break. Started fresh w/ a better banking strategy and we already have music playing w/ 2 full banks reserved for music and sfx 🥳 Next: graphics and that damned scrolling ⚔️

Hope y'all having a great Dragon Quest Day! To celebrate, I'm still not working on the game 🤦‍♂️

This week's pickup! The label is in pristine condition too! In other news, still busy with non-gamedev work but hoping to get back on the saddle soon 💪

Have to finish an Angular app I've been working on for a little while but game updates will be back soon!

Flea market purchase! I had it before but couldn't find it anywhere. The only og Ninja Gaiden I could finish too! #nes

Ever wonder how I build levels for the NES? Wonder no more!! #nesdev youtu.be/3HhQq7CK8qI

Still hacking away at the sdk to unlock all that sweet extra rom space. In the meantime, got a flasher and a couple of MMC1 flashcarts from Retrostage and put an older build on it. It's a special feeling to see my game run on my own NES I got in 1987!

While normal people spend their weekends relaxing, I spend mine reading books about FPGAs. 🤷‍♂️

Made a PCB for nrom carts. It can't run the game but I had fun! #nesdev

Trying to expand the MMC1 part of the llvm-mos-sdk to support 512K PRG ROM space rather than 256 so we can cram twice as much stuff in the game. Needless to say, I am in *way* over my head. Stay tuned!

Started listing spells and items this weekend 🌧️ The Book of Rynn is not gonna be one big story, but rather a collection of short stories w diff characters, meaning that you won`t necessarily get to grind to very high levels. I need to take that into consideration coming up with spells and items!

Quick DW4 sesh before dnd! 😸

Each character in The Book of Rynn is gonna have 5 attributes! Strength will dictate attack power, dexterity will dictate defence, vigor will dictate maximum HP, conviction will dictate maximum MP and magic damage and fortune will dictate, well, you'll see! Yk, standard RPG fare 😅

Anyone else in the same predicament? #gamedev #indiegames #retrogames #nesdev

A fun thing about doing coding in a new environment is that you often do things very badly the first time. I woke up yesterday and rewrote my entire UI code and now it takes half as much room and constructing a menu is so much more elegant. Nice! 💪

I made a Discord server in case people would like to come and hang and chat about the game, share ideas, ask me anything, yk, just chill. Here's the link: discord.gg/s9c3g4XaTC

Good thing I don't have a deadline for this game cuz Elder Scrolls Oblivion Remastered is just 🔥🔥

I hope you like menus. Cause menus is all you'll be getting for a few weeks. 😅 In the meantime, reply with your spell ideas!

AFAIK, all technical uncertainties I had related to making this game on NES have been cleared (scrolling, drawing UI across nametables, music+sfx, mapper+banking, battery saves). Everything else is game logic and content and the only challenge left is making it all fit inside 256KB. 🥳