Presenting GOODNIGHT

I'm pleased to announce the release of GOODNIGHT, a short (& hopefully sweet!) pixel art puzzle-platformer made for the A Game By Its Cover jam.

Adam Bing and I worked in our free time through the month of August to create this game inspired by the art of Sam Boucher.

It's really a love letter to the Nintendo Entertainment System, known as the Family Computer in Japan. It uses the same 256x240 resolution, and the music & sound effects were created in the NES Sound Format, which means you could actually play them back on real NES/Famicom hardware.

We strove to make a game that felt authentic to the hardware, but we did take a little bit of artistic license. For instance, the NES's Audio Processing Unit only had 5 sound channels, and these were shared between both music & sound effects. This meant if the same channel was used for, say, background music harmonies and a jump sound effect, the harmonies would disappear every time the player jumped! In GOODNIGHT, you can jump to your heart's content and the music will never miss a beat.

The game is free & the code is open source. If you want to see how it was made, go take a look at the repo on Github. GOODNIGHT also features a free tileset created by Adam Saltsman and available here on itch.io.

(Please note that Adam Bing and I retain the rights to our art & music.)

It was built on top of the Phaser 3 framework and utilizes the Howler and libgme audio libraries. I also published this nsf-player you can use to play Nintendo Sound Format files in your own JavaScript-based games.

As a player, you can approach this game a couple of ways. If you just go straight for the chain in each level, it might take just a few minutes to finish! But hit the PAUSE button and you'll notice a few stats you can try to max out in your playthrough if you so choose.

Well, enough talk. Please go play the game, and when you're done, let us know what you think!