Homebrew
Jason Kelk returns with the latest hobbyist retro goodness
Demakes take existing games and pare the design down to something which would potentially work on an 8-bit or 16-bit system, so the Demake Jam is, possibly unsurprisingly, a competition where developers take their favourite games and consider how they can be made to work after a significant drop in processing power.
It does have to be noted that there are some dreadful puns among the titles, for example Low Knight and Delunky are reworkings of indie darlings Hollow Knight and Spelunky respectively while Thieves At Sea is a top down Rpg-style rendition of Sea Of Thieves which simulates how Rare’s game could look if running on the Game Boy Color. And we had to smile at the exploration-based Low Mem Sky which looks to be less divisive than its muse was… at least when it was originally released.
Mario’s most recent Odyssey adventure received some attention with two platform-based reworkings offering different takes on the source material, while Super Plumber Boi’s instead went back to the first Super Mario outing for inspiration, converting the graphics to black and white to make them even more retro. The famous plumber’s brother also got to do some ghost busting in Muigi’s Lansion and another Nintendo franchise Splatoon was remixed multiple times, with Spraytoon sporting some very impressive pixel art. Fox Mccloud took to the skies once more, although his trusty Arwing was dismantled for a couple of visually simplified shooters.
Also for fans of blasting aliens is Ticaruga, a stripped back 2D rendition of level one from Ikaruga for the TIC80 fantasy console. It’s not ideal, and lacks a few important mechanics, but at it least demonstrates that a more involved reworking is potentially possible. There’s a lot of love for the fantasy consoles among the 70 entries and even instructions for an intriguing live action version of Pokémon Snap, all of which can be found at the competition’s page via Kikstart.me.uk/demake-jam-2018.
On a related note, Jon Burton of Traveller’s Tales recently posted a video to his Youtube channel Game Hut about possible ways to implement a game similar to Playerunknown’s Battlegrounds on retro hardware like the Sega Mega Drive. A 16-bit version of PUBG will probably never happen, but this video shows some of the thought processes behind creating such a demake. Jump through Kikstart.me.uk/pubg-md-theory for his video and there’s plenty of other interesting behind-the-scenes discussion of games from Jon’s impressive back catalogue on the channel.