We recently had a natter with Chris Cacciatore about Nebs ’N Debs to find out where the inspiration for his colourful NES platformer came from and his answers were something of a surprise
Where did the idea for Nebs ‘N Debs originally come from?
A piece that I pixelled for my daughter’s first birthday in 2015. I did the alphabet and with each letter a kid with an animal on their head. The characters Nebs and Debs came from the letter ‘S’ and the corresponding squid kid. Over time, the squid morphed into an octopus. I think that was because I could make an octopus look a bit better in a compacted space – 24 by 24 pixels.
Who was involved and roughly how long did it take to create?
Anders Gullmarsvik, artist; Kaela Camille Agustin, artist; Heather Klinger, packaging design and layout;
Chris Cacciatore, programmer and project lead; Richard ‘kulor’ Armijo, sound and music. It took 2.5 years to make. How has the feedback been from NES gamers so far? Great! Starting with winning second place at the 2016 NESDEV competition and up to and after our successful Kickstarter campaign the support we have received has been positive. I post animated GIFS regularly on Twitter showcasing gameplay and graphical glitches – my personal favourite – and these helped get the word out. There is also a lot excitement in the NESDEV community right now. There are awesome games in development, being released, or Kickstarted at this very moment! Nebs ‘N Debs is certainly riding that wave.
And is there anything you would have done differently with hindsight?
I knew that focusing on the asset pipeline would be important, but I should have spent even more time on it.
The NES is an old system and is ignorant of modern game assets – for example PNG tile sets and palettes, music and sound effects in the form of Tracker files, and JSON level data from a level editor. So transforming and stuffing these assets into a NES game…well, it requires work!
Early in development I watched Miau and Nicolas from
Morphcat
Games stream development of their NES game Bana Nana. Seeing how they tied together their build process with Python scripts inspired me to try similar approaches, but with the Ruby scripting language. The easier it is to add stuff to your game, the easier it is to experiment and make it better.
Finally, do you have any future projects that our readers might be interested in?
Yes, our next project is codenamed Janus. It is an action adventure game for the NES about a protagonist who wields a slingshot.
This title will definitely use more sophisticated cartridge hardware than Nebs ‘N
Debs which had to fit within 40 kilobytes. We are contemplating using expansion audio as well. Release timeline is one-to-two years. There will be more to say about it once Nebs ‘N Debs is released!