06 Aug 2025
I'm gonna' talk a bit about my first released game, the NES-impersonating rocket-car-parody Missile Champions because it's my first game and I'm very proud of it.
For this we’ve got to dip into the Something Awful Forums, where for a while regular game jams were held. These varied under different hosts, from SAGDX to Awful Jams to Dogpit Jams; this was for Awful Summer Jam 2017. This was the first jam I was going to participate in (solo!), and with about three weeks time to work on a game I had plenty of freedom to learn what I needed.
Before the jam I had just started learning how to use SDL to make games using that framework in C++. The project I made to get my legs was a pong clone, it was simple enough that I worked out the game loop, controls, and objects on field interacting. Don’t be afraid to clone a game to learn, it will teach you so much about how to implement those systems. With that under my belt, I felt confident to take on the challenge of a jam.
Each of the jams has a secret theme that’s not revealed until the jam starts. For Awful Summer Jam 2017, it was Bootlegs. I drilled down to a Rocket League NES knockoff since that’d be fairly simple controls and graphics. I learned a lot during these three weeks and change about how to scope for a jam.
Unfortunately, the detailed log I kept on my progress was on the Awful Jams website and that’s been long dead. Which is a shame, because it was a wonderful chronology of the art and my progress on structuring all the code.
The most important direction I set for myself on this was sticking to vibes. Using the four-color (well 3+alpha) limitation and limited separate palette use. There’s a few spots where I cheated a bit and maybe got in an extra color, but hey it was done in three weeks. I was hooting and hollering when I got some features in like those boost trails and the cars rotating, and then there were other bits where I said good enough (like how the cars can’t collide lol).
I also had a blast doing the music. I’d had messed with Famitracker a bit by then and made a few tracks using the N163 chip. I listened to a few sports NES and Genesis games to get like a general vibe and NHL ‘94’s vibe was like the closest I had in mind. I wasn’t hitting that level of Vibe, but hey it wasn’t a bad shot. Then as a goof I did a Famitracker cover of Running in the 90’s by Max Coveri and got good mileage out of that as the main gameplay theme. Unfortunately it gets grating when you have to hear it for 10 - 19 rounds in a row.
Within three weeks I was able to cram in sprite art, multiple team selection, and a Gameplay Loop Single Player With An Ending. And slow credits, I love slow credits. There’s also an arrow that shows where the ball is offscreen, that was a last-day addition I was so glad to get in before people got lost finding the ball. I am insanely proud of accomplishing that, and the end result is pretty polished! Ironically that journal I kept won an award for the best log.
Yeah play it! It’s here on itch.io or you can also find it in the Video Games sidebar menu. I’m glad to share a couple pics from its development, and at some point I need to get around to making a proper hosted page for it that isn’t the itch.io page.
