Alwa's Awakening - A NES-inspired adventure game

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Nintendooh
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Alwa's Awakening - A NES-inspired adventure game

Post by Nintendooh »

Hi everybody

I'm working on a NES-inspired adventure game called Alwa's Awakening. It's main inspiration is Battle Of Olympus but also newer games like the Trine series. I'm the Game Designer and we're a team of four people currently working on the game. None of us work full time with this, we only work late nights and on weekends. This game actually started out as a real NES game but my Assembly buddy left the team this winter. So I decided to move on and use Unity as the game engine because my skills in Assembly is too limited to program a full game. The dream of making a real NES game is still alive though.

I wanted to show the game to you guys and get your feedback. Although we're using modern development tools the NES feeling is still really important to me and getting it to play and feel like a real NES game is something we're really going for. We're currently developing with Wii U as our target platform but If I were to find a talented enough Assembly programmer I would love to do a NES version as well. Large parts of the game of course has to be re-designed (such as the aspect ratio etc.) but we're trying to stay within the NES restrictions as much as we can. I would love to get your feedback on my project so please comment on the graphics, design and how true NES this look etc.

Thanks for your time! :)

Watch the trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J6VOhGM1ktA
Visit our website: http://alwasawakening.com

Some screenshots
Image

Image

(EDIT: Updated with corrects links to updated screenshots)
Last edited by Nintendooh on Sat Jan 14, 2017 8:09 am, edited 3 times in total.
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Re: Alwa's Awakening - A NES-inspired adventure game

Post by tepples »

We're currently developing with Wii U as our target platform but If I were to find a talented enough Assembly programmer I would love to do a NES version as well.
I'm not privy to Nintendo's contracts. But given what happened with Brian Provinciano and Retro City Rampage, I highly doubt that Nintendo would approve of simultaneous licensed and unlicensed development for its platforms.
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Re: Alwa's Awakening - A NES-inspired adventure game

Post by Drew Sebastino »

Would it be impossible to license an NES game in 2015? :lol:
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Nintendooh
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Re: Alwa's Awakening - A NES-inspired adventure game

Post by Nintendooh »

tepples wrote:
We're currently developing with Wii U as our target platform but If I were to find a talented enough Assembly programmer I would love to do a NES version as well.
I'm not privy to Nintendo's contracts. But given what happened with Brian Provinciano and Retro City Rampage, I highly doubt that Nintendo would approve of simultaneous licensed and unlicensed development for its platforms.
Yeah. I know. I was thinking one would make a unlicensed NES release first and after that approach big N and show them the game. They'll never allow a simultaneous release. But yeah, good feedback. Did copyright issues stop Brian Provinciano? I wasn't aware of that.
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Re: Alwa's Awakening - A NES-inspired adventure game

Post by Nintendooh »

Espozo wrote:Would it be impossible to license an NES game in 2015? :lol:
Yeah, I'm pretty sure Nintendo wouldn't want to do that. I guess though if Yacht Club Games approached them with Shovel Knight they might consider it. Being how huge success they've had. Interesting question...
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Re: Alwa's Awakening - A NES-inspired adventure game

Post by tepples »

You might end up having to choose one or the other. Become a licensed developer for Wii U or become an unlicensed developer for NES, but not both. This would mean that your "modern" version would end up on one or more of PlayStation Vita, PC, and Android.

Nintendo states on WarioWorld.com that it also wants its developers to be financially stable companies. You might have to ship a few titles on PC or Android to prove this to Nintendo.
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Nintendooh
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Re: Alwa's Awakening - A NES-inspired adventure game

Post by Nintendooh »

tepples wrote:You might end up having to choose one or the other. Become a licensed developer for Wii U or become an unlicensed developer for NES, but not both. This would mean that your "modern" version would end up on one or more of PlayStation Vita, PC, and Android.

Nintendo states on WarioWorld.com that it also wants its developers to be financially stable companies. You might have to ship a few titles on PC or Android to prove this to Nintendo.
Yeah, we'll see what happens in the future. I'm quite confident I can get the game out eventually being how friendly Nintendo are to indies nowadays. But you never know, it's still their decision yeah.
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Re: Alwa's Awakening - A NES-inspired adventure game

Post by thefox »

Looks very cool.
Download STREEMERZ for NES from fauxgame.com! — Some other stuff I've done: fo.aspekt.fi
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Re: Alwa's Awakening - A NES-inspired adventure game

Post by Drew Sebastino »

tepples wrote:Nintendo states on WarioWorld.com that it also wants its developers to be financially stable companies. You might have to ship a few titles on PC or Android to prove this to Nintendo.
Is that an official website? I've never heard of it before... I guess Nintendo wants to keep it hidden to keep people from creating bogus accounts and stuff. It's a little strange that the game would be named after the GC game Wario World though. (I think it's a pretty good game and I've noticed that it's made by Treasure (the same Treasure as Gunstar Heroes?) but the game is incredibly short, even if you find everything like I did. Sorry to get off topic...)

Oh, I noticed that you are using more than 4 different color palettes for the BG. That's obviously going to have to change in order to be on the NES.
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Re: Alwa's Awakening - A NES-inspired adventure game

Post by tepples »

Espozo wrote:
tepples wrote:Nintendo states on WarioWorld.com
Is that an official website?
It appears to be Nintendo's counterpart to scedev.net. And if it's not official, ICANN was fooled:
ICANN WHOIS wrote:Organization: Nintendo of America Inc.
Mailing Address: 4600 150th Ave. N.E., Redmond WA 98052 US
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Re: Alwa's Awakening - A NES-inspired adventure game

Post by rainwarrior »

tepples wrote:
We're currently developing with Wii U as our target platform but If I were to find a talented enough Assembly programmer I would love to do a NES version as well.
I'm not privy to Nintendo's contracts. But given what happened with Brian Provinciano and Retro City Rampage, I highly doubt that Nintendo would approve of simultaneous licensed and unlicensed development for its platforms.
What do you mean? What "happened" to Retro City Rampage?

It was my understanding that he did release the NES version as an emulated playable within the Wii (and Steam) version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZffFxLyD4Ig
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Re: Alwa's Awakening - A NES-inspired adventure game

Post by rainwarrior »

Nintendooh wrote:I would love to do a NES version as well. Large parts of the game of course has to be re-designed (such as the aspect ratio etc.) but we're trying to stay within the NES restrictions as much as we can.
In the video, all of the rooms appear to be static. You could easily turn this into a 2-screen wide room on the NES with very simple scrolling. (I ended up doing this in my own NES project.) There's not really any need to change the designed rooms, unless being able to see something on the opposite side of the room without moving toward that side is important.
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Re: Alwa's Awakening - A NES-inspired adventure game

Post by Nintendooh »

rainwarrior wrote:There's not really any need to change the designed rooms, unless being able to see something on the opposite side of the room without moving toward that side is important.
Yeah, that's a great idea. Thanks! Lizard looks awesome btw. I backed it a couple of months ago :)

EDIT: Warioworld.com is an official Nintendo page btw.
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Re: Alwa's Awakening - A NES-inspired adventure game

Post by Drag »

This looks really nice! Great job!
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Re: Alwa's Awakening - A NES-inspired adventure game

Post by Sik »

tepples wrote:It appears to be Nintendo's counterpart to scedev.net.
Can confirm this, I knew about this site since long ago actually.
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