Saturday, December 01, 2018

School Zone: aftermaths

Five year ago, I released a single-level "anniversary" game featuring Bilou in a school zone settings. A bit later, in early November, I had the opportunity to have it play-tested by my nephews, who were 7 to 13 years old by then. From there difficulties to approach the game, I added one "preliminary" level that is now level 1 in school Rush.

Voici 5 ans, je vous faisais un jeu-anniversaire avec Bilou dans la zone de l'école. Quelques semaines plus tard, en septembre, mes p'tits n'veux me faisaient me rendre compte qu'il me fallait quelque-chose d'autre comme niveau pour introduire les mécaniques du jeu. Ce niveau non-tutoriel est depuis devenu le premier niveau de School Rush.

Download SchoolRush - JLN build.

So yeah, the 5 levels I'm releasing today for Bilou's 25th  anniversary took me long time to make. And it doesn't even feature the level that started it all. Because meanwhile, I grew interest in speedruns, and I wanted the game to focus on going as fast as we could and save the books. Things with a focus on wandering, discovering, solving or exploring will happen in another small game.

I'm proud I could get feedback from several professionals with the 2016 release. I hope the game is better now. May there be many of you finding it, may you have a fun time playing it. This is my gift to whoever makes free software, free music, or free videos. Thank you all for making coding possible/enjoyable


The engine code is LGPL, the tools 'used to make it (animations and level editors) are GPL, the art and level design remain my copyrights, but they are free to play, and free to share unmodified as part as this School Rush release.

Aujourd'hui, le développement de School Rush prend fin. Ce fut long, parfois fastidieux, mais je voulais l'amener jusqu'au bout. Comme dans tout jeu, il y a des choses qui ont été abandonnées en cours de route. Soit qu'elles ne convenaient pas, soit qu'elles m'écartaient du but premier du jeu... soit qu'elles promettaient de devenir un gouffre de développement rendant irréaliste toute sortie tant que je serais en solo sur le développement. Que ce jeu soit mon cadeau à tous ceux qui ont écrit du code free software que j'utilise tous les jours, les musiques que j'écoute en codant, les vidéos sympa qui m'ont donné envie de continuer. Merci à tous pour votre travail.

I'll just update November post with the link to December contents, if you don't mind. How-to-play etc. is there. If you're looking for a changes list, it's been posted already ;)

Featured on PDRoms.de

History tracked on playeradvance, tigsource, homebrewlegends

24 comments:

m0nsieur L said...

Bilou est excellent comme jeu de plate forme, foncez les copains !

eschnou said...

Félicitation ! Je vais essayer avec les enfants !

pixelpiledriver said...

Gratz on shipping! 🎉 Will check it out! 🕹

jujurackham said...

Merci pour ton travail, ton désir de partager ce que tu fais via ton blog, les forums, Twitter... Merci de continuer à faire vivre le #homebrew sur #nds. ��

zio said...

Wow, wasn't even aware this was homebrew, just thought it was some neat indie game, certainly even more interesting than it already looked^^

cyangmou said...

Thanks a lot, glad that it helped you. This is very much appreciated and made my day =)

Yoda07 said...

Félicitations pour l’aboutissement de ton projet.
Je vais tester ca rapidement, il a l’air vraiment sympa.

0xtob said...

Thank you, and you're more than welcome! I can't believe you're still homebrewing! Your game looks awesome! :-)

REDFIELD1 said...

Félicitations pour cet acharnement et l'aboutissement de ton projet !

shonumi said...

Looks pretty good! It's nice to see polished homebrew for the NDS. Feels like the heyday for that was mid 2000s/early2010s, so it's great to see people still making things for the handheld.

Mostly just wanted to say thanks for your efforts. I'm in the process of improving the NDS core of my emulator, and any sort of ROM I can use for testing is appreciated, especially interesting games. Despite the somewhat "meh" state of NDS emulation in GBE+, School Rush manages to run without crashing. Very impressive work you've done here, keep it up.

moasdkn said...

Played it. Was really good! Fluid movement - the little guy is especially bouncy. All in all, solid work. Once I get the chance, I'll try to go further, but you have a good game here.

Linky439 said...

Ah, géniale nouvelle ! Félicitations pour avoir fini ce jeu, surtout après 5 ans cactus smile

Je vais essayer d'y jouer via un émulateur alors. J'ai jamais touché à un ému DS donc ça sera ma première

headkaze said...

An amazing accomplishment! Well done!

mirrorbird said...

It looks very cute! The visual style reminds me of the Addams Family game on the 16-bit consoles.

serpent said...

nice looking game. if not commercial, enter Revision wild compo or Assembly game compo. it looks so good it could fare well

guelnika said...

couvert sur le blog e-magination

Pursuing Pixels said...

I’m definitely always up for a speedrun driven challenge! :D

hot_pengu Goodboy Galaxy said...

Congratulations!!

Felipe Sanches said...

This reminds me of Stage 4 - "The Library" - on Mickey Mouse, Castle of Illusion (Sega Genesis) :-D

PypeBros said...

@Felipes I cannot deny Disney influence regarding super-sized worlds, of course. It goes beyond Castle of Illusion though. Influences draw in many games. Mostly some of the '90s. As for #castleofillusion, I sure played it a bit as a kid, but I don't remember making my way to the library level. I was told about it in 2011 (https://pixelation.org/index.php?topic=13151.msg127769#msg127769) and sure had a look at their flasks when starting to design "inkjet" characters.

#RealBisqwit said...

Looks a bit like Kirby's Adventure

@sjodogne@qoto.org said...

Sylvain, c'est magnifique ! Je suis extrêmement touché de voir que le but que tu t'es fixé durant toutes ces années a été accompli grâce à ton investissement personnel. Félicitations pour ce bel exemple ! Avec toute mon amitié ^^

PypeBros said...

@sjodogne, Oui, ça m'a pris a peu près 2x plus de temps que prévu (sans compter le temps passé sur la majorité des graphismes où je n'avais même pas encore l'idée de faire ce jeu précis). Mais je trouve que c'était une démonstration importante à faire.

Quand on sait doser ses objectifs pour qu'ils restent raisonable (5 niveau pour des parties de 10-15 minutes agréables à recommencer), qu'on va à la rencotre de personnes qui peuvent nous conseiller et qu'on abandonne pas, on finit par obtenir des résultats dont on peut être fier ^_^.

PypeBros said...

(and it was my pleasure that the 'gift' was received by malmen on a day where kind words were needed)