Sometimes it’s not enough to give a game the retro look; you’ve got to give it a retro release, too.
That’s the idea, anyway, behind Tanglewood. It’s a puzzle-platformer that is currently raising funds at a rapid rate on Kickstarter, which is probably largely in part to the creator’s intention to release the game on cartridge for the SEGA Mega Drive or SEGA Genesis next year.
According to the Kickstarter pitch, Tanglewood is uses Sonic, Flashback, Another World and The Lion King as inspiration while borrowing mechanics and elements from more modern platformers like Ori and the Blind Forest and LIMBO. Unlike any of those games, however, Tanglewood has an adorable creature called Nymn who looks like a fox (but is called the Djunn race, because foxes aren’t that cute when they eat your pets in real life).
The whole game is being coded in “raw 68000 assembly language”, although the game will also be released for PC, Mac and Linux if you want to play it that way.
It’s raised about a third of its €48,000 goal so far, which isn’t too shabby with 30 days remaining. Creator Matt Phillips is hoping to have the cartridges shipped for retro fans by November next year, with the PC, Mac and Linux version due out around Christmas 2017.
Comments
4 responses to “People Still Want To Make Games For The SEGA Mega Drive”
Little known fact: In Brazil the Mega Drive has never ceased production an year after year keeps a good number of sales. A local factory obtained all rights from Sega to keep producing it for as long as they want.
Backed.
And as a fellow Sega Mega Drive programmer, I will never lose my desire for making more games on the system!
I also feel like it’s got just the right balance between simplicity and modern complexity as a great introduction for those interested in learning low-level programming.
There are also a lot of projects to make it more accessible. You no longer have to learn 68K assembly and build your own toolchain. Now, a complete SDK exists which allows development in C with only a few commands to automatically put the environment together.
Do you have any links to s community where people could learn?
Hey, yeah there’s a few good communities out there.
If you’re interested, I’d recommend just searching for “mega drive homebrew tutorials” [or “genesis homebrew tutorials”].
For specifics, spritesmind forums are really good. The developer of SGDK hangs out there.
http://gendev.spritesmind.net/forum/