Rapid prototyping: Playing around with Godot 4

ANNA (アンナ) is (will be) a game for the Nintendo NES and Famicom. The development is working well, nearly all physics are implemented in the code, the graphic assets are ready. Some enemies will follow in the next weeks. Currently I’m working on finalize the levels, build new traps and so on.

Over the last time more and more people asked about a game version for modern hardware. The main focus is the NES and Famicom, the game will be available as real cartridges and also as a ROM file to play it.

But: I tried something new and played around with the current release of Godot Game Engine. The version 4 got a release and I downloaded it and did first steps. It’s cool how easy the processes are if all I did lately was writing code in Assembly. Coding for the NES is an amazing experience, but migrating the game to modern platforms could be a cool way to learn something new and also open the way to new user bases.

The focus when working with Godot is to implement the gaming experience of the original hardware (NES/Famicom) 1 to 1. This means that even if almost everything is possible on modern hardware, a possible game version will have the same characteristics that it also has on the NES. The colors will be limited, the physics and the animations will be based on the original. These circumstances make it surprisingly easy to develop a version with Godot.

After two hours with Godot

The comparison between NES/Famicom gameplay and a first state in Godot 4