The Mega Cat Chronicles

A blog series by @Scrobins

Episode 4: Graveyard Dude

Introduction:

I wrote this last year and had the honor of interviewing Rani before their tragic passing. Back in 2022, I reached out to them when Mega Cat and I first started talking about collaborating to help developers release their homebrew games on cartridges, and Rani was interested. It was a fun collaboration, and I enjoyed the art that our team created together and getting to know them through our interview. Rani knew players were excited about their game as they sold some early copies at conventions, and I wish Rani could see this release and experience what we’ve worked toward on their behalf. This is for you Rani. I hope we made you proud..

The concept of play is one we take for granted. We have certain activities that quickly come to mind when thinking about “playing”. We might use the verb as a throwaway notion when telling others we were doing something without conscious thought. But when was the last time you dug deep into one of your favorite pastimes and experimented with how you might do something differently or how someone you admire would do the same if they were with you right now. In the gaming community this sort of alchemy gives rise to some of the most exciting creativity, such is the fun that game hacking brings. And then inevitably, the play of different ideas layered onto past projects creates something completely new that we as fans can then enjoy in our play.

For this entry, I’m covering Graveyard Dude, a puzzle adventure for the NES developed by Rani “Timekey” Baker. As of the time of this writing, Graveyard Dude is available for digital download here, and the physical edition can be purchased from Mega Cat here, as part of their ongoing collaboration with us to bring fun games from talented brewers to the physical realm.

Rani’s Proto Cart Sold at PRGE

 

Development Team:

Rani Baker: programming & music

 

Game Evolution:

Graveyard Dude’s story begins with the story of Retro Puzzle Maker, a game-making tool developed by Sarah Parker aka potatolain, and shared with the public on January 1, 2019 (with an overhaul released March 2, 2022). Created with the goal of making retro game development easier, Retro Puzzle Maker has been the catalyst for a number of games such as Force Bot as well as a host of entries in recent NESdev Coding Competitions. Encouraged by this tool’s potential, Rani developed Graveyard Dude and shared the full version to their Ko-Fi & itch.io pages on August 1, 2022 (offering a free demo on September 1, 2022). Rani also submitted Graveyard Dude to the 2022 NESdev Compo, along with their other game Senseless City. Rani entered Senseless City: Space Jesus into the 2023 NESdev Compo.

Sample Screenshot of Retro Puzzle Maker by Sarah Parker

I’ve been following Rani’s Ko-Fi page for a while, eagerly collecting their Game Genie codes for various homebrew games. I was excited to learn about and immediately download an early version of Rani’s first original game on June 9, 2022. Since launching our collaboration with Mega Cat, whenever I learn about a game that might be fun to release on cartridge, I reach out to the brewer and, if interested, connect them with James. That conversation began on July 1, 2022 and has continued to some interesting places: like CasualCart’s in-manual comic that sets up the game’s story. Rani has been fun to work with and I can’t wait to see the wider homebrew community enjoy Graveyard Dude. If it’s any indication, Rani’s limited release of prototype cartridges at the 2022 Portland Retro Gaming Expo went gangbusters, leaving several fans and collectors kicking themselves for missing out. In fact, I only just recently tracked down a copy of that proto release for myself in the past few months. No worries, because Rani, VGS, and Mega Cat have got your back!

 

Gameplay:

Graveyard Dude describes itself as a spooky puzzle game. You play as Sir Heinrick aka Sir Henry, a loyal knight of yore whose spirit protects the graveyard. While slumbering, the dead arose from their tombs and left an unholy mess. As the faithful guardian of this cemetery, you must tidy up the boneyard, collecting scattered bones & pushing coffins back into their holes, while contending with some lazy ghosts blocking your path.

Controls are eerily easy: move around with the D-pad, use the B-button to run, the A-button to rewind your movements, and press Start to pause if you get too scared. Different puzzles have different goals, so be sure to check the HUD as you devise your cleanup plan. It’s not a fate worse than death if you take a wrong step; that rewind button is a real lifesaver.

Screenshot from Graveyard Dude

 

Review:

Graveyard Dude aspires to be an 8-bit Saturday morning cartoon, and Rani easily achieves that goal with bright, fun gameplay. Graveyard Dude is a puzzler that walks the fine line of offering enough difficulty that playing isn’t a complete breeze, but not so hard as to make you feel dumb for getting stuck (but if you get so deep into a mistake that you can’t rewind enough to fix it, well, that’s on you). Picking up and playing is so simple, this might be the first homebrew I’ve played in a long time that wouldn’t intimidate me if I got my hands on a cart-only copy, and found myself without a manual to guide me. Rather than complex controller mechanics, Rani’s puzzles keep you focused on the screen.

The graphics are detailed and colorful, creating a vibe that is eerie yet silly; the kind of spooky that makes kids giggle and adults wax nostalgic. Which is great because I don’t think I could collect so many severed heads if they weren’t adorably creepy.

Or at least devilishly handsome

Meanwhile, Graveyard Dude’s music harps on the familiar with its upbeat Halloweeny chiptunes. With a layer of spooky tension underneath, the game’s music provides a bouncy soundtrack that complements the flow of the hero’s movement. The rhythm seems to carry you weightlessly as you push coffins around, seemingly speeding time while pulling you in further.

 

Interviews:

For a behind the scenes look into the game’s development and the stories that share its creator’s inspiration, I interviewed Rani to learn more…

 

Rani Timekey Baker

@destroyed4com4t

-Before we dive into Graveyard Dude, I would love to talk about you and your background. What first inspired you to become a game programmer, hacker, writer, and musician? What is the origin story of Rani Timekey Baker?

Well I've been doodling out ideas for games and inspirations from games I enjoyed since I was a kid. Just sort of mashing up ideas together into different combinations. I was poking around with making fantasy graphics and music starting with an old TI-99/4a computer my dad bought in the 80s and forgot about, then moved up to an Apple ][, then an x86 PC in high school.

 

-Who are your influences? And whose work are you watching closely now?

I'll probably stick with NES Dev stuff for most of these questions because I keep an eye on a lot of things. As far as like tool development stuff, I find a lot of interesting stuff going on with Russian retro-game hacking guys like the Chief-Net crew like lancuster and guyver. Translating from Russian to English is significantly easier than translating from Japanese or Chinese to English and they have a ton of games translated to Russian that don't even have English fan translation patches, yet which make good "buffers" when building my own translation patches. Among my hacks you can probably easily see influence of old Famicom hackers like Rinkaku and DASTARD and Makiamura MFG and I'm now checking out some of the weirder SMB hackers like ATA and Faisoft. Wanting to get more heavily into fooling around with archiving and hacking old Famicom Family BASIC shareware from the 80s but that's got a time investment curve I can't afford lately. But I'm also watching the stuff all of us are like the NESmaker update and instructional videos and John Riggs and watching Displaced Gamers take apart the code of the first Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles game. Follow a ton of people on itch.io, a lot of really great stuff happening in the NES scene.

 

-How would you describe your design aesthetic, what to you are the hallmarks of a game made by you?

My aesthetic usually involves fantasy or sci-fi horror but is also cartoonish. I developed a drawing style that incorporates the styles of 80s Heavy Metal Magazine/60s graffiti art like Vaughn Bode with artists from Dragon magazine like Larry Elmore. So game art usually synthesizes all that with collage and other things. I obsess a lot about fonts, for instance.

Artwork by Vaughn Bode

 

-What tools do you use to code and compose for your games?

I do a lot of coding right in the debugger of the FCEUX emulator actually. Like, I'll use tools for broad-strokes editing but the finer-point stuff I'm poking it all out in hexadecimal. I put together the base game for GRAVEYARD DUDE using Retro Puzzle Maker, but then rewrote half the code to add more music and graphics that the tool itself wasn't capable of, as well as cheat codes and a run button among other things. I plan on doing stuff in NESmaker soon, but it doesn't run in Linux and they have no plans for Linux compatibility, so it means doing everything on a laptop and porting it back and forth to my desktop. So I'm dragging my feet on getting started. I also wanna try out the Mojon Twins NES devkit at some point. I have a million ideas for projects, it's just a matter of what falls into place when. Music for my original games is done in FamiTracker, but I have also done some pretty elaborate musical compositions for some of my hacks by poking away at it in hexadecimal.

 

-Before Graveyard Dude, you were primarily known for your NES game hacks, spanning such games as Hydlide, Garfield, Ms. Pac-Man, and Fist of the North Star. Was the experience of developing a game like Graveyard Dude from the ground-up different?

Well before GRAVEYARD DUDE and before the NES hacks I was building games in Twine. Still plan on doing some releases in Twine in the near future. But yeah I did a ton of NES hacking before committing to making an original game. Building a game from the ground up rather than patching or modifying an existing game is way different because an established game already has the rules and the world and the vibe spelled out whereas with a new game literally anything goes and you have to reign it all in to be like, no this fits into the universe the game exists in and this doesn't.

 

-Did you have a different attitude toward developing Graveyard Dude compared to your work patching games? Does playing within the existing worlds of established characters impose limits on what you can do with them or do you feel it offers a larger sandbox to play in?

It's interesting because you can tell in my very early NES hacks if you dig far enough back on my Patreon that they didn't have, I dunno, a lot of "respect" for the rules and the limits of the original game. It was a lot of breaking stuff just to break it and as long as the game didn't crash it stayed. But as I got better control over what I was capable of, through all the Game Genie experiments I was doing, it became part of my goal to preserve as much as I can alongside changing as much as I can, if that makes sense. Bending things rather than breaking them or introducing new features in a way that augments the original experience of the game without altering it.

 

-In addition to your hacks and patches, you are a prolific creator of Game Genie codes. What brought you into crafting these codes on such a large scale? What is your favorite type of Game Genie code? Are there any you try to avoid making?

Pumping out the Game Genie Cheat Suites for games was basically just both a challenge to myself and to also fill gaps in existing cheat code resources like Gamehacking Dot Org and Gamefaqs. There's not a lot of Famicom Game Genie codes, for instance, because there isn't actually a Famicom-compatible Game Genie device (well there is, there's more than one, but then you are getting into bootleg stuff), so it's (usually) all composed on emulator. I like when I find a code that turns out to be really powerful, like one that unlocks all the doors in a game, or the one I found last year that disables the final stage password in Gauntlet. Invincibility cheat codes tend to be the biggest pain, because there are multiple ways to go about them and you have to test them for the whole game to make sure what enemies/obstacles/spikes/whatever they work on or don't or if you wind up in a situation where it interrupts, say, an end of level health to point conversion where you have to let the health bar go down to continue the game. Double jumps are also a particularly hit or miss thing to pull off, either super easy to cook up or not worth the trouble.

 

-You also developed the game’s music, with your background as part of the band Destroyed for Comfort, is your creative process for composing the soundtrack to a game similar to when you are working on your other music?

Most musical projects I've worked on I usually sketch out the idea using Tracker software, which is a type of step-sequencer kinda like MIDI, but it was originally designed for Commodore computers like the Commodore 64 and Amiga. The music I make for NES games (if not literally hardcoded in with hexadecimal) is with FamiTracker, which is based on that same sort of Tracker software that I have been using since high school.

Album cover for Destroyed for Comfort’s House for Sale, released earlier this year

 

-Speaking of Destroyed for Comfort, which creates experimental electronic music, does your experience performing provide inspiration for your game music, or vice versa? What are the quintessential qualities of your music?

I compose the music for these different projects in a very similar programming environment so the approach is very similar, the goal is different. My music is very textural, a lot of filters and arpeggiation, a lot of moving parts even if the actual melody line is simple. NES having a very limited number of voices definitely effects what I can pull off.

 

-And of course on top of all your other skills, you write articles for a host of publications including Cracked, Medium, Bunny Ears, LGBTQ Nation, Looper, Grunge, and Modern Rogue. First of all, when do you sleep? Second, were you always a writer as well? How did you become a regular contributor to so many publications?

I've been doing paid writing for various publications for almost a decade and a half now, I first joined the writers’ workshop at Cracked back in 2008 and branched out from there. I dunno, I've tried my hand at a lot of stuff and if it works out at all I keep doing it. My brain just keeps coming up with ideas and then I gotta figure out the best way to execute them.

 

-What new challenges or surprises surfaced in developing Graveyard Dude?

GRAVEYARD DUDE is a very small game, 40kB, so there was a lot of shuffling things around and trying to shave off every extraneous byte to make room for something else by the end. It is a very tightly packed game that I think manages to pull off a lot with what it's working with.

 

-I always ask my interviewees whether there is a reflection of themselves in the game’s protagonist. Do identify with the knight in some way?

Sir Henry was always kind of a tertiary character in my stories. If a story needed a knight, then we had a knight. I mean on some level we all want to be brave and to be able to navigate the difficult situations we find ourselves in, so it's hard not to identify in at least some way.

A little sample of CasualCart’s brilliant in-manual comic

 

-There has been a lot of support and enthusiasm for Graveyard Dude. How does it feel to see so many people excited for your game?

It really seems to be taking off! Was not expecting it! I've had some of my projects do pretty well, but this is a whole other level. Hopefully this is a start of many cool releases.

 

-What aspects of Graveyard Dude are you most proud of?

I think it pulls off a lot for what it had available. I put a lot of effort into making it as visually and audibly engaging as possible.

 

-Your Twitter also teases your second game: Senseless City, in which you can choose the player, music, and graphics. What can you tell us about that game?

SENSELESS CITY is right now a demo of features there wasn't room for in GRAVEYARD DUDE but I really wanted to try out. The idea of being able to swap out characters and graphics and palettes and even music to change the game experience seemed really intriguing. Since the release of the demo, Retro Puzzle Maker did an update on the tool which creates UNROMs instead of NROMs, including the ability to add more full screens of text or graphics and insert them anywhere in the game, so I may wind up using that to expand the project into something meatier than just a short demo of features.

Screenshot from Rani’s second game: Senseless City

 

-Are there any other projects you have lined up on the horizon, NES or otherwise? Any dream projects? Collaborations?

I've been talking about making a side-view mixed-action-adventure horror game with like Friday the 13th or Dr. Chaos but with mechanics like Goonies II for ages. I've got the rough outlines of it, it's just a matter of getting into the practice of using NESmaker regularly to put it together, which like I mentioned earlier is not Linux compatible so most of the work will be done on laptop. Also have the release of some pretty elaborate hacks and translations coming out hopefully by the end of the year. Like, fully translated Famicom JRPGs and stuff. And of course more Game Genie stuff.

 

-Are there any homebrew games in development that you are excited to play?

There's a lot going on, I haven't even really had a chance to even look over everything that was presented at Portland Retro Gaming Expo and there's a bunch of stuff in the running for the NESdev Compilation Competition and Byte-Off was just a couple months ago. Excited to play it all and hopefully drop some Game Genie codes for them.

 

-I really appreciate you taking the time to talk with me and share your experiences. Is there anything else you would like to tell readers and fans?

I'm always releasing new stuff, keep an eye out I guess!

 

Conclusion:

Thanks for tuning in to this latest episode of the series that highlights the latest treats coming to the cartridge, thanks to Video Game Sage’s collaboration with Mega Cat Studios. What are your thoughts on Graveyard Dude and its incredibly talented developer? What homebrews are you eagerly looking forward to? Perhaps you’ll see it here soon in the next tale of…The Mega Cat Chronicles!