A Homebrew Draws Near!

A blog series by @Scrobins

Episode 51: Crater Song

Introduction:

Usually when we think of hybrid games, we imagine a game whose overall gameplay blends elements from multiple games. However some classics such as The Guardian Legend feature multiple types of gameplay as a way to weave the story together and elevate the game as a whole. Has anyone attempted both? A game that alternates styles of gameplay, at least one of which is itself a blend of genres? Gamers wouldn’t know what to expect, but they would surely be eager to explore such uncharted waters.

For this entry, I’m covering Crater Song, an adventure puzzle AND action obstacle game for the NES by John Vanderhoef, and published by Premium Edition Games. As of the time of this writing, the game can be downloaded on John’s itch.io page here, and the physical game can be ordered from Premium Edition Games here.

Standard CIB edition, plus challenge card & dog tag

 

Development Team:

@johnvanderhoef (John Vanderhoef): programming, design, story

@Raftronaut (Jordan Davis): sound/music design

 

Game Evolution:

Crater Song first entered our orbit with the Byte Off IV Competition, NESmaker’s regular development compo. Announced on February 9, 2024, the competition’s theme was "new frontiers." Crater Song certainly made an impact, as the game was awarded Best Narrative on May 8, 2024 at the live award show hosted at Midwest Gaming Classic. Development of a full game continued in earnest. On September 16, 2024, Premium Edition Games opened pre-orders for the game on their website, with fulfillment offered at some point early the following year. On offer is a CIB of the game, a matching dog tag, and a challenge card. Those who opted for the special edition can get a silver cart.

 

Screenshot from Crater Song

 

Gameplay:

Crater Song describes itself as a single-player co-op adventure puzzle game. You play as twins Arco & Menuett, who were born with cursed harmonics amid a tribe that communicates through song. Their poisoned frequency calls out to the Nox, an extradimensional danger whose threat alone leads the Melodic tribe to cast the twins out. Journey to a sacred crater that can lift the curse and help the twins rejoin the harmony of their people’s song.

The controls of this game require you hold two controllers sideways like joysticks. Your left hand controls Arco, while your right hand controls Menuett. Use the D-pads to move each character, and press the Select button to sing.

The joystick controller diagram

 

Review:

Crater Song is an intriguing adventure that blends genres and offers an inventive interface for gameplay that will challenge players in a delightfully musical setting. Continuing in the Orebody universe, Crater Song plays in its established sandbox to also continue the “joystick controller” scheme devised for Candelabra: Estoscerro and Spook-o’-tron, demonstrating the versatility of its style. Controlling two characters at once initially creates a challenge in which different movements between your hands can seem discordant, but the structure of the puzzles with the beats underlying the game pull your movement together. Paired with the game’s actions and puzzles, Crater Song offers something familiar and yet boldly different.

Visually the game is a colorful, mystical adventure, filled with pretty and varied environments. Supporting the art, Jordan’s music provides tense rhythms that propel you forward with a strong sense of adventure. Together the graphics and music combine to form the mystique of an alien quest that feels old and strange, but full of beauty. If ever a homebrew game deserved a Worlds of Power book, Crater Song feels worthy of an adaption with its deep sense of lore.

 

Interviews:

I checked back in with John to learn a few more measures of Crater Song, read on for the notes he played…

 

John Vanderhoef

@johnvanderhoef

-Before we dive into Crater Song, it’s great to talk to you again! How have you been since we last spoke?

That’s kind of an existential question, no? Haha. Look, because where I work at the moment is far from where my family lives, life is just not very fun 8 months out of the year right now. A lot of plane rides.

But outside of that, ahem, “little problem,” things aren’t so bad. I’m keeping busy with work and my game projects, and I have an endless supply of ideas, all of which I’d like to get to someday. And hey, did you know Crater Song is coming out as a physical release soon?

 

-Have your influences remained the same since we last chatted? Is anyone else’s work fascinating you?

My overarching influences remain the same – I’m forever fascinated with grandiose, mythological worldbuilding coupled with intensely personal, intimate storytelling. I still admire the Nintendo approach to game design, the melding of sound and design from Tetsuya Mizuguchi, the minimalism and emotion of Fumito Ueda, the terrible narrative ambition of Ken Levine; I could go on.

But – and I think I will have revealed my next project by the time this is published – I have taken A LOT of inspiration recently from 8- and 16-bit pinball and breakout games. I have an Analogue Pocket handheld I use to explore the vast library of retro games I never played earlier in life. And several months ago, right around the time I was finishing up Crater Song, I stumbled upon a Super Famicom game called Battle Pinball by a developer named Banpresto. I mean, they were kind of a big deal at the time, so some readers may be familiar. Battle Pinball is essentially a pinball game with four boards, each inspired by a different Japanese franchise, including Ultraman, Kamen Rider, and Gundam.

In particular, the Ultraman and Gundam boards spoke to my long-running, but recently revived, affinity for kaiju media – giant monsters and the like. With the recent surge in Godzilla films (Minus Zero and New Empire), along with introducing my young son to the world of Godzilla through toys, kaiju have been in my thoughts frequently. And as happens with me, I started to think about game possibilities. Beyond the simple Rampage-like or perhaps a top-down brawler perhaps, nothing really came to mind or excited me.

But then I played Battle Pinball, and it all clicked. I decided to try making a similar game with giant monsters in different classic settings – cities, islands, oceans, moons, etc. – and rather than controlling the monster, the player would interact with a ball to try to defeat them. That’s how Super Kaiju Boom Ball for the NES was born. Now, the game went or is rather going in a particular direction because of my own limitations as a developer paired with possible solutions from some key members of the NESMaker community. But I’m sure I can talk about all that in a future interview.

In short, I love exploring previous holes in my retro game knowledge and discovering brand new ways to be inspired by the concepts, mechanics and dynamics at work in those games, which span decades now, depending on how you define retro – and I’m not even touching that particular debate in this interview.

Screenshot from Battle Pinball

 

-Crater Song represents another musically-oriented game, what about music in gaming do you find resonant to a satisfying gamer experience?

While I think the defining idea of a video game is interactivity and choice, limited though it may be at times, I consider music and sound to be very important to the experience – really, to the human experience, too, if you’ll allow me to gesture that large.

(As an aside: I want to be careful about how much grandeur I attribute to music and sound given the fact that hearing is not a universal human characteristic, and video games can be and are enjoyed by many, many people who either cannot hear or sometimes even mute audio during play.)

So, for me, some of my most memorable video game experiences have been music-centered or music-adjacent, despite being unable to formally create music myself. I know, right? Who among us doesn’t hum the Mario Bros. theme to ourselves, or the Zelda theme? Music can amplify and solidify the state of “flow” in games – that state of mind we get into when we’re zeroed into the game and syncing with it at all levels as we let our outside concerns drift away. Music really helps with that. It can turn a simple set of button presses into a symphony – sometimes quite literally – or it can punctuate the actions a player takes in the game.

All that pomposity aside, it was more of a happy accident that I came to Crater Song after Oratorio. It wasn’t planned that way. I was already working on a steampunk-inspired, nautical Game Boy game set on the oceans of Orebody that’s going to be called Hammermill. But then the NESMaker competition known as Byte-Off came around, and I started to get itchy with an idea.

Since Orebody is more of a narrative universe, I’ve already done a ton of worldbuilding off and on, in a giant tome, of sorts, most of which has never been seen and might never be seen. But one of those details was the existence of a nomadic tribe on Orebody that communicates only in song. I think the idea came from a radio show I was listening to – some NPR thing, like This American Life or RadioLab or some such – and I really liked the idea of an alien race that talked only through songs. (Ironically, the box office bomb The Marvels used a similar idea but for mostly comedic effect. I imagined something much more soulful and sincere.) In any case, I had that Orebody alien tribe, the Melodic, just sitting there.

So, after deciding on a game design where players control two characters at once – inspired by the indie game Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons  – I had to think of a narrative dressing to layer over it. Who would the two characters be? What corner of Orebody could I explore with the game? So many possibilities.

Going with the Melodic, and the story of two twins, connected in psychic and spiritual ways, that must travel across a dangerous landscape to cure themselves, armed not with blasters or swords or the implements of war but only their voices – songs! – that was very compelling to me. Despite making several shoot-em-up games and other violent games, there’s a part of me that always wants to push against violence as being the default mode of interaction in video games.

So…music and singing. Who doesn’t love singing, right?

 

-Crater Song also derives inspiration from Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons, another modern game. What about this game do you find interesting, and can you speak to your fascination with bringing facets of popular modern games to the homebrew scene?

There is just nothing else like Brothers. Okay, at this point, I can’t be the ONLY person to have tried to emulate that dynamic, right? I mean, there have to be a few other examples of single-player, two character games. But nonetheless, for me, Brothers is a singular experience.

And it’s a really engaging idea. There’s a kind of challenge to trying to navigate two objects on screen at the same time. And in order to mitigate the potential headache, the devs limited interaction to just one button for each character. I borrowed that concept with Crater Song. Other than running around, there’s only one other button to use, which is to sing. All the mechanics and puzzles in the game are based around maneuvering the characters to specific places on each screen, avoiding enemies and dangers, and singing. It’s pure in that way.

The other thing that Brothers does really well is stitch its storytelling to its mechanics. By controlling each brother at the same time, you learn to deeply identify with each. You become protective of both. You want to guide each to safety. And you’re constantly using one brother to help the other, always strengthening the perceived bond between them. And this allows for more immersive and emotional storytelling. I love how they accomplish it. Now, I can’t say I’ve achieved the same feat with Crater Song, but I’m chasing that idea.

As I’ve said previously, one of my issues with the retrogaming community, writ large, is they sometimes can feel a little stuck in time. Sorry, y’all. You know I love you. But this tendency has potentially prevented many retro players and devs from experiencing the full history and development of game design and mechanics. There’s so much out there!

And with modern indie games, it’s an explosion of innovative, really cool ideas. It’s an embarrassment of riches. While I paint and have painted on the NES canvas, so to speak, for five years now, I find it very useful to reach across eras of gaming for inspiration. There’s always just the novel challenge of translating some of these ideas to the NES. With Oratorio, it was trying to translate something like Rez’s interactive soundscape. For Crater Song, it was trying to figure out how to allow a player to control two characters at the same time based on the template of Brothers.

Screenshot from Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons

 

-At the heart of Crater Song is its use of dual-controllers, which we have seen in a few other games, such as Spook-‘o-tron and Candelabra: Estoscerro. Were those games inspiration for designing Crater Song’s gameplay, or did you already know you wanted to implement the design this way? Was it challenging?

Yeah, so I had the problem of how to control two characters at the same time. There’s only one d-pad on an NES controller, after all. But then I discovered how easy it was to simply ask the player to hold one NES controller sideways in each hand, like a joycon or wii-mote, and – boom! – it feels like it was always meant to be that way. That’s how I came to the idea – my history with playing Wii games and then using the joycons for the Nintendo Switch wirelessly in each hand. It’s intuitive for me.

(I later discovered this was the control method for Smash TV on the NES to allow for independent movement and multiple direction shooting – how cool is that?)

But no, I never played Spook-’o-tron or Candelabra: Estorscerro. Now I feel like I need to! I thought what I was doing was somehow novel, but it turns out, a good idea is a good idea, and others are bound to have considered it already.

The actual implementation of the two-character design wasn’t very difficult. That is to say, getting the setup to work on screen. The difficult part was, of course, designing boards that gradually grew in challenge and that continually introduced new mechanics that were additive, instead of incongruous, with this unique control scheme.

 

-Are there other creative ideas you have for playing homebrew games you are hoping to implement?

Nothing at this time. Crater Song illustrated one thing for me: retrogame players love novelty but they also, when confronted with entirely new setups, often don’t stick around long. Maybe I’m bitter and cynical – it’s true – but just trying to get people to sit with Crater Song long enough to get into the meaty part of the mechanics has always been difficult. Like Oratorio before it, when people get the game, they GET it. But it can be alienated and off-putting for some. And I totally understand. Most of us are trying to fit these games into our immensely busy lives. Do we really have time to learn and become accustomed to a new control scheme that has a lot of onboarding friction? Many just don’t. It’s easier to bounce off. And that’s the danger when straying too far from established conventions. In that respect, I’m not sitting on any other zany ideas for unique controls at the moment. But, well, about that…

My next NES game, however, Super Kaiju Boom Ball, will be an entirely unique experience on the system, I hope. As I stated above, it’s a pinball meets breakout meets kaiju monster battle. At least, that’s the goal and vibe I’m going for. The NES, as always, presents a challenge when you want a certain tempo and chain-reaction dynamic, at least for me and my coding skills, and at least using NESMaker as the foundation. That’s my current mountain to climb.

 

-Crater Song was developed for the NESmaker Byte-Off IV Competition, where it won Best Narrative. How does that recognition feel? How does the final game differ from the original submission?

It feels really good. I’m a creative writer at heart. I’m particularly fond of beautiful and evocative prose and poetry. All of my work is driven by story, whether in subtle or significant ways. Super Kaiju Boom Ball maybe is less story-dependent than my other work. But there’s still a narrative wrapper there.

Anyway, for Crater Song, it was about crafting what I have called a dark sci-fi fairy tale. Because that’s what I was really going for. It’s a story about two kids, right? And they have to face some dark eldritch horrors on a cross-country journey on an alien planet to some magical space rock in order to cure themselves of this affliction? What’s more classically fairy tale than that?

After submitting the Byte-Off entry, I didn’t even wait for judging before I decided I had fallen in love with the story and the characters and the game design. Crater Song was supposed to be this short competition game, something I posted for free on Itch.io. However, I was compelled to add more to it, and when I decided to do that, I knew I had to make it robust enough to warrant a full physical release.

The final version, what I’m calling the Definitive Edition, has an entire additional chapter, with a really cool mechanic, not featured in the initial competition demo, along with more levels for every chapter, four more bosses, and other expanded features for the story campaign.

I also included an entirely separate challenge campaign that effectively doubles the length of the game and features puzzles that are challenging from the start. It’s meant for players who have already finished the story campaign.

Finally, there are a few other bells and whistles, including a mini-game, music test, and quick access to all the major lyrics in the game featured throughout the story mode. While not the best poetry ever, I was able to craft a number of original lyrical poems that help tell the story of the game and flesh out the culture of the Melodic tribe. And I wanted to make these easily accessible, even though I doubt many NES players are super interested in reading poetry on their consoles. Haha.

Joe & Austin hosting the Byte Off Awards

 

-I’ve asked you this about Oratorio, what was the intention behind Arco and Menuett’s design, do you identify with them and their quest?

With me, everything is always about available resources and what makes the most sense to match my initial vision. For Arco and Menuett, I didn’t want to be bothered to design an alien creature, but I also knew I didn’t want them to look human, with human facial features. So, I did the classic 70’s sci-fi thing and simply hid their faces behind masks and their bodies behind cloaks. It’s a classic look for a reason.

And I realize now, upon reflection, that maybe I didn’t give your question the consideration it deserved when speaking about Oratorio. In that game, it’s not that I identify as Oratorio in gendered or any specific terms, but rather the idea of a powerful hacker, on the fringes of that dystopian society, that’s able to fight back against seemingly unbeatable corporations is an aspirational creation. So, Oratorio is a great example of an aspiration character – somebody I wish I could be, perhaps. Or that part of ourselves that always wants to fight back in the face of oppression or power.

Using this abstract way of looking at characters, I suppose Arco and Menuett also represent an aspect of myself. They are outcasts. Through no fault of their own, they were born with a curse, and now they are being hunted by monsters and abandoned by their tribe. They’re just kids. But they have this one hope to change their fate. And it becomes their singular purpose. I like the downtrodden, the outsider, and the stigmatized as protagonists. Maybe I’ve always felt a sense of that, like I never quite belong anywhere. Or I’m always just passing through. It would be nice someday to feel a sense of terra firma beneath my feet, but I’m just not there yet. Look, this isn’t my therapist’s couch, so I’ll leave it there.

Put another way, though, my games, and many games and stories, in fact – but my games especially – tend to be about the powerless rising up and facing the powerful to achieve some sort of justice or – a future really. I’ll always identify with that. Probably a lot of us can. Or I hope so, anyway.

 

-What aspects of Crater Song are you most proud of?

I’m proud of the simple but emotional story. And while I almost never say this, I’m proud of the mechanics and gameplay. It just works, and, for me at least – I always end up making games for me more than anybody else – it works really well. It’s breezy without being shallow. It’s mythic without getting bogged down in lore and detail. It’s emotional without succumbing to cheesy sentiment. It’s engaging without asking too little or too much of the player. It’s a nice little interactive sci-fi fairy tale, and one that offers NES players something they haven’t experienced before. I hope a few others can appreciate these elements, too.

 

-What new challenges or surprises surfaced in developing Crater Song? What lessons did you learn that you would like to share with the people who aspire to follow in your footsteps?

This is the question that makes me wish I was more of an engineer with the vocabulary and thought processes to intelligently talk about all the constraints of the NES, balancing data between banks, and trying to make a somewhat bloated core NESMaker engine work with all of my ideas. But I’m just not. I’d get basic words or facts wrong. Or I’d have to spend an hour or two fact-checking. All that is to say, the engineering part of gamedev is always a huge challenge for me. Every part. But you stick at it; you seek help; you try to get to a place of “good enough” because perfection is a mirage.

More practically, the first major challenge was the control scheme question – using two controllers at once. Luckily, I solved that very early on – I wouldn’t have moved forward with the prototype if I hadn’t.

Another challenge was to make sure I was introducing some new element in every chapter of the game and that each addition felt natural but engaging. This way, by the final battle, when a lot of the mechanics are working together, the player doesn’t even second guess themselves – they just KNOW how to approach the problem. Play test. Play test. Play test. Iterate. Iterate. Iterate. When you don’t have dedicated quality assurance (QA) or playtesters, bring your game to conventions and talk to people who play it. But really, if I’m being honest, at the end of the day, given my scale, I have to trust my own gut and instincts and preferences. Which doesn’t result in games that appeal to the broadest audience, unfortunately.

The final challenge, although it was more fun than anything, was expanding the initial competition entry, which more or less told a full story, into a longer, more robust campaign and then building out a second campaign and other features to justify a full release. I want the game to feel like a complete package and not just a demo on a cart, you know?

The final challenge – and this isn’t unique to Crater Song – is simply letting people know that the game exists. And then, after that, trying to convince them to play it. This is the albatross around every gamedev’s neck. That’s why we’re doing this interview. And this is actually fun. And most of us hate promoting our stuff. I know I do. I’ll repeat: I hate it. The worst emotions I associate with gamedev come from trying to promote my games. Marketing budgets help. But mostly it’s all about relationships. There are some awesome people out there doing thankless work (like you, Sean!)  streaming and covering NES homebrew games. I tip my hat to them – or the ones who acknowledge me, anyway. Haha.

 

-There has been a lot of support and enthusiasm for Crater Song since its pre-order launched on Premium Edition Games. How does it feel to see so many people excited about the game?

I always love your positivity, Sean. Because I just don’t have access to the metrics or enough people sharing their enthusiasm online to know that’s the case. I mean, I could always ask Premium for current numbers, but that doesn’t tell a story really. It was the same for Oratorio, and still feels like the case. Unlike for some homebrew devs, I don’t get a ton of people sharing pictures of my games on social media. So, I just assume they are sitting on shelves out there if they’ve been purchased at all. Have they ever been opened? I don’t know. I know a few people have said they are looking forward to Crater Song and have preordered. But that’s just a few people.

Sometimes it feels like painting in a cave, you know? But you can’t get too caught up in that line of thinking; otherwise you might stop painting. And then what’s left? After all, if you’re not doing this work because you love it, how can you expect anybody else to love it? That’s the only reason I keep going. It’s not financially lucrative, that’s for sure. After all the expenses, we’re talking beer money. For a major release, after a year of selling a physical copy, maybe a little chunk of change to pay off some accumulated debt. And there’s very little direct feedback either, for me. But there’s love for the work at the end of the day. And that’s what counts.

I hope people appreciate the gorgeous art on the box cover for Crater Song, again painted by my friend Matthew Warren Lee. This time, he went above and beyond and created two paintings: one for the box cover and one for the manual cover. If not for the gameplay, maybe people want to pick the game up just for the amazing art? I’m only half-joking, of course.

As always, for those who have supported Crater Song, or any of my other games, I truly appreciate it. You have no idea.

In the meantime, I’ll continue painting in my cave.

 

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

My current project is the NES game Super Kaiju Boom Ball, a kind of pinball meets breakout meets giant monsters experience. It’s mostly to impress my son, who is four now. He can’t quite collaborate fully on the project yet, but he has great ideas. Even the Boom Ball part of the title comes from him. I think I’ll have started sharing screenshots, assets and footage of that by the time this interview posts, so please go check those out if you’re curious. I’m hoping to have that wrapped sometime in 2025, but who knows?

The next project on deck after that is Hammermill, the Game Boy game I put aside when development on Crater Song began. I said it before, but Hammermill is a kind of a steampunk nautical action-exploration game set on the oceans of Orebody. While I know a few Game Boy devs, I’m not really plugged into that community. I have no idea what players like or don’t like. I just know that I thought long and hard about what I like in a handheld game, particularly a Game Boy game, and Hammermill is what I ended up with. It’s still my goal to finish that game after Super Kaiju Boom Ball. But again, we’ll see.

Beyond those? No idea. That’s enough through 2026 or even 2027, right?

 

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

There are a number of games I think will be awesome when completed:

Super Sunny World looks like a faithful, yet additive and inventive, extension of the great Mario Bros. games on the NES.

Joe Granato’s Mystic Searches, while long in the oven, looks phenomenal.

Changeable Guardian ESTIQUE looks to be yet another excellent shmup. I can’t get enough of those.

Cyber Rogue looks cool too. Whatever Dale Coop has his hands in; you know it’ll be worth checking out.

Trials of Kharzoid looks like an amazing Arkanoidvania, as its dev, Pascal, calls it. It’s actually scary to be working on a game with breakout-like mechanics in the wake of Kharzoid, but I hope what I’m doing is different enough, both in macro and micro design as well as aesthetically, that people will accept Super Kaiju Boom Ball as its own thing. If we can have a million platformers, hopefully we can have a couple breakout-esque NES homebrews, too.

I mean, there are, at any given time, several dozen NES homebrews in serious development, and perhaps hundreds more in some phase of casual tinkering. I can hardly keep up with them, and so many look so good!

Screenshot from Cyber Rogue, in development by Dale Coop

 

-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 just want to give a shout out to Crater Song’s composer Jordan Davis of Raft Labs Interactive. In addition to developing rad games like The Storied Sword, Jordan has worked with me on all of my Orebody Inc. games. He has, effectively, created the soundscape of Orebody, from the epic music to the tiniest sound effects. Go support him by grabbing The Storied Sword and following him on social media (who am I kidding? If you’re reading this far, you probably already do.)

I guess I’ll end by reiterating something I said above. Love what you create, whatever it is. Love it. If you don’t, you can’t expect anybody else to.

 

 

Conclusion:

Thanks for tuning in to this latest episode of the series that shares the stories behind the homebrews you’re eager to add to your collection. Are you excited for Crater Song? What homebrews are you eagerly looking forward to? Perhaps you’ll see it here soon when…A Homebrew Draws Near! Command?