Review Fix chats with Mega Cat Studios’ Alexandre Tokmakov, who discusses the development process behind their new NES adventure on Kickstarter, The Meeting.
Check the game out on Kickstarter, Here.
About The Meeting:
Become a ghost minotaur on the quest to put his meat back together in this puzzle platformer. Use pyrokinesis, possession, and an array of other ghost skills to solve puzzles—and the mystery of who butchered you.
Platforming, puzzle-solving, combat—The Meating has it all! You’ll have to jump, headbutt, and possess your way through over 40+ stages. Use all your ghostly powers and wiles to gather all your missing meat to reveal Kon’s fate!
Features: Traverse through various dungeons and landscapes as you try to uncover the mystery of Kon’s death. The game features minimal controls, which makes it easy to learn and hard to put down! Kon also comes with an array of ghostly abilities and powers, which he can use to defeat enemies and solve puzzles!
Review Fix: How was this game born?
Alexandre Tokmakov: This game was originally a testing ground. Of course, I know several programming languages, but at the time when we started, I did not know the console architecture well enough. So, to improve my skills, we decided to make a non-release mini-game.
Review Fix: What is your role in the game?
Tokmakov: I had the idea of creating a game for the NES for a very long time. However, It was very clear to me I can’t do this alone, since I would need to create not only the code, but also the pixel graphics and music. Even a small project would take up a lot of my time, and most likely I would burn out before I finished with the last pixel, the last line of code and the last note in the soundtrack. Too many people have tried this way, but only a few have reached the end.
So I decided to work on the code, while the musician would work on the music, and the artist would work on the pixels.
Review Fix: What has development been like?
Tokmakov: At first we made some very simple puzzle game, coming up with it on the fly. The game no longer fit within the selected mapper (CNROM) fairly quickly and we moved the project to another one (UNROM) and upgraded it to the current one (UOROM).
Review Fix: What makes this game special?
Tokmakov: The high storyline. Also additional mechanics make this game something more varied than the classic shoot-and-jump pattern found in platformers. I think it needs more than one attempt before you defeat some of the bosses of the game, but things will fall into place if you remember what powerups are intended for.
Review Fix: How is this Kickstarter different and unique?
Tokmakov: This is the first Kickstarter project I took part in, so it’s unique to me anyway. I like the idea of a cart shaped like the ossobuco I had for dinner last night.
Review Fix: What games influenced this one the most?
Tokmakov: A bunch of them. From Nuts&Milk to Mega Man. We tried to implement many things that a retro player is familiar with. This includes a password system and a starting script that introduces the player to the plot, attract mode. We learned all this from classic games.
Review Fix: Any fun stories or wild moments during development?
Tokmakov: It was an international team. It’s always fun for me to learn how people live on other planet’s corners. I learned a couple of recipes for meat dishes and destroyed several myths and stereotypes.
Review Fix: What were the major lessons learned?
Tokmakov: There is nothing wrong to make a game with the help of like-minded people. Maybe not all teammates’ ideas will be compatible, but finished project are worth more than vainglory.
Sometimes it’s necessary to hold a game before release, like a steak resting under foil. This allows to look at your work from a different angle or find bugs that were not found before. I think I would fix a lot of things in this game now. But what’s done is done, let the wasted enthusiasm builds up again.
Review Fix: Do you think preserving older gameplay mechanics in new games is important?
Tokmakov: I don’t think so. If someone these days could create a high class beatemup like Battletoads, it would be cool, despite the old mechanics. Personally, I can play this game until the Second Coming.
Review Fix: How have your previous experiences in industry helped this game?
Tokmakov: I haven’t developed retro games before, but like other 80s kids, I’m interested in the demoscene a bit, and have been involved in the development of demoscene stuff a few times. Demoscene geeks are fans of optimization, and if they had their way, they would pack the whole world into one bit. The NES only has 2k of RAM, so I also optimized a few things in this game, like saving the states of the ice blocks in the meat freezer world.
Review Fix: What’s next?
Tokmakov: Besides eating meat and gaming, I enjoy disassembling old games and making them run on different hardware than the original one. I’m currently porting an arkanoid-like game from the ZX Spectrum home computer to the NES. However, this port will only work for the MMC5 mapper, so real carts is out of question. But I believe homebrew software for this mapper will encourage people to learn it and make carts based on. Otherwise, this mapper will be lost on the margins of eight-bit history.
Review Fix: Anything else you’d like to add?
Tokmakov: I would like to wish everyone to have a piece of meat on a pan, a roof and a peaceful sky over their heads, and many good games for their favorite console of childhood.
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