Drakenmaid

Drakenmaid is an 8-bit sci-fi fairy tale about a girl and a dragon.

The game purposefully does not feature any in-game dialogue or diegetic text and tries to tell a story purely through visuals and game mechanics.

This current demo, providing a taste of basic mechanics and the general structure of the story, was developed during and for the NESMaker Byte-Off VI competition in March 2026. A much longer, extended version of the game is now in development.

In case of bugs or time constraints, a full playthrough of the demo is available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hwa1z6y5o2g

Story

On the planet Orebody, lawless and cruel alien slavers called The Dominion capture and equip mountain drakens with control modules and use them as cyborg weapons in their criminal empire.  Operating on the fringes of what passes for civilization on the planet,  few have opposed The Dominion and their operations.

However, high in the Nebesa Gora mountains, one draken egg destined for Dominion control miraculously hatches to reveal a young girl without a name or language.

As The Girl, players must rescue and befriend their brood sibling, The Hatchling, a small blue draken, and find a way to escape from and defeat The Dominion’s forces.

Features and Mechanics

Drakenmaid features both overhead action-adventure gameplay and psuedo-3D shooting sections.

As The Girl, players can walk using the D-Pad and dodge-roll using the A BUTTON. When in the rolling animation, players can avoid damage from enemies and projectiles. Players can also use the roll action to ram into some contextual on-screen objects to solve light puzzles.

Once players free The Hatchling, the draken will follow the player everywhere unless distracted, sleeping, or captured. While The Hatchling is following The Girl, players can use the B BUTTON to command the draken to fire a projectile. While the initial dragon projectile is good for destroying boulders, players can eventually equip ICE and ELECTRICITY dragon blast powers.

Using their dodge roll and the various dragon powers, players must find a way to defeat The Dominion and liberate the mountain.

Controls

D-Pad — Move

B Button — Command Dragon to Fire Projectile

A Button — Dodge Roll

Select — Switch between dragon power-ups

Start — Pause

Credits

Design, Story, and Lead Development: John Vanderhoef

Music and SFX: Jordan Davis (Raft Labs Interactive)

Programming: John Vanderhoef, James Dean, NESMaker Community

Art: Alb Pixel Store, Aztrakatze, BeyonderBoy, Electric Lemon, Elthen’s Pixel Art Shop, Life in Pixels, John Vanderhoef, Matt Walkden, Myaumya, Nightspore, Penusbmic

Future Full Release

Within a few days of starting this project for Byte-Off, I was already in love and knew I would be developing it into a full game. With that in mind, the full release of Drakenmaid, now in development, will feature a campaign 4x to 5x longer, more bosses, more puzzles, more environments, more dragon abilities, and more development of the relationship between The Girl and The Hatchling.