“The End is only the Beginning!”
BackwardsQuest is a fantasy adventure that you play in reverse. You are a Dark Lord wielding a cursed sword made of teeth. You just slew the King. But why? You were about to do the same to the Princess until she cast that pesky Reverse Time Spell. Now your twisted story will be revealed… from the end, all the way to the beginning.
Watch the BackwardsQuest Trailer on Youtube
FEATURES
- Byte-Off V sized! Finish the game in a short sitting.
- Original Fantasy Story
- Play as 5 different characters
- Reversed platformer mechanics
- Level Down! – Decide which stat to give up
- Even the music is backwards
- Boss fights & plot twists
“BackwardsQuest is an unique and unusual experience for your NES.”
Downloads & Extras
A few special notes about this game
- The cover art was drawn by hand by Jason Boisvert in Adobe Animate (Flash).
- Jordan spent a lot of time experimenting with backwards sounds. As a result the game contains both forward and backwards music. The Start and End songs are actually the same song with both the music and instruments reversed.
- Shared background colors other than black! Every game I worked on prior to this used black as the shared palette color. One of the secret challenges was to use other color so the RPG hud felt like it was floating in the open sky.
- Dale Coop is amazing to work with and went above and beyond making the code for this game. When you un-kill monsters it actually decreases your XP. To simulate reverse-falling-of-a-cliff there are spots in the game that fling you backwards up in the air. But when you jump back down off the cliff… you do not bounce. Turns out he made the spring jump work when you are holding the joystick left. My mind was blown. In order to handle the 5 difference playable characters, Dale split the overworld screens into 4 rows. Placing the character on the first few rows would make you use the Dark Lord characters. Using the rows below would make you appear as the other characters. Each charcter is a different game object so its speed and actions could be different. Also, thanks to Dale Coop this is the first game I have worked on that has animated tiles and screen fades. It is also worth noting here, that we found out just 2 days before submitting that Dale was chosen to be the Emissary Judge for the Byte Off. He was unaware of this too. Fortunately none of us have kids submitting games in this year’s jam, there is no conflict of interest.
- Because we got a late start, FJ had less than two weeks to draw 5 player characters, two versions of the King Boss fight (including the monster), a half dozen strange monsters, background tiles, the title screen, and then the never ending stream of requests being hurled at him as the story changed. He re-drew the Dark Lord character 3 times. I was extremely impressed with FJ’s art and his unfaltering persistence.
- PineOak, a player that went above and beyond helping test the game wrote all of the dialog from the game down… and translated it in to Portuguese! The download for it is available above.
- BackwardsQuest was a concept that I have wanted to try forever. When I heard this Byte-Off’s theme I immediately knew that we should try telling a story fantasy backwards to get to the “why”. It was a lot harder to write than expected. Honestly… getting to do crazy things like this is my real-life “why”. I have never missed a Byte-Off yet. Grateful to this community for making things like this possible. This was by far the most ambitious game jam project I have ever been a part of. It was the first time this full group of friends were able to work on a Byte-Off Jam game together. During the last week, I stayed up working on this until 4am three times, and past 5am the last…
- Many Coffees were injured during the making of this game.
Battle on!
Artix
P.S. Jordan, Dale Coop, and I will be at Midwest Gaming Classic this year. Hope to see you there!
