Hammer Smack! The Sound of Satisfaction

Hammer Smack! is a 1-stage demo which was designed for the 2019 Byte-Off competition.  It is a platformer designed using NESMaker.  It tells a semi-autobiographical story of a young dwarf and his hammer as they set out on a delivery quest.

I was developing a completely different NES game from scratch using Notepad and was looking for a better text editor when I stumbled across NESMaker.  When I first discovered it, there were only 9 days left to submit a project to the Byte-Off competition and many other community members had already been working on their projects for months.  I did not know the tools but I was already fluent in 6502 so I decided to use the contest as a way to learn the software.  I created the concept, sprites, maps, music, sound effects, booklet, and non-NESMaker code myself.  Several features weren’t working as I wanted out of the box but, due to the severe time restraints, I didn’t have enough time to work with the system so some significant chunks of existing code were hacked out and redone.  Many shortcuts were taken.  The code is real ugly.  But I am very proud to say that I finished the project and submitted by the deadline.  I maintain delusions of cleaning it up and finishing a full game at some point.