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Well, gang, we made it -- 2025. (Again.)
RF Generation is old, make new content for it, site refresh, yadda yadda...
I'll skip the pleasantries. I'm planning on returning to one article per month again, depending on what my time schedule allows. As such, I was wondering and wondering about what my first article for this month would be. Several ideas floated around in my head -- a Nintendo Switch retrospective, an article about ANTONBLAST, another article about Animal Crossing: New Horizons...
What I landed on today, the day before the month's end, was to spend some time talking about one of my favorite little toys to play around with this month: SmileBASIC 4.
So what makes SmileBASIC 4 special? Its story? The captivating gameplay? The music? (Well, I do quite like the music present in the app...)
...SmileBASIC 4 is a programming app for the Nintendo Switch. It is essentially a closed-off simplified BASIC IDE, (with some pre-built limitations that clever souls have found out a workaround for) with the ability to save your projects as a file and upload them to a server full of programs.
In other words, it's programming Super Mario Maker. Back when I was in my young "let's code! I wanna code now! LEMME HAVE AT IT!! AAAAAAA" phase, I quite often checked around certain quarters to try and find any sort of simple coding app. One of these ended up being the Nintendo Switch's eShop. Sure enough, I did find what I was looking for -- two coding apps were present on the eShop: the aforementioned SmileBASIC 4 as well as an app titled FUZE4 Nintendo Switch. (I may get back to FUZE in a later article.) SmileBASIC 4 seemed right up my alley, so I peer-pressured slackur into buying it for me. I tried it out, and I was able to learn some simple commands and have extremely simple projects going on, but after a couple of weeks I abandoned it. I was also interested in the online functionality, but when being hit with the fact that you can only download one program without a Server Ticket (which to me at the time sounded like the Server Tickets were scummy mobile game microtransactions making it into My Nintendo Console), i abandoned it and didn't return to it for several years.
Fast-forward to the Christmas season of 2024. I am in the Christmas spirit, i.e. actively checking the eShop to see what I may buy if I receive a Nintendo eShop gift card (as one does, right? This is normal, right? Right? Right?!) when I decided to look through my list of deleted games. Sure enough, good ol' SmileBASIC shows up there and I decide, "You know what? It's been several years. My own game has gone through several iterations and has received a final released version since then, and I am currently working on a second game. plane I'm going to try and figure out this program."
I went to the coding tutorials section again, viewed one, and decided, "I'll get back to coding later; I want to check out the games, even if I have to download them one at a time." Download them one at a time, I did, for around two weeks. In that time, I was able to pick out several games that I thoroughly enjoy that I shall now list:
Tiny Huge World: Although this may at first sound like that one Super Mario Galaxy level or like a game jam game in which you manipulate object sizes, this is actually a very simple, extremely floaty platformer about a white block. The entire game feels very tech-demo-y, and is very buggy, but is pretty fun. This was also the first time that I saw any sort of 3D in SmileBASIC (it's presented in a 2.5D sort of view), a technique I am very fond of. It has a lot of levels and even a level editor. Go give this one a try using the access code 4PKKE8VHV.
CELESTE Classic: A full port of the original PICO-8 game. I don't think I need to go into more detail about this one to explain how cool it is. Its access code is 45KYV334J.
Finiti - 3D Engine: A simple, efficient 3D basis for making games. Its project file comes with several cool tech demos. You can find it at 4ANXXXX.
RALLY500 PARA4: A simple elimination rally game. The game is split up into several checkpoints wherein you need to have passed enough cars to pass. There are wide turns, and avoiding the cars is fun. I've found it helpful as one of those games that you can just turn your brain off and play. You can find this one at 4N3S33EXY.
MARBLE RUN 3D DEMO: This game reminds me of one I saw in Dreams, named Ball World Adventures. This one has less expansive, yet more creative levels in my opinion. The access code for this one is 4K28XW3KE.
Fairhythm: A very fun, simple rhythm game. This game has the highest production quality overall among all of the SmileBASIC games I've played, the most features, and is one of the most fun ones. I'd highly recommend the app for this game alone. Check it out using its access code4C44EX394.
Neon Driftway: This is the one I was the most impressed with. This is essentially, neon-infused vector graphics Mario Kart, and it plays exactly like it. I'd recommend this one to just about anybody. The whole thing is super polished, and my only issue with it is that there is only one track. Its code is 4TAMVE3QJ.
Overall, I'd very much recommend SmileBASIC 4. It truly shows what creative people can do with even the most simple of items and commands.
(I just got back into this because I ran out of Nintendo Switch Online...)
Ok, well, I've stopped thinking of creative ways to talk about the delays of my blog posts. I'm supposed to have one every month, right? AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA-
Well, anyways, I've been coding and Arting(tm) lately as well as have been making more than my fair share of music. Development is going along well.
In my time not spent developing I have been mostly watching YouTube videos; however I have also been replaying through some games including Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney, Super Mario 3D World, and Super Mario Bros. 3. I'm making my way through OneShot and will hopefully have an article about it in at least 83 years.
I've even started my own game collection as well.
And I'm making it my goal to have learnt toki pona (it's a conlang. That's cool but I won't get into it here) by February 2022.
Wait this article is about Baba Is You?
The game I find my self coming back to the most now that I've coped with the fact that I can't beat every game is Baba Is You. As previously described like a year ago, it is a block pushing puzzle game where the rules themselves are present on the screen as blocks that can be pushed around.
It recently recieved a level editor update, which piqued my interest. Now, the level editor isn't exactly new, as it has been around in the PC version for a year now.
Unfortunately I have no way of buying stuff on my PC so this has been unreachable for me until now.
I must say the controls for the level editor are rather weird; I think that since it's been on PC so long, the developer had to make a way for it to work on Switch. It literally uses all the buttons on the controller for different functions.
Now, the level editor is extremely versatile. It contains every word in the game. Because this game is essentially a programming language in and of itself, this allows you to take the Minecraft Redstone approach and build computers, so long as they fit into 64 x 32 squares.
This means that you can make music, games, and other stuff really easily.
Also, part of the level editor itself is the existence of levelpacks, which are essentially entire games made with levels from the level editor. In simpler terms, the entire original release of the game is a levelpack, and you can make games that big using levelpacks.
Now, the developer has added 2 whole new games' worth of content into Baba is You.
This is the type of developer support I want to see in more games. I (as a developer) want to do that, and I hope more games can learn from Baba Is You, to make more games finished, and then add content down the line if they ever want to.
You simply don't see that in AAA games, from my point of view. EA gets bashed so many times for this, and rightfully so, in my opinion.
If you're a aspiring game developer, heed my advice.
This has been koola, and I just thought of ending my articles like this.
(Baba Is You has influenced my music so much, so that's another reason.)
So, I think that I can say that my last post was good. Thank you to everyone that said that it was good! I didn't think that it would be like that! Back to the point at hand. (Not like I even started with a point... [wait I'm delaying myself even more my saying that ARRRRRRRRRGhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh])
So, I think that most of my family can agree that my hobby is glitching/breaking/bugging-out/bugging out games. (Heck, I've even broken the hyperlinked images on my blog. If it doesn't show reload the page. [Sorry, bickman2k.]) Traditionally breaking games is easy, if you know where to pick at. Platformer genre in general is all about clipping into things. Role-playing, executing more than one move at once, or dealing too much damage at once. Shooter, clipping and dealing too much damage at once. You probably can guess. PC games allow you to mess with the games files, allowing you to break the game(s) really easy. Here's an example:
Say Example: The Movie: The Game wants to access file1.fileex And file2.fileex is something you want to break the game by accesing earlier than intended.
Rename file2.fileex to file1.fileex (Usually most files in a game like this that are gonna work are of the same file extension, in this case .fileex , but if they are of different extensions, then they need to be the same.)
And, if your game didn't crash, then congratulations, you've caused the game to load the wrong file!
Now usually it will carry out instructions that are contained in the file that it just loaded. (file2.fileex)
(If you're wondering how I glitched out the hyperlinked images on RFGeneration, I created a .png file with only one letter in its base:m. By doing that, most websites will cause them to not even show an image, breaking the tag altogether. [If I hurt your feelings bickman2k, then sorry.])
Now here's the part where coding comes in. Most of my breaking games actually helps in coding because then it's easy to understand what's going on behind the scenes in the games. I've seen t-poses, a-poses, unanimated models and sprites, completely given up games, confused games, black screens and wait--
[img]https://onedrive.live.com/?cid=64B3378894533E83&id=64B3378894533E83%213291&parId=64B3378894533E83%211191&o=OneUp[img/]
Rebooting MerryGoRoundGaming's_trying_to_write_an_article.exe...
Success!
Anyways, as I was saying, I've seen a lot of how games break. And that helps me code, because I know what the polished developers do.
Coding is fun, but often times it can be very repetitive. Variables are my friend. It is fun to code, in my opinion.
In summary, I just like to test things and see what I can mess with.
Whew! I haven't gotten to geek out like that in a while!
😊
Crash image owned by Nintendo, used in one of GameXplain's videos, where I promptly edited it.
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This is koola6's Blog.
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Welcome to my little side of the internet! This is where I post game reviews, video-game related things, and stuff about MY game, OMNIFATE. Expect a new article about every month; sometimes I post more than once in a month or take five-month long breaks.
(The schedule is a guideline.)
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