Pyoro64
Released: December 25, 2018
Tags: C, Libultra
When I got into the N64 scene in 2018, it was very small and there was barely any homebrew around. Most homebrew came from a now-defunct website called Dextrose, which had a very small N64 homebrew community. This community released a few intros, demos, and tech demos games. After the N64 was discontinued, the only homebrew game that was released afterwards was a clone of Flappy Bird for the (then) 2D focused SDK Libdragon. I, however, wanted to use the SDK that every developer in the 90's used, and so with only the official programming manual and examples, I decided embark on a journey that I haven't quite stopped since. Most people write clones of simple games like Tetris or Snake for their first project... I instead decided to make a clone of a WarioWare minigame called Pyoro. But I wasn't just going to make a game, I was going to document it all and release the source code.
I wrote Pyoro64 in about 6 months, having to also write my own custom tooling in order to import textures, and spend a lot of time fighting the official sound and music toolkit. After releasing the ROM with the source code, I spent a few weeks writing a more beginner-friendly tutorial series for making games for the N64 with the SDK. As I reached specific milestones in the project (like drawing the first texture, writing an object system in C, putting in sounds...) I took that code and zipped it, with the intention of writing a companion document covering how I got to that specific spot on the project. I eventually made 12 ZIPs, and after releasing the game I started working on those documents. I only wrote up to 5 of them, because it was incredibly time consuming and it had reached a point where I felt that there wasn't really any more interesting stuff to cover that couldn't be learned by just looking at the source code.
To this day, I sometimes see bits of Pyoro64's source code (or code from the documents) in other people's projects, meaning that the project was overall a success as it helped a lot of people on their own N64 journey :)
