The promises and perils of SNES game jams

With the dust having slowly settled after the conclusion of the SNESDEV 2025 game jam
and a lot of great releases, new faces and old and new friends, I wanted to take the time and draw my personal conclusions from this event.

First of all, a big thank you to the organizers and jury team who finally brought us back together again after the previous SNESDEV game jam in 2021.

For those interested, I'll briefly describe my personal journey for this release:

Preliminary considerations

Initially, I was torn on whether to participate at all:
Having regained my faith in Jesus Christ in 2024 and dedicating my life to him since, how could I give glory to god with a video game?
In that sense, would the development be time well spent or wasted?
Not your typical gamedev question, but it was an issue for me.

I reluctantly decided to participate, not least because I felt a certain obligation to support the organizers in case turnout was as meager as the aforementioned 2021 iteration.

With very little free time to spare, I knew I had to shoot for the absolute minimum scope if I wanted to have any chance of actually releasing something.

Preparatory work

I recalled the simple, relaxed Super Rambler torte00 entered in the previous jam.
In a dream, an image of a buffed bavarian riding a tiny bike came to me and I spent two evenings drawing and coloring that image:

The Autobahn theme didn't really pan out (because the Autobahn is grey and visually boring, after all), the wooden telephone is a reference to nocashs self-built phone he once showed on the nesdev forums (of course!).
The main music motiv is a melody I've had in my head for years, possibly since the nineties, so I whistled that into a microphone for later use.

With the gameplay of a simple time-attack, auto-running platformer that was beyond easy to pick up but hard to master combined with the image of Christs death on the cross as a way to bridge the chasm between mankind and god firmly placed before my minds eye, I spent the next two (!) months drawing background and sprite mockups as time permitted:

Implementation

With only a couple weeks left and after starting to actually implement the game (based on my current code-base I've used from Super Road Blaster in 2012 all the way up to Dottie Flowers), I realized that my player sprites were way too big and I had to shrink them down by 50% if I wanted them to support the fast gameplay I had envisioned (big sprites ~ narrow space, making it hard for the player to react to/dodge obstacles):
That was major blunder number one.

Super Boss Gaiden was previously my last game released with a LoROM memory-configuration in 2016 (a requirement for this years game jam). All my subsequent games used HiROM, which doubles the size of each memory bank.
Going into the jam, I assumed the switch back to LoROM to be a simple, one-line configuration change.
What I disregarded completely is that over the years, my code-base grew in size (and bloat), but the way it was implemented, the core engine still had to fit into a single memory bank.
Long story short: Instead of spending a couple of seconds to change one line of configuration, I had to spend a whole week rewriting the core engine to make the game work as LoROM!
Major blunder number two.

Now, with only a couple days left, I scrambled to implement the remaining gameplay elements, a couple of enemies, the music and actual stages.
My previous experience with and studies of top-tier platform games allowed me to accomplish that in a straight-forward manner.
I heavily cut back on sleep in the last few days leading up to the game jam deadline and entered crunch mode:
Envisioned were 6 + 2 bonus stages, in the end I managed to implement only 4 stages with the last one started 45 minutes before and implemented and tested 15 minutes before the deadline. The lack of visual decor in that stage is telling.

So with a comfortable 13 Minutes left on the clock, I submitted the game ROM and sighed in relief.

Relaxing and casually checking the other participants submissions, I started to wonder:
"Why are all the other games just 2Mbit?" when it hit me:

My game was the only one that didn't meet the size criteria, it was twice the allowed size!
At some point, I had expanded the ROM size and forgot! All the work was for nothing!
I was devastated.
That was major blunder number three and by far the biggest of them all.

Post-release

The day after the deadline, I accepted my failure, basically wrote the game off and didn't think of it anymore.
In the following week, I started realizing: With some optimization and reduced graphical fidelity, this 4Mbit game could actually be cut down to just 2Mbit.

Maybe the game would be disqualified from the competition for not meeting the criteria at the time of the deadline, but that didn't bother me all that much: It was more or less a personal challenge at this point.

And indeed, I managed to fit it into 2Mbit at last with just a couple bytes to spare.

Looking at the feedback, I was surprised that the game was well-received, far more than I had expected.
I was prepared to receive a lot of backlash for the juxtaposition of a platforming video game on one hand with christian themes on the other,
but actually made a few new acquaintances through that, for which I am very grateful.

 Addendum: Left on the cutting room floor

You might be wondering: Why is the protagonist wearing a black visor?
Well, the originally intended gimmick for this game was to support the Famicom 3D system,
which can be converted for use with the SNES and is supported by exactly one SNES game, Hyper Zone:

Next, you might be wondering why some of the HUD elements are in the center of the screen instead of aligned to the top.
That's because I planned to implement an optional multiplayer mode for up to four players with the ability to drop in and out of gameplay at will (like in New Super Mario Land) and the screen real estate was left reserved for the other three players:

Sadly, all these non-essentials had to be cut due to time constraints.