It’s my birthday again! I’m thirty-four, if you can believe it! So it’s time for my traditional roundup post once more; the year in review..!

Welcome back to my little series, talking about how I built my Deltarune Ch3 NES demake/fangame!
Last time on the blog, I talked about how I got the project started, and some of the technical details on background tiles and level editing. In this part, I’m going to go over the player’s sprites & behaviours, monsters, hitboxes, the HUD, text, and cutscenes!

Back in 2025, I spent 3 months making a demake-slash-fangame of a particular part of Deltarune Chapter 3 for the NES! After I finished it, I thought it would be nice to make a video about how I built it. However, after recording my takes, it was about 45 minutes of audio, and so much of it needed motion graphics and explainer visuals that editing it became a marathon project that my amateur video editing skills simply couldn’t follow through with. So here we are - a year after I released the project, I’m finally lifting the veil on some of the things I did to build it! This post in particular will cover the reason why I went with a NES game, the initial hurdles I had to overcome, and dig into some of the technical nuts and bolts around backgrounds, level data, and my workflow. It’s a little dense in places, but I’ll do my best to introduce various NES development concepts to anyone unfamiliar with them!
If that sounds like a good time, then read on..!

ah! the refreshing feeling of getting back into an old, lapsed hobby and/or skill. recently, i’ve taken to dabbling in one of my old passions. a long time ago, before i decided on game development as my career, i was thinking about going into cybersecurity. i had a knack for burrowing into filesystems and finding gaps in protections early on in my dalliances with computers.

I feel like making things is intrinsically important to being the person I am. I don’t know exactly how to explain it, but when I’m not making something it feels a little like my existence is on hold. Not like I stop existing or anything, but more like… I’m just not really living when I’m not making something. It doesn’t have to be a public work, either; I don’t mind so much about the reaction to the thing as I do the fact that the thing has undergone the process of being made. It doesn’t always have to be finished; just the picking away at the creating is the key. And it doesn’t need to be big, sometimes just cooking a nice dinner satisfies the need to make!