First article??? This isn't a tutorial nor anything, it's just a page explaining how I do my own sprites. If you want to give it a quick read, click in the obnoxiously big text below 9ARIO.

obnoxiously big text

A bunch of unfinished assets and placeholders... What a beautiful shitfest...

I'm still asking wondering if I should record "devlog" videos of the game. However, I do think that there's a bunch of technical stuff that isn't as interesting to see. Hmmm... I will see if there's a way to update this with videos, assets, or other facts about the in-game universe.

Since the game was simplified and 3D assets have been removed, I think that a Newgrounds release is now possible. Dunno if it'll be butter smooth in most machines, but I'm trying the best as I can to make it optimized and also moddable. Now... the timing was BAD.

I made a prototype in January 2022, and in the next month, I thought that making a game about rodents invading country after country felt in bad taste the next month. I considered changing the theme to cells, organisms, computers, or even random objects like nails or pens at one point. Like, do you know where Sudemuridia was supposed to be located when I first conceptualized of Milirats? THE BLACK SEA. Now, developing a game about rodents invading European countries in a place that's awfully close to Ukraine and Moldova? Shit, terrible.

I know barely anyone will read this, but I'm just writing this as a way to tell others that everything is fictional, although slightly inspired in reality. I even considered making an entire planet from scratch with its own continents and stuff, but I still want it to be based on real world nations.

I gave customization capabilities to the player as a way for them to project their own country in case something in the vanilla game seemed "not cool". Also, your first rival is Mustelia which is based on Croatia, considering that Sudemuridians are their neighbors. If any Croats are reading this, I'm SO sorry but there's no realistic way for your little guys to invade territory that's like countries away from them realistically.

OH, AND THE ADRIATIC AND IONIAN SEA NO LONGER EXISTS SINCE SUDEMURIDIA/MAUSENIA IS LOCATED THERE. YEAH, THEY NO LONGER EXIST, IT WAS ALL LANDLOCKED SO SHHHHH

Is this a devlog? I'm writing this as a way to keep track of what the hell I'm doing and what I will do next.

• Implemented state movements according to keypresses
• Implemented states such as walking/jumping to the left and right, stopping, reloading, shooting, and a melee attack that MIGHT be discarded
• Each state is tied to the player animation, thus making the code cleaner
• A Projectile/Health/Moves Left counter, as of now they're represented as numbers above the allied unit's head for debugging purposes
• The player is now able to switch to the "AIM" state by pressing RMB
• Both allied and enemy units are able to take damage, however, there's no death animation
• The ability to pause has been included, no menus as of now
• Pathfinding, some enemies might change their path depending how long the battle has been going :DD
• Enemies can now aim at your allied units in a predetermined interval of time, some can be more aggressive, some can be more restrained
• Enemies ACTUALLY SHOOT BACK as opposed to aimlessly walking to the left
• Optimized the enemy's aim state, they now aim only when the allied units are detected as opposed to aiming for every single frame, which could really screw up performance once there's hundreds of projectiles or explosions on-screen
• Characters are no longer rendered when they're off camera, ANYTHING TO SAVE THOSE 20MBs OF RAM!!
• Visual feedback that shows how much HP you've dealt/taken
• Music/Sound Effects now play on their own respective audio buses, which means you'll be able to lower/raise volume from inside the game (no menus have been implemented though)
• Lil Whisker's rifle deals between 6-10HPs of damage now
• A place I call "The Placeholder Zone."
• A base with spawn menu included, only one allied unit can be spawned as of now (Lil Whisker)
• Fullscreen/Windowed key

[ FEBRAURY 24, 2024 ] - BOOTLEGZ

Bootlegs. In many countries outside of Western Europe and North America, you have to resort to bootlegs just to occupy your mind with something that vaguely resembles Mario. Even to this day, the original NES seems pretty alien to someone who's used to Famiclones, Multicarts, hacks of other hacks with Chinese titles, and misleading titles written by a Chinese/Russian bootlegger with low English proficiency.

Some companies, such as Hummer Team and Super Game, made decent ports that still look and play well, despite being relatively short due to time constraints or just running out of memory. Then, you have Cony Soft with their SHITTY atrocious fighting games, or Chengdu Tai Jing Da Dong SOMETHINGSOMETHING with pseudo-games like "Aladdin II.". So, I stopped being active because I felt that there was nothing left to see. I have played plenty of NES/MD bootlegs that I just didn't have as a child. I could probably name a bootleg game from the tip of my tongue at any given moment due to how many of them I have played throughout these years, well, except those countless Chinese RPGs set in medieval China. ROFL

Around the late 90s and 2000s, there was this company known as "Inventor," and they would BUTCHER, DESTROY, AND DISFIGURE regular NES games into something else as a way to prevent copyright infringement. Want to see an example? I used to have a cartridge that came with a "game" known as "ROGE BRER." ROGE BRER is just a heavy hack of Mario Bros. for the NES. What would they do to prevent copyright? Replace Mario with a badly colored version of Milon from Milon's Secret Castle, butcher all the notes, remove copyright, and give it a brand new title that means nothing in English. IT LOOKS LIKE THIS.

NOT ONLY THAT. THEY WOULD DO THIS TO MANY, MANY, MANY GAMES. Well, eventually, I managed to play all of them. So... it's all over, right? Nope. There's more and more ROMHacks like that. I managed to find this stream by Retro Pals where they play a miniature arcade cabinet known as "RETRO GAME". There's a bunch of weird hacks on it that I have never seen before at all. All of them have that same "look and feel" as Inventor.

Eventually, those ROMs were dumped, and I played them! It's over, right? NO. THERE'S MORE. AND MANY OF THEM ARE UNDUMPED AS OF TODAY'S DATE.

YouTube recommended to me this video by 12Bit Club of a hack known as Defender Fighter, and it's a pretty butchered hack of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Tournament Fighter. To my surprise, it seemed that either Inventor, or a subsidiary was behind this crap! What the fuck?! However, this time it wasn't tied to Inventor, NEW GAME, RESERVED, 2002, or whatever gibberish it keeps being copyrighted to. Around 2022-23, a company known as "TimeMax" has resurfaced with never before seen hacks in bootleg handheld consoles. Despite them only appearing recently, the hacks seem to be over 20 years old, so they possibly came from Plug n' Play consoles and multicarts. I have researched a little, and I found this website. They have dumped a lot of unknown and obscure hacks, and as of now, I haven't found anything from the Subor Q6 handheld console as shown in 12Bit's playlist. Now I own a lot of good games with broken English, meaningless titles, and broken music... Neat!

If you have played NES' entire library, here's a list of all known Inventor hacks and their descriptions.

Yes, we're almost in the mid-2020, something, something, blah, blah...

I'm currently revamping this site's interface as a way to bridge my hiatus. Let's see if it's possible to use less than 1MBs just for this page right here as a small challenge...

Besides, Milirats was not abandoned. The main problem now is to recode the game "from scratch" because Godot 4.2's GDScript language is very different from Godot 3's.

Well, at least this gives me the opportunity to fix some spaghetti code.