Nova the Squirrel
You can also get the game from itch.io!
Nova the Squirrel is an NES game that stars Nova Storm, a green squirrel, who finds herself in an unfamiliar world and is pushed into the position of playing the hero, using a newly found ability to copy abilities from enemies.
This game takes inspiration from Super Mario Bros. 3, Kirby Super Star, Chip's Challenge, and Hannah and the Pirate Caves. It has a strong focus on puzzle platforming.
Engine features include cutscenes with variable width text and portraits, and moving platforms.
There is a level editor named PrincessEdit that takes inspiration from Lunar Magic.
This project was originally also intended to provide a good platformer base like Super Mario World tends to serve, without copyright infringement.
Building
In order to build the game, you will need Python 3 and cc65. Python 3 is optional and is only required if you want to modify any levels or graphics, as the repository contains pre-compressed versions of both.
After having those installed, you can run mk.bat to build the game, or copy and paste the commands out of there to run them separately if you wish.
Some of the data is kept in a human-friendly format and needs to be converted into a game-friendly format, so if you want to modify it then you also need to build a few tools. In the tools directory there's tblmake.c and mkdialog.c which can both be built with gcc tblmake.c -o tblmake and gcc mkdialog.c -o mkdialog or something equivalent for your C compiler of choice.
From here, there are .bat files that use these programs to re-convert assets, and there's another .bat to re-convert and re-compress the title screen in the title directory.
Individual graphics files in the chr directory can be compressed with py -3 pb53.py -i graphic_name.chr -o graphic_name.pb53 --raw
License
All code is available under the GPL license version 3 or later.
Assets (graphics, levels, etc.) are available under Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International therefore the game may not be sold without permission with these intact. Permission is not granted to use characters from this game in other games, however.