Eleven years of N64 Squid

Another year, another anniversary post.

There have been 43 new homebrews added to the gallery, though about half of those are just minigames from the N64 Brew Game Jam 2024 competition.

There has also been a new section of the website opened for business: N64 book reviews. This was just started a few weeks ago so there’s only one review so far, but I am in the process of reading another book to be added in the coming months.

In terms of projects added to the portfolio, I only added The Prophecy of Kendo: Prologue and its unfinished sequel. Honestly I should have added more to the repertoire but I really wanted to get the Game Jam posts over and done with since there were so many of them.

I don’t have a making-of page for it yet, but this year I worked on Hydra Harmonics, my team’s entry for this year’s Game Jam. It’s a game where you play as one of four hydra heads trying to eat as many notes as possible.

With regards to the homebrew development guides, I re-did several of the graphics guides to work with the updated Libdragon stable branch, and even added a little bit about 3D graphics with OpenGL.

The website itself has seen a few changes. Honestly it’s a lot more work behind the scenes than what you see on screen:

• Homebrew pages are now in a new format with a sidebar box, and located in /homebrew/roms/ instead of /. I’ve been slowly converting the pages over and have done all categories of homebrew projects except for Demos which still have a lot to be migrated over.
• Upgraded to PHP8. I’ve been postponing this for a while since the upgrade crashed the site. There were some old modules here and there that had to be updated manually, but they should all be done now.
• Replaced the ‘related posts’ at the bottom of each page. These are now only on the new homebrew pages, and they now recommend you related projects based on (in this order):
  1. Type (game, port, demo, hack etc)
  2. Developer/team
  3. Genre
  4. Competition (were they both part of the same contest?)
  5. Year
  6. Player count

As for what the next year is looking like, I’m working on a new game (non-game jam). It’s a 2D game so nothing too fancy but it is looking good so far. After that, I hope to start working on something in 3D to help write the tutorial for people to use as a reference. Don’t forget about the N64 books section.

I’m also looking to re-arrange the tutorials for graphics. At the moment they’re divided into Software and hardware graphics, but I’d probably want to make it more of a 2D/3D split instead.

Here’s to another year of N64 awesomeness!