TLDR I'm making a free tiny Metroidvania as a very heavy homage to the original. It is very good and I am working very hard on it. It will release August 6th 2026, check out details here on my other site.

I love Metroid

tldr: Metroid was enthralling when I was very young, and this inspired me to dabble in every creative work.

People laud CRT displays for the vibrant colors and response times we've only just begun to match today, and for how pixel art of yesteryear renders best on them, but people fail to account how the CRT was alive. It's warm to touch, it buzzes, it has a fuzzy field of electric magic that you could run your finger over, just past the display. The image didn't render on the glass like screens of today, but instead underneath the glass, recessed into the deep body of the machine, giving the impression that the game world was a real thing which existed just underneath.

So, when I first saw Super Metroid at 3 or 4 years old, I had absolutely no concept of the tricks and magic they use to create these worlds. I could barely maneuver Samus, but the instantaneous response time just lent further physicality and credence to the existence of the entire world. I was convinced and mystified.

With much effort, I was eventually able to get from K2L to Zebes (or maybe someone helped me - I can't quite recall). But then, I could barely get past the first few doors. It was impressed upon me that this was only a small part of the game. To me, the rest of that world was mysterious and impossible.

I always strived against being told that I would understand something when I was older, etc. but I understood Super Metroid as something simply too large to grasp. I would beat it for the first time when I was thirteen, years later.

I would soon play Metroid Prime, a spiritual remake of Super Metroid (which itself was a spiritual remake of Zero Mission), and eventually crown myself "The Biggest Metroid Fan in the World". This probably is not true, but I digress.

I would eventually play and beat Super Metroid on an emulator, years later, ahead of the release of Other M.

Aside: The emulator was given to my dad by a coworker. Being a goody two-shoes, he explained this was actually a beta for the GameCube 2. Not understanding my dads job very well, I told people on the playground that the GameCube 2 would let you play games from every previous Nintendo console. This would come to fruition with the Wii Virtual Console. I accidentally became the kid with the "uncle who works at Nintendo".

But before then, I played through the entire series. Fusion, then Prime, Prime 2, Zero Mission, Hunters, Pinball, Prime 3, etc. But that wasn't all.

I made power suits out of paper bags and pringles tubes, I taught myself HTML to make fansites and GameMaker (back on version 4!) to make various attempts at fangames. I tried to learn 3D modeling (first in Maya, then CAD, and now Blender), I learned to make digital art and sprites. I made an arm-cannon lamp in middle school shop class, and then almost killed myself disassembling it while it was connected to a power outlet. I tried making midi music in Anvil Studio, and I read game design posts for my whole life. I recall myself reading the writings of one "Radiation" on the Turing-complete Earthbound dialogue system, far before he would work on the Homestuck music team, let alone Undertale. Small world.

Meanwhile, I followed AM2R, Prime2D, and the myriad other fangames which never survived. I was reading Zebeth and I was on the MDb forums. The cool fanart I made (which I still do today btw btw) got added to some fangames, and almost got added to a "Harmony of a Hunter" fan album before they got a better artist, etc. I've been in the community for years by many names.

Nowadays, I actually don't find the missile-wielding cyborg exploring ancient alien ruins exploding them to be so enthralling. The unexamined male gaze of Samus, particularly from 2001 through 2009, rubs me the wrong way. The self-contradicting and under-explored characterization of Samus is disappointing, and the villains motivations are very rarely fleshed out or even coherent. The very-clearly Alien-inspired world which undermines the key message by saying, "Actually, the one galactic government is benevolent, and it could contain this lifeform for research purposes, if it weren't for the Space Pirates, and the Space Pirates are both an evil profession and a race btw".

And as far as Metroidvanias go, the Metroid series is not even that good. The best Metroid is the fangame AM2R, the best games in the genre are Silksong, Outer Wilds, and Environmental Station Alpha. Much of the Metroid series involves a lot of tedious design around farming energy, bombing blocks, etc.

It's hard to play Metroid with a critical eye. But it doesn't need to have the best worldbuilding, the deepest narrative, or even be the best Metroidvania. It was cool to me when I was four, dammit. It's never not going to be important to me.

And more importantly, Metroid was the bedrock for my entire creative soul.

So, I decided to pour my entire creative soul into a passion project, which I have been working on since late 2024. That project is

DEMAKE86, or, the "Legally Distinct Action Adventure Platforming Game set on a METEOROID"

Demake86 is my not fangame homage to the original NES Metroid. It is releasing on the 40th anniversary: August 6th 2026. It is titled "Demake86" because the project had the aspirational scope of having strictly Less Game than the original.

I'm using almost every creative skill I have here. 3D modeling for environments, pixel art, programming and physics-simulation logic for the game, physical dynamical models for effects like screenshake, particles galore, etc. It's a dinky project but it's taking a lot out of me, so it might be my 'magnum opus'.

Demake86 is a tiny tiny Metroidvania set inside a tiny 8^6 pixel Meteoroid: Tiles are made from 8x8 pixels, rooms are made from 8x8 tiles, and the whole meteoroid is made from 8x8 rooms. I cheat this a bit, but the game is tiny enough you can speedrun it in 86 seconds.

I'm developing this game with absolutely no AI (this is a passion project!), and it will be free and open source, and entirely playable in browser on launch.

Aside: I'm developing this in Godot, which I first started using in 2016 with Godot 2. In that year, I did analysis work on behalf of the US Navy to identify the best game engine to develop new simulations in, and Godot was my choice. The contenders were primarily FOSS engines due to the default Terms of Service prohibiting the work we intended to use this for. The contenders included Amazon Lumberyard, Blender Game Engine, Cube 2, Panda3D, Irrlicht, Torque3D, and Godot.

Of these engines, most are now defunct. Not wanting to be "left waiting for Godot", they went with Amazon Lumberyard, which had been discontinued as of 2021.

I am proud to say that Godot was the right choice :)

From the site for the game, (which includes a painstakingly modeled-and-rendered wallpaper btw!), here is a bit of lore:

You are Relan Gras, the legendary protector and sole inheritor of the now-extinct mysterious ancient Corvus species. Your purpose is to create a true peace in space. Many believe you to be a myth.

Orphaned as a child, you were saved and raised by the Corvus on Planet Zenith, a natural fortress planet blanketed in meteoroids. You travel the galaxy at light-speed, cursed by relativity to live a solitary life, dedicating your life to ending intergalactic threats as they arise.

You've just received a emergency transmission: The intergalactic paramilitary bandit ring known as the Neolegion have unearthed the ancient parasitic life-form known as SETONA, discovered in the labyrinthine fortress-ruins of the largest Meteoroid in the orbit of Zenith.

The transmission suggests the Neolegion base is hosted by their ringleader, the mechanical life-vein known as the Minister Baroness. She is joined by the corpulent cave-dwelling monster Kemp and Relan's personal nemesis, the plasma-breathing dragon and genocidier Reagan.

If the Neolegion were to tame the Setona, the shadow of their imperial rule would cover all of intergalactic society. You never expected your work would bring you home. Do you have what it takes to quell the evil which waits above the surface?

For legal reasons, this is not a Metroid fangame. The character is original, the setting is original, the

Being an entirely original area with Original the Characters, I'm not beholden to anything in the original Metroid. The protagonist, Relan Gras, retains much of the same backstory, but lives a very different life. FTL travel being impossible, she is equipped with the only lightspeed engine in existence, quelling intergalactic threats as they arise.

Traveling lightcenturies between missions, Relan's heroics are quickly relegated to the historical record of the civilizations she leaves behind, and she is forever understood as a myth. Any friends or connections she makes would be dead by the time she returned. She lives forever as a myth, existing only to quell intergalactic threats as they arise. She is the loneliest woman in the universe.

I think this is a far more compelling set of characterizing circumstances for a character in this role, and (as far as I know) has not been explored in sci-fi, instead preferring their "great-powers-great-responsibility" characters to exist in a world where FTL is possible.

Of course, none of this matters. The 64x64 pixel screen is hardly enough to tell much of a narrative on.

What about Libera Labyrinth?

tldr: Libera Labyrinth was going to be my open source Metroidvania. Demake86 is the new Libera Labyrinth.

Friends and followers might have heard about another project, Libera Labyrinth, a Metroidvania far more original in terms of ability-set and narrative.

Libera Labyrinth was to follow Winter, an amnesiatic armor-clad being who awakens in the lowest pit of a dead and impossible world. The goal was to create both a compelling Metroidvania and an open-source 'starter pack' in Godot, a-la what AM2R or Metroid Planets is for the community.

Demake86 was originally meant as a stepping-stone project, the idea being that my many small-and-not-finished Godot projects would expand the scope of what I could work with and fit in my head. But instead, Demake86 expanded to that project. Demake86 isn't perfect and is filled with hacky design, but it's all been

In making Demake86, I've become aware of how infeasible Libera Labyrinth would have been as a solo project. Despite being so tiny, Demake86 is taking a huge amount of effort. I wish I could articulate how much work it is to make a game, the site, everything on your own. I am sad to have only realized a few days ago that GitHub had not been tracking my commits due to an email snafu, and so my would-be green squares tracking progress are all naught.

This reverses the typical playtime-per-devtime ratio

A lot of gamedev today tries to maximize the playtime-per-devtime, and so you see a lot of procedural generation, rougelike elements, etc. This is especially true for indie games.

If I was putting my time into a procedurally generated roguelike, I would have a very good 20+ hour game on my hands. I could have a marketable game like Loop Hero maybe.

Instead, I went the opposite approach, developing a very dense and intentional game. Instead of having hours of playtime per hour devtime, you are getting a second of playtime per hours of devtime.

In making such a short game, I hope it is also challenging. You only get one energy per tank and two missiles per tank, and they don't recharge during a run. You can only jump two blocks up (but, that is 25% of the screen). I hope I am making a game that demands intentional play. There are no Syobon/Kaizo moments, but if it's too hard, you can simply memorize it.

in conclusion,

I've been working very very hard on this game. I don't do any tracking or analytics or newsletters.mIf you want to play a small free Metroidvania that will only take a few minutes of your time (target playtime is 8 minutes, target speedrun time is 86 seconds), please bookmark the project page and set a reminder for August 6th.

I don't think I will have the only Metroid project releasing that day, but I am certain I will have the most Quality Per Second

Until then, see you next mission :^)