If anyone knows the thrill of getting rich, it’s gotta be the good folks at Nintendo! They’ve been on a hot streak the past gen with their blue ocean strategy. Time will tell if the Wii U is met with the same success or not.

I’m enjoying NSMB2, but I do have to echo the issues a lot of people have with the game–it does feel pretty “safe” in terms of presentation and (lack of) spectacle, especially compared to recent platformers like Donkey Kong Country Returns and Rayman Origins. On the plus side, the level design is as smart as ever, and the game as a whole is still good fun. Can we at least get some new music next time, though?

Okay, so, big announcement time! Longtime readers of BitF may remember me putting up a teaser photo of a tadpole a couple years back. The truth is, as a sort of side hobby, I’ve been working on a video game!

The game is called Tadpole Treble, and the concept for it actually predates BitF itself quite a bit. Art and music (and video games) are my passions, so I wanted to combine them in a fun way that hasn’t really been done before. I had wondered about sheet music itself, the layout of the notes, the way they flow and fill the five-line staff, and I thought it’d be cool for that layout to actually make for the basis of a game. Then I considered a water creature swimming through an auto-scrolling stage, dodging notes of the song as it played, and the basic game concept was born.

So you essentially play as this newborn tadpole, Baton, who’s trying to find her way home through a number of stages. And there are all sorts of nifty things going on while playing to give the game life–creatures blocking you or just moving around in the background, rhythm-based context-sensitive areas designed to multiply your score if activated, bosses, and so on.

My brother and I have worked on Tadpole Treble on and off for awhile now, with him handling sound effects, level design, and business stuff, while I’ve done the art, music, and general concept/game design stuff. Neither of us knows much about programming, so we’ve hired a Baton Rouge gaming company, Pixel Dash Studios, to help us form a single-stage demo! It should be available from BitF to play on your computer in September!

I’ll be posting updates regarding Tadpole Treble as they become relevant, but for now, if you’d like to read up a little more on it, you can check out this article! Look at my head.

-By Matthew