Let’s make a Gameboy Advance game! Part 3... and more!
So here I am! It’s been two days and two weeks since my last post, and boy have I been BUSY! So busy that I had to delay this post even. So what have I been doing all this time? Well, let’s just say I made two games in the last two weeks in addition to working on the stuff for this post. Buckle up because this is going to be a wild ride!
This week, I did a collaboration with @thewakingcloak to take his graphics and world and put them on GBA hardware. He sent me his tileset, his character sprites, and a screenshot of his game and I made it into this:
To do this, I had to do a few things that I haven’t done yet: designable maps and collision detection. To do the former of those things, I used a custom tool to design maps. This is what the tool looks like:
The red boxes indicate that the tile is meant to be collidable, or in other words, is meant to not be something you can walk over. I just strapped an option to export the maps to a format that I could slap into the GBA code into my map editor and I was in business! Or was I?
Turned out that it was a tad bit more fiddly than that. I spent several hours trying to cram both the tileset and the map into the very limited GBA video memory. This is one of the less insane visual errors that I got in the process:
Here’s a more insane one, the ones that I had a lot more of:
I actually had to cannibalize certain tiles, in other words, the ones I wasn’t using, to be able to fit everything into memory. It took a while to figure out which parts of memory to use and how to tell the GBA to use them, but in the end, I got it to work. If I had to do it again, I would use various sorts of compression to not make fitting everything into memory nearly as much of a pain.
Making everything collide was actually pretty easy because The Waking Cloak uses a very simple sort of collision. Other than making it so that the player couldn’t walk off screen, all I had to do was check “can this block that I want to move into be walked onto” before actually taking the step. This illustrates a point that I am learning too well about making games for the GBA: coding the actual game is like normal, it’s getting the graphics to do what you want them to that’s the hard part.
Now here’s something cool! My fiancee has actually been letting me use her GBA flashcart recently. For those who do not know, a flashcart is a game cartridge that lets you run whatever you want off of it. In the case of this one, I could put stuff onto a microSD card and load it up onto an actual GBA! Here is what this demo looks like on real hardware:
Next time I will attempt adding sound to something, which is a lot more difficult than you would think.
Here is the link to the ROM that I made for this post.
But wait! Don’t go yet! We’re just getting started!
As I said before, I have actually made two games since last post (and I am tired because of it!). This game was made in 48 hours with a team of four (I was the programmer) for Chillennium, a game jam held at Texas A&M each year. Game jams are competitions where people get together and make games in way too little time, often 1-3 days. The theme for this competition was “Transformation”, and if I recall correctly there were almost 400 competitors and 86 games produced.
What is Bro Boosting Beats? A virtual pet rhythm game about raising a neckbeard into a slightly better person of course! We styled it like a Tamagotchi and, well, this is how it came out:
We’re very proud of making such a strange experimental game! If you want to try it, you can download it for free from itch.io here for Mac and Windows.
Oh boy, what have I done?! Well, this I guess. Inspired by the spooky season, my fiancee and I created “Alfredo’s Mansion”, a game about shooting an infinite wave of ghosts. Also, it’s for the GBA and I made it in about 12 hours for a game jam-like competition called a Hackathon :P
You hold down the A button to make your shots bigger and travel further distances. Also, the RNG is quite broken because of an oversight on my part when constructing the random number generating system, but oh well.
It’s a super short arcade-style game, and you can download it here.
Unless I do more collaborations, I may build off of this game in future blogs, because the concept is rather fun and I think that I can manage to make the game sort of decent.
Something over the horizon?
More information to come soon…
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