Refresh Games

Yay! Space Splosionator 2086 was completed last Wednesday for the Workshop Wednesday challenge over at the lovely socoder forums and whilst it didn’t get as much time as I’d hoped to spend on it, plays pretty well, albeit in a tough as nails way.

The theme for the Jam was Hashtag so the game takes place in side a hashtag…in SPAAACCCEEE!

I know, awesome right? XD

What’s there in the game worked really well, there’s a starfield, lasers, targetting reticule and enemies that zoom into the screen and attack you, all complete with screen shaking effects!

It does essentially boil down to whack-a-mole, but it’s good fun for a few minutes 🙂

You can playit online via the gamejolt emulator orr, for a much better experience, use the BGB emulator and download the ROM instead!

http://gamejolt.com/games/space-splosionator-2086/186987

In other news I’ve made myself a tool to convert 8bit 8000Hz audio into 4bit 8000Hz audio for including wave sounds into gameboy games via sound channel 3.

I’ve shyed away from this channel before as I didn’t really get how it worked but now I’m playing with wave forms including triangle and sine waves to get more sound variety out from the gameboy!

I’d love to see if it’s possible to stream a low frequency sound whilst a game is playing. It’d be really low in quality (60Hz) but could be suitable for some applications, probably not vocals though. We’ll see!

Right, a few more changes have been going on under the hood of Formula Racing, including an overhaul of the A.I. which was a lot more predictable than in the current version, the A.I. can now branch into different paths depending on the track layout and is a lot less likely to crash into things as a result. So you really need to plan your overtakes now!

This has called for a redesign of some of the older tracks to handle this variant of the A.I. which has turned out to be a great blessing, with a lot of optimisation in the code now present to reduce CPU usage I’ve also weeded out some unneccessary lines of code and removed the speed overflow bugs that were present.

These bugs caused boost pads to stop the car and crashes to occsionally accelerate the car instantly to it’s top speed!

While this is all good, it’s resulted in the game becoming much tougher than before, unpredictable A.I. really puts things into a twist.

There have been some graphical changes to each course group also, billboards, trees and other elements being locked to each group help to give each track a slightly different feel, which is pretty nice!

The password system is almost there for Grand Prix mode and I’m working on a custom sound editor in the background just for the hell of it.

GBDK and sound can be a pain in the arse, there’s lots of ASM based solutions but GBDK could do with something, however basic it comes out initially. Unobfuscating the process could result in more games with soundtracks in, which would be nice!

There’s a couple of little A.I. bugs to sort out still but they should fit in nicely with the ~500byes remaining. I’m hoping to add a car explosion effect also in the remaining space!

Oh my gosh. it’s 1am, time to sleep, will post again soon!

Just another Saturday night and I noticed the one hour game jam was on in a minute or two. So, time to roll up those coding sleeves and bosh out a game based on the theme “Stealth”

One hour really isn’t much time to make a game in so I had to use some fairly ugly hacks to get the game working, it’s a simple affair, guide the shadowy character to the “WIN!” text and you win. that’s it. Whilst security beams are switched on and off, with animation, audio cues and walking sound effects. The only collision routine used is that with the background layer. There’s so little time to get anything working that my collision routine is a little iffy, resulting in sliding along walls.

Nevertheless, I’m glad I managed to make something “slightly” more substantial than my previous one hour game jam attempt under the theme “Everything is dangerous” again, simple enough, avoid the spikes, walls, etc. Just under an hour.

Even though these games aren’t much, it’s nice to try an intense burst of game coding every now ‘n’ then!

Download Links for the ROMs below:

• You Will Die – Everything is dangerous Theme (32kb) – 1 Hour
• Unseen – Stealth There (32kb) – 1 Hour

Despite not having many hour last weekend for Ludum Dare, I started to put together the pieces for another lil Gameboy Game called ION. Where you take the role of a charged particle that needs to attain certain levels of charge to proceed to further levels and boost the players score.

It’s a fairly simple game in essence and uses ice physics for motion control with state-based A.I. charges that vary between seeking and fleeing routines to keep the player on their toes.

Here’s a quick 20 second video with some of the game in action.

There’s still a way to go, but I’m planning on adding obstacles, slow and charge wells to help mix the gameplay up.

Yes, it’s finally here, with comments and everything! Below is the code for the C file and I’ve included all the files with a readme.txt file for your perusal here. I hope this helps you to get started on your gameboy development journeys!

gbdkdemo .zip file, 6kb