Oh my gosh, where to begin? Flap Happy had a Kickstarter through February which ran to completion and was crazy exciting to see happen before my eyes with the help of all the backer lovelies, retro game streamers and Mega Cat Studios and it was all a bit overwhelming, I didn’t expect to see it happen, reach it’s goal and surpass it. It’s still kind of crazy now I think about it, amazingly cool though!
The Kickstarter was for not just the NES version of Flap Happy but also, the Gameboy / Gameboy Color version so, it’s a multiple console release, how cool is that? I think it’s pretty cool and both versions are nearing completion now, the NES port has only a couple of things to be added, whilst the Gameboy port needs a little more cooking time, it’s 90% of the way there now, just some oddities to sort out, mainly rejigging some music code and writing up the second ending.
Through February and March a fair amount of coding on the Gameboy port has taken place, with a lot more testing, 1024 levels of testing to be precise, checking each level is beatable, if not, applying a fix to it, then re-trying, it takes up a fair chunk of time and memory!
Memory on the Gameboy port has been something of an issue I’ve had to keep a wary eye on, as I’m targeting a 64kb cart (4 x 16kb banks) programmed in GBDK it’s been about as tight as it’s smaller in filesize NES version (40kb in ASM) Thankfully a smaller screen allows for some workarounds but also left me wanting more in terms of level generation, to the point where the different zones still feel like the NES versions, but, in an effort to make more appropriate for the smaller screen, don’t look identical to them. I’m more happy with how the Gameboy levels have turned out to be honest, although a lot of that could be recency bias.
So, pretty smooth sailing from here, yes? Well, mostly, I lost about a month of development time whilst my development laptop was in for repairs, the data was thankfully all safe and backed-up but Windows had decided it had had enough of running and , whilst there’s no good time for that to happen, this was one of the worst times for it to happen. It’s been a bit of catch-up where I can since then, getting my dev environment set-up properly again, dealing with some of the more pressing stresses in life, the usual gumpf, you know the drill, but Flap Happy…or should that be Flap Happies?! Are closing in on becoming finished now.
What, no image? Nope, not today, sorry ’bout that.
Skip to content
Gameboy Game Development in GBDK & Other Game Dev things