Picking NES & Game Boy Development Back Up Again

Life has certainly gotten in the way of a few things of late, the usual combination of commitments has shifted my focus around a lot. I’ve not really felt settled at home to get many decent game development sessions in for quite a while.

Probably just down to the distractions in modern life, so, I should really re-organize myself to get certain things done with some sorta schedule ideally. That includes posting updates onto here at least once a week. Probably every Wednesday. I wander how long that will last for?!

What needs to be done and where?

Bee Happy (NES Game Development)

This game is at that weird stage in development where it’s fairly playable but needs some extra elements inside it for a good difficulty progression. I think adding solid walls would do well here in amongst the slow-down hedges, in order to make use of the limited space I’ve set out for each level.

  • Versus Mode
  • Music
  • Sound Effects
  • Transitions between Screens / Levels
  • An Ending Sequence

Flap Happy and Fancy Free (Game Boy & Game Boy Colour Dev)

Flap Happy is further back in terms of development, I’ve attempted to convert what I made to utilize bank switching, but ran into issues. To the point where I might just restart from my previous base and develop along that pathway. The game is in a similar position to Bee Happy and needs the following features to be considered complete.

  • Music
  • Sound Effects
  • Level Transitions (Easy Fade)
  • Ending Sequence

CPU usage is still fine for the Game Boy which is good news for future development bits.

There’s some good news coming soon from the lovelies at megacatstudios.com also, which I’m looking forward to. Keep your eyes peeled for updates later on this week for more details on my retro game development adventures!

How high is your highscore?

Right, I recently came into a little problem regarding storing highScores and comparing between them. It sounds stupid as most people would probably think. “Well, duhhhh use greater than or less than”

Which is fine. but with the gameboy being 8 Bit, I’m storing my scores as arrays as scores up to 255 would be rather boring….

So, for example 9,001 would fit into an array of 4 lots of UINT8, for an easier time displaying things to the screen, without extra computation.

E.g.

In a game I’m making currently, scores can extend beyond the limits of a 16 bit integer also, so we’re using slighlty longer arrays to store things in, no biggie.

But. I’ve found a handy solution to my problem, along the lines of the following:

What the code above does is compare the arrays on an integer by integer basis and set another variable with the result, reliably!

I hope this helps someone out there who has a similar issue regarding setting up high-score boards on the gameboy as this seems to be a safe an fairly quick method.

I may well be missing another way that’s quicker all-around but this seems to work for me anyway 🙂

Expect a new game posted around the end of this month 🙂

 

So, August and me coding in GBDK didn’t really happen.

Yeah, yeah, I didn’t even update this blog either. For over a month!

But, that doesn’t mean I’m stopping gameboy development, far from it. There’s plenty of games I need to finish off before I move onto tackling 6502 ASM again in October / November.

There’s quite a list of them now, how does it always end up like this!

Formula Racing.
It’s nearly all done, but just needs a bit of polish and better ROM bank management.

I Shall Be Queen.
I’d really like to add that boss fight in there sometime soon. Then I’ll accept it as complete.

Shield Warrior VII.
It’s a small game I attempted to make for Ludum Dare 36 during the bank holiday weekend, but life and family fun was way more important. So, I need to finish this one off soon!

Ayasumi Todayachi.
A horizontally scrolling shmup with alternating weapons.

Space ‘splosionator 2086.
A quick Whack-a-mole type game. But in space!

They Are Everywhere.
I’ll come back to They Are Everywhere again sometime again. I feel it needs re-programming now I have a better knowledge of the system as opposed to in October last year.

Roll on September!