So, where am I at with GBDK so far then?

I figured now’s probably as good a time as any to look through and see where I’m at in terms of features I have working / would like to have working or at least working better.

Gameboy Controller Input

Seems to be all there, but occasionally (rarely) misses tap commands for some reason, I can’t fathom this one out though.

Background, Window and Sprite Handling

kawaaiii
The sprites were still cute, thanks to my lil PHP tool 😀

This has come along really nicely since when I begun my journey with GBDK, to the point where I now have my own tool to convert png files into usable GBDK data and export it out a plain VRAM for usage in other tools.
Whilst the game itself turned out pretty poorly, the tools I developed were vital for Global Game Jam 2016, making sprites of that size purely in 8×8 groups of pixels would be horrendous!

Sound

Sound effects are pretty much there but I’m still without the right method to convert music from a program into byte code and back into a tune on the Gameboy.

Multiple Bank Handling

Seems to be all good, I’ll be doing some crazier bank switching antics in the coming weeks, with an eye into starting and finishing a scrolling shooter, orrr possibly a racing game, it depends on my mood I guess.

GGJ 16 – A Swing and a Miss

Whilst I’ve enjoyed a good streak of results from recent game jams, my first Global Game Jam didn’t go quite as planned, I felt like I was working against the Gameboy throughout the 42 hours of development time available to me, as I hadn’t done any real Gameboy development work since Ludum Dare 34 in mid December, I was going to have a rough ride of sorts in any case. Quite how rough was a bit shocking to me.

Bugs occurring at stupid hours in the morning greatly affected the amount of sleep I got in during the weekend and by Sunday morning , whilst I was determined to have something finished, there really wasn’t much of a game there, although to be fair, a clicker game isn’t much of a game anyways.
waifu
There was a lot of coding going on though, for little reward, after some issues, particularly with remembering how multi-banking worked, Waifu Clicker is a clicker game, with randomnly generated characters, password system, some sound effects, difficulty curve and sadly, not much else.

kawaaiiiAfter submitting a working initial build to the Jam site with 2 hours to go I attempted to bung the in-game shop in there but, more issues with decrementing my heart score (an unsigned 8-bit array) after the first pass and general exhaustion left me collapsed at my laptop.

Whilst it’s far from my best work, it proved to be a handy reminder for me to be prepared for game jam events and my preparations this time around were minimal to say the least.

So, 2 Gameboy Games, 2 weekends. Is this a trend for me?

Probably not, haha! I do love making games for the Gameboy though, so I’m going to continue down that line for a while now. It’s still enjoyable to code games for limited hardware for me and it’s taught me a fair amount about code optimisations, which is handy for me in general. There’s also plenty left for me to learn about it, I may have made 3 games in total for it and have one in the pipeline but there’s a lot to learn in that lil system and I’d also quite like to make myself some tools I can use better within the games I make.

I nearly ended up using my own system for the sprites for Novascape, but, sadly it had a small bug, which has now been fixed so I can make more complex backgrounds and sprites with a bit more ease than before!

I might try my hand at making a basic platformer next time around, It would be nice to get a better hang on properly mapped scrolling backgrounds. Then again, They Are Everywhere has been waiting in the wings for quite some time now and really needs completion sometime soon. Ohh decisions, decisions…

Additionally, I put some feelers out regarding making some videos to help people into Gameboy Development with GBDK as the documentation on getting started with it seems rather scarce out there. I remember searching for hours in an attempt to find a PDF that contained the actual values that converted over to notes! I made my port of Spike Dislike using an inaccurate emulator, which then showed up on actual devices and my current emulator of choice, BGB.

So, I’ll spend a lil bit of time during the Christmas break putting some videos together for the New Year, yeah!