Cartridges! Coming Soon-ishly!

Yes! I’ve finally found some lovely people from 8-bit Evolution to team up with who publish retro games! They’ve taken a liking to a few of my games in-progress so far and now they really need to be brought home over the finish line.

This is one of those geeky dreams of mine that I had since being on the playground in the 90’s, to have a game of mine on a Nintendo console, on an actual cartridge, complete with box and instruction booklet, the whole shebang!

So, I really need to tighten up some code on Formula Racing to make it as optimal as I can (again) in GBDK, get the password system in-place, sort out that difficulty curve, add some endings, some sorta music and that game will be done and ready for perusal. Also, I need to make some awesome box art like I made for They Are Everywhere 😉

gameboypaknmgb-fixed

It’ll be one of my game developer “awesome things to accomplish” things marked off the list and I never was sure which way to achieve it so I’m very grateful for 8-bit Evolution to reach out to me on this one.

And there I was considering some Sega Master System development instead. Well, maybe again in the future eh 😉

Gearing up for 2 Players!

Gameboy Development has been really good fun over the last 14 months and in total I’ve made over 10 games which are all playable in one state or another, which is nice!

I’ve played with some gameboy colour stuff and feel like I have a good handle on MBC1 style bank switching. Audio is coming nicely along the way and will keep on evolving over the coming months until I’m happy with both editor, exporter and GBDK implmentation.

But, one of the things that was in a lot of gameboy games was the ability to link up to another system, allowing for two player games. Normally in a versus mode scenario.

I WANT TO DO THAT!

And I want other people to be able to to do that also!

So, there are decidated functions and variables inside GBDK for handling such functionality allowing for not just link cable but other accessories to be attached, such as the gameboy camera and printer! I’ll look into those at a later date but for the moment, the next goal is to make a 2 player game!

Space Splosions and More Gameboy Tools on the way!

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!
Space Splosionator 2086 spacesplosionatortitle
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!