More Gameboy screens in Photoshop

Refresh Games Gameboy Title Screen Game Intro Screen with mode selectNot the most productive day for coding today but, thanks to my sleep pattern being slightly messed up this weekend, I managed to fit a couple of screens of pixel art in tonight / this morning.

The Refresh Games logo needed some Gameboy love and should fit easily into RAM, but, the main title, I’m not so sure about.

Some clever tile mapping will be needed no doubt, I guess that’ll be tomorrows gubbins!

Still, it looks pretty cool there, I used a 3d model of super deformed F1 car I’d made a couple of years ago which just seemed to fit in really nicely when posterized in Photoshop.

We’ll see tomorrow I guess then.

[P.S. most of my tutorial code for part 2 of my GBDK tutorial series is nearly ready also, it just takes a while to write all about it.]

Background collisions, SFX and TURBO!

Well, today went really well, I fixed up my collision routines with the scrolling background, yup, it was using a simple offset, with a case for looping every 32 row increments, seems to work well. Possibly un-optimised but good enough so far.

There’s some rudimentary noises from both cars on screen based on their speed and distance from each other, also collision noises are in there now.

The fuel-o-meter has turned into a working turbo bar to help catch-up or overtake other racers. It’s getting there, but I’m down to 4kb of ROM remaining now and the racer A.I. needs improving on the sly. I’d like to get some BGM in there also somehow.

CPU Usage is getting pretty high now though, so I may need to inestigate into other ways to load my level up. Setting colours for each tile through a switch is probably slower than referencing another variable directly I imagine but, well, a balance needs to be struck.

Tomorrow I’ll most likely be sorting out the code into banks to save space and going from there with more advanced A.I. (Not simple homing, falling of the track A.I.) those cars need to fall foul to going off track also and that’s going to be inetresting to set-up correctly!

Screenshot tonight is from the gameboy classic mode where, yes. Identical cars. I’m not too fussed about that. I am fussed about adding some steering animation though!

Getting There

How To Get Started with Gameboy Development using GBDK

So, you’ve decided to make a Homebrew Gameboy Game using GBDK, Good for you! Let’s get you up and started with some of the vital tools that you’ll need.

  1. GBDK – GBDK Download & Install Guide
     ( I installed my copy to C:\gbdk and will refer to that location throughout this series of tutorials.)
  2. A Text Editor. Programmers Notepad is pretty nice and FREE
  3. BGB (Gameboy Emulator, again FREE and the best one out there.)

Please note that I’ve only done GBDK coding on my Windows Machine so some installation bits may vary depending on your choice of Operating System.

That’s it, that’s the bare minimum you’ll need to get started and get used to bare minimums, because the Gameboy, despite being a well-balanced machine, isn’t powerful, if you’re used to Unity or other modern development tools, this will be quite the step back. Let’s take a brief look at the specs

Yay Gameboy!CPU Speed: 4.19 MHz ( or 0.000419 GHz if you prefer)
RAM: 8kb – Expandable to 32kb depending on your ROM Carts settings

And we’re looking at ROM Sizes between 32kb to I think 1Mb. Not much space, and to start we’ll be dealing with 32kb ROM Size only.

Everything Graphical is Tile-based (8×8) and we have a screen resolution of 160 x 144 Pixels, In 4 shades of grey.

And yes, you can still make a game, running at nearly 60FPS on this, cool huh?

Tomorrow we’ll write our first program which will cover that most important thing, getting something on-screen with a few lines of code and running, it’ll be great!