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?

Flap Happy Menu for Gameboy Color
Bee Happy - NES Game in Development

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!

Porting Flap Happy From NES to Gameboy

Recently I’ve began converting Flap Happy over from the NES version to both Gameboy and Gameboy Color with some success, I’m foolishly aiming to fit as much game into just 32kb again which is going to be the real challenge with this one as C is never going to be as small as ASM, but, we shall see how far I get with this wee project.

Probably the best way to show you is with a video. but, it’s come along a decent way and I have ~18kb free now from the 32kb limit.

The major space hog is going to be the music here and ate up around 6kb on the NES version so I’m going to need to get a bit creative with data compresion here. Also, it seems like when I have added music, it’s been down by an octave again. This isn’t present in the video but is a necessary frustration.

I’m not overly worried about the CPU bounds here, Flap Happy isn’t an intensive game for the NES and shouldn’t be either on the gameboy. If by some miracle I have space at the end I might bung in some Super Gameboy Bits but, that’ll be very much an afterthought.

  • Initial Flap Happy Menu for Gameboy
  • Initial Flap Happy Menu for Gameboy Color
  • Initial Dungeon Level Layout for Gameboy
  • Initial Dungeon Level Layout for Gameboy Color

Bee Happy now has a Level Editor, Yay!

It’s not particularly pretty orrrr un-pretty, but it’ll get the job done pretty well I reckon. Might let the kids have a play about with this come the weekend, the hive location is going to also act as the spawn point for new bees ( newbies ) to start from, as well as the drop-off point. There’s not many tiles is there, but difficult levels can be attained through a combination of hedges in the way as well as the number of enemies and their set-up.

I’d best get the whole importing the data into the game side of things working next I guess!