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!

Background collision bugs fixed, flower stages also added, yay!

Well, that sorted itself out quicker than I thought it would, did a lil stream for 90mins over at https://twitch.tv/rychanwr3 with the aim to just get background collisions less buggy and, here we are!

Using RAM along with some reference arrays in ROM made life so much easier here, it should be nice and easy to get the following bits of gameplay code implemented pretty soon I reckon.

What are they? Well, there’s quite a list!

  • Limited pollen carrying & depositing at the hive.
  • Scoring
  • Sorting those birds out
  • A handy dandy level editor
  • Maybe making the spiders / crabs a bit less central in the screen
  • Player 2!
  • Possibly cut scenes?
  • Sound Effects
  • BGM
  • Passwords
  • VS Mode
  • Ending Sequence…s
  • Tidying up that intro and other bits.