Also, it’s for the GBA and I made it in about 12 hours for a game jam-like competition called a Hackathon :P Inspired by the spooky season, my fiancee and I created “Alfredo’s Mansion”, a game about shooting an infinite wave of ghosts. Oh boy, what have I done?! Well, this I guess. We’re very proud of making such a strange experimental game! If you want to try it, you can download it for free from itch.io here for Mac and Windows. What is Bro Boosting Beats? A virtual pet rhythm game about raising a neckbeard into a slightly better person of course! We styled it like a Tamagotchi and, well, this is how it came out: The theme for this competition was “Transformation”, and if I recall correctly there were almost 400 competitors and 86 games produced. Game jams are competitions where people get together and make games in way too little time, often 1-3 days. This game was made in 48 hours with a team of four (I was the programmer) for Chillennium, a game jam held at Texas A&M each year. Here is the link to the ROM that I made for this post.īut wait! Don’t go yet! We’re just getting started! ぼくの Bro Boosting BeatsĪs I said before, I have actually made two games since last post (and I am tired because of it!). Next time I will attempt adding sound to something, which is a lot more difficult than you would think. In the case of this one, I could put stuff onto a microSD card and load it up onto an actual GBA! Here is what this demo looks like on real hardware: ![]() For those who do not know, a flashcart is a game cartridge that lets you run whatever you want off of it. Now here’s something cool! My fiancee has actually been letting me use her GBA flashcart recently. This illustrates a point that I am learning too well about making games for the GBA: coding the actual game is like normal, it’s getting the graphics to do what you want them to that’s the hard part. Other than making it so that the player couldn’t walk off screen, all I had to do was check “can this block that I want to move into be walked onto” before actually taking the step. Making everything collide was actually pretty easy because The Waking Cloak uses a very simple sort of collision. If I had to do it again, I would use various sorts of compression to not make fitting everything into memory nearly as much of a pain. It took a while to figure out which parts of memory to use and how to tell the GBA to use them, but in the end, I got it to work. I actually had to cannibalize certain tiles, in other words, the ones I wasn’t using, to be able to fit everything into memory. Here’s a more insane one, the ones that I had a lot more of: This is one of the less insane visual errors that I got in the process: I spent several hours trying to cram both the tileset and the map into the very limited GBA video memory. Turned out that it was a tad bit more fiddly than that. I just strapped an option to export the maps to a format that I could slap into the GBA code into my map editor and I was in business! Or was I? The red boxes indicate that the tile is meant to be collidable, or in other words, is meant to not be something you can walk over. ![]() To do the former of those things, I used a custom tool to design maps. ![]() To do this, I had to do a few things that I haven’t done yet: designable maps and collision detection. He sent me his tileset, his character sprites, and a screenshot of his game and I made it into this: This week, I did a collaboration with to take his graphics and world and put them on GBA hardware. Buckle up because this is going to be a wild ride! So what have I been doing all this time? Well, let’s just say I made two games in the last two weeks in addition to working on the stuff for this post. So here I am! It’s been two days and two weeks since my last post, and boy have I been BUSY! So busy that I had to delay this post even.
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