Gamejam on jono shields

Sips

Wed, 01 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Time for another GBA Gamejam! This time it is the winter jam, its the smaller of the annual GBA Gamejams. We had 1 month to make something little, this time the Title Screen.

Wow. I almost feel called out. The Title Screen is usually the last thing I think of and sometimes skip entirely.

A whole month. I could make a pretty popping title screen in that time.

So I set to work brainstorming and settled on the idea to make a really vibrant cafe scene. It wouldn’t be interactive, but you could sit and people watch.

Nuclear Love

Fri, 11 Nov 2022 00:00:00 +0000

You can look at my last couple of posts for my grand desires to compete in GBA Jam 2022. But the best laid plans and all that.

I ended up not actually starting any sort of entry until the 28th of October. 3 days till the jam ends.

So I sit down with my brother for coffee and we get chatting. It would be cool to do a Halloween themed game since the game ends on October 31st. We spitball some ideas and end up talking about doing a post apocalyptic dating game.

Making a Shoot 'em up for the masses

Sun, 04 Sep 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Kirby’s Dreamland

Recently I watched an interview with Masahiro Sakurai, the designer of the original Kirby game among other amazing titles. He talks a bit about the history of platformers and how at that point in time games in general were made to be difficult. Not just for the sake of it mind you, catridges had limited sizes and developers could only fit so much content in there, so to be able to make a longer format game you had to make it hard.

Starting another GBA Jam

Sun, 31 Jul 2022 00:00:00 +0000

The past ~7 months since LRO

My plan after LRO was to keep working on it and eventually release a paid edition with a lot more content and airport themed games. That didn’t happen. Instead I got distracted. Life got in they way.

However over all this time inspiration did strike a number of times.

LRO, but now a full BLOWN RPG!

I downloaded a ton of stock assets from itch.io and started messing around with the idea of creating a game based in an airport to follow on as a sequel from Luggage Retrieval Officer. The idea is that you have been hired by the airports HR team to create training documentation for all the different roles.

Polishing LRO

Sun, 26 Dec 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Carrying on from the previous post I wanted to talk about further design decisions I made in the last couple of weeks.

Using Dialog to create a narrative element

At this point the game works. You can complete levels and progress through the rank system from Trainee -> Expert -> Officer. And while the puzzles get harder to help show the progression, there is little else.

Can I get away with this? Absolutely. Most classic puzzles games don’t offer more than this at all, just take a look at the likes of Dr. Mario and Bust-A-Move.

Enhancing Luggage Retrieval Officer

Fri, 10 Dec 2021 00:00:00 +0000

The Todo List

At the end of the last post I left a todo list with a bunch of features for me to add to the game.

✔️ Level Select Screens - 40 puzzles and to select between (4 difficulty levels).
✔️ New Suitcase select - having a cursor to select the item you want to move instead of tabbing through the suitcases will be a lot easier for most players.
✔️ Success Animation - making it more obvious when you have completed a puzzle, rather than just loading the next one.
✔️ Tutorial - how to play
✔️ Save Progress - puzzle unlocking
✔️ More Puzzles
✔️ Sliding animations of luggage
❌ Dialog screens
✔️ Lock harder ranks until easier ranks are completed
❌ Levels 41-50

Pretty good. Pretty, pretty, pretty goooood.

GBA Winter Jam

Wed, 08 Dec 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Another GameJam

Following on from the success of the GBAJam21, the GBAdev community has decided to wrap up the year with a relaxed winter game jam. The optional theme is Frozen.

Check it out on Itch.io here.

Scope

Based on the last GBAJam that I did, I knew I had to reel in the scope. There were two games that I kind of had in mind.

A space shoot ’em up, similar to Uridium for C64. I could render 3d models to sprites and make some cool rolling animations.
A rush hour clone, an awesome sliding block puzzle game.

No Internet, Even less power

This summer (NZ) we are on the road travelling around New Zealand in our little car SoyBean. This means that while I have been able to recharge my phone and look at the jam page, I haven’t been able to do any programming.

Kiwijam21 - 48HRS - Adapt

Tue, 27 Jul 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Kiwijam21

Kiwijam started on Friday night, at 7pm the theme was announced and our space at The University of Auckland became a hive of activity.

The theme - Adapt.

My first thoughts were that I wanted to make a game where the player needed to use a Bop-It (TM) to control several different “levels” where the game changes significantly in between. For example the first level a platformer, the second a racing game, third something else.

Feline - Finishing Touches

Wed, 07 Jul 2021 00:00:00 +0000

GBAGameJam2021 | Making a game for the Gameboy Advance

Day 88

It is the last week of the jam and I am cramming like a high school student before exams.

A New Level

I really had to get my a** into g.

So I took my dungeon tile sheet, added a filter or three and threw some rocks in there.

Throw in a background and…

And a New Enemy

I don’t want to share too much about the story behind this enemy. But I wanted to make something that was a step up in difficulty from the slimes and bats.

Using HBlank to add Parallax

Wed, 30 Jun 2021 00:00:00 +0000

GBAGameJam2021 | Making a game for the Gameboy Advance

Day 81

At first I thought that adding a title screen would be boring, but not when you discover how to use HBlank effects.

What is an HBlank Effect? Well, when the gba draws to the screen it draws in rows, starting at the top and going down. We can make code run in between these rows. Find more detailed info here (this is genuinely very much worth the read if you plan to develop for GBA).

Adding more lore to Feline

Wed, 23 Jun 2021 00:00:00 +0000

GBAGameJam2021 | Making a game for the Gameboy Advance

Day 74

Unfortunately I haven’t had much time over the last few weeks to work my GBAJam2021 entry. And I realized today that the deadline is approaching very quickly.

In the last post I talked about how important narrative was to me in this game.

I decided to add stone tablets dotted around the level that the player could stop and read if they wanted.

Mapping out an MVP for Feline

Tue, 01 Jun 2021 00:00:00 +0000

GBAGameJam2021 | Making a game for the Gameboy Advance

Day 52

In a previous post I talked a little about how important it is to make a plan. You may be thinking “well if I don’t have a plan, it is impossible for things to not go as planned”.

Well yes. Technically this statement is correct. But it also means that when things don’t work, it is hard to pinpoint why. Plans do much more than that though, they create focus and help you to make decisions.

Jono has a Plan

Fri, 21 May 2021 00:00:00 +0000

GBAGameJam2021 | Making a game for the Gameboy Advance

Day 44

I read a really good post-mortem the other day. One of my key takeaways was simply to have a plan. Not so that you can stick to it, you update it as you go. But so that when things go wrong you can look back and try to figure out why. Like “oh, I shouldn’t have left the music till the last week” ~ probably Jono in a month.

Attacking Animations and Enemies

Mon, 17 May 2021 00:00:00 +0000

GBAGameJam2021 | Making a game for the Gameboy Advance

Day 40

Okay, so in a lot of projects there comes a part where a lot of work is needed for little reward. I always struggle to find motivation in these parts. Queue a week of procrastinating.

But this week I…

Refactored the player class so that an instance of Player lasts for the whole game.
Added enemy class and an enemy list in the Player class.
Adding attacking hitboxes.
Struggled with the below problem for a whole day!

ARHGH!! Okay. So I got stuck on this for ages and it really did my head in. I am trying to use pointers for the first time, so no wonder this kind of thing went wrong.

Animation, Camera and Movement Improvements

Mon, 10 May 2021 00:00:00 +0000

GBAGameJam - Days 28-32

Camera Movement

Last time I posted an update on the GBA Dev Discord I was recommended an article about camera movement. And I can highly recommend this to anyone making any sort of 2d game. It made me think for a lot about how the camera should move in my game.

When I started the easiest thing was just to set the camera’s position to the player. This way the player was always in the centre of the screen. This is called position-locking, and while better than nothing, sometimes it isn’t the best experience for the player.

Another Level, Dialogue and NPC's

Thu, 06 May 2021 00:00:00 +0000

GBAGameJam - Days 24-27

Off the Grid

The last 3 nights I have been staying in a campsite with no cell reception. But thanks to the awesome docs bundled with Butano, I haven’t really hit any major snags.

And without the distractions of the internet I have made a lot of progress in the last few days.

New Level

Our story has to start somewhere, and the idea being that the bad guy broke in and kidnapped our hero’s family. We should start there. At home.

Will this be a game?

Sun, 02 May 2021 00:00:00 +0000

GBAGameJam - Days 20-23

Lets talk game design

Okay. We are at the point where I need to try to figure out if this is going to be a real game or not. So I came up with a game design pitch, another level, a world map, abilities, collectables and more.

Pitch

You arrive home to find your place in ruins, your wife and children are missing. Find out what happened and save them by unlocking the secrets of the past hidden under the island you have lived your whole life.

Animation States and Dash Ability

Thu, 29 Apr 2021 00:00:00 +0000

GBAGameJam - Days 18-20

More refactoring

Okay, so last time we pulled some stuff out into classes. Now after learning some more I have created .h and .cpp files for my new hitbox and player classes.

At this point comparing c++ to other languages I have used before an header file is kind of like an interface or an abstract class. But also at the same time it is absolutely not that. I think.

Refactor and Acceleration

Mon, 26 Apr 2021 00:00:00 +0000

GBAGameJam - Days 14-17

Major Refactor - Classes

So. How do classes in C++ work? Yeah, that took some googling on its own. Actually just trying to figure out the weirdness of their constructors was time consuming.

I ended up making a hitbox class that I could use for my character. This is what it looks like…

class Hitbox
{
    private:
        int _x;
        int _y;
        int _width;
        int _height;
    public:
        Hitbox(int x, int y, int width, int height)
            : _x(x), _y(y), _width(width), _height(height)
        {}
        int x()
        {
            return _x;
        }
        int y()
        {
            return _y;
        }
        int width()
        {
            return _width;
        }
        int height()
        {
            return _height;
        }

};

This is clearly not something that you should be learning from me though. So I will leave a few links here..

Collisions, Music and More

Thu, 22 Apr 2021 00:00:00 +0000

GBAGameJam - Day 13

Collisions

This should be fun.

FYI I first learned collision logic making a similar platformer in pico8. I found these tutorials invaluable for that. And I think its a great resource that can be applied in any programming language even though the examples are lua & pico8 specific.

This should be easy now that we can get map data.

So first off I am making a simple method to apply gravity so that we can move better.

Detecting Map Tiles

Wed, 21 Apr 2021 00:00:00 +0000

GBAGameJam - Day 12

Okay. I did it!

I figured out how to get map data so I can start using tile data to figure out collisions.

So as before. We have our bg that we made..

bn::affine_bg_ptr map_bg = bn::affine_bg_items::map.create_bg(256, 256);

And I finally found out that you can call map_bg.map().cells_ref() to get the pointer to the cells of the map. You can then call .value() on it to get the actual data in a span (kind of like an array?).

Yeah, its going okay

Tue, 20 Apr 2021 00:00:00 +0000

GBAGameJam - Days 4 to 11

Okay. So I may have been scared off a little by C++ again and a little frustrated at my self for not trying harding or digging deeper.

This week hasn’t been very good.

But that isn’t to say I haven’t done anything. The gbaDev discord is buzzing with activity and I am enjoying learning little bits and pieces about the GBA, dev tools and other random projects people are working on.

Animation, Movement and Backgrounds

Tue, 13 Apr 2021 00:00:00 +0000

GBAGameJam - Day 3

Animation

Today I am tackling animation, not for any specific purpose, but just because I have the assets for them already.

We can use Butano’s create_sprite_animate_action_forever to kick off the animation.

Also just note that throughout using Butano you will see the use of Actions, they allow you to do transformations to a sprite over time. Read more here.

So getting the animation working is pretty simple…

Let's draw a sprite!

Mon, 12 Apr 2021 00:00:00 +0000

GBAGameJam - Day 2

Okay lets do this. Lets try to get as far as I can doing this with assets from an old game.

This is the Butano Sprite Example..

/*
 * Copyright (c) 2020-2021 Gustavo Valiente gustavo.valiente@protonmail.com
 * zlib License, see LICENSE file.
 */
void sprites_visibility_scene(bn::sprite_text_generator& text_generator)
    {
        constexpr const bn::string_view info_text_lines[] = {
            "A: hide/show sprite",
            "",
            "START: go to next scene",
        };

        info info("Sprites visibility", info_text_lines, text_generator);

        bn::sprite_ptr red_sprite = bn::sprite_items::red_sprite.create_sprite(0, 0);

        while(! bn::keypad::start_pressed())
        {
            if(bn::keypad::a_pressed())
            {
                red_sprite.set_visible(! red_sprite.visible());
            }

            info.update();
            bn::core::update();
        }
    }

But really the only thing we need is bn::sprite_ptr red_sprite = bn::sprite_items::red_sprite.create_sprite(0, 0);

Joining GBAJam

Sun, 11 Apr 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Day 1 of the GBAGameJam21

I normally use much higher level languages, python, javascript, c#. But looking at the example code for Butano and seeing all of these :: confuses me a lot.

Maybe I could map all of this to a language that I know. Googles “Lua bridge” furiously.

Eventually gives up.