As mentioned in last time’s “So I Haven’t (yet) Written a Game Boy Game“, I’m going to start pushing my source code to Github as I go. The repo for “Jumpy” is now live, so you can take a peek under the hood and see how it all hangs together. As with this diary it’s […]
Author Archives: Andy
So I Haven’t (yet) Written a Game Boy Game
So this is Christmas… and what have I done? Not written a complete Game Boy game that’s for sure. Back in April I set myself the target of writing a Game Boy game by Christmas, with the idea that if I succeeded I would buy myself a present of a special flash cartridge so I […]
Building out a “proper” level (aka Why Mario can never go home)
I’m going to come clean about Jumpy’s level (if anyone is actually playing the ROMs?). That clever looping behaviour isn’t specially coded – it’s just what the Game Boy does. The Game Boy’s VRAM – the part of the memory keeping hold of all the graphics stuff – only actually holds a total width of […]
Let’s fix those platform bugs. How hard can it be?
Last update I identified a few bugs, notably to do with bad collision detection when falling on to (or, uh, through) the platforms. First, the “snapping” bug: Catch that? Let’s look at the frames: Last time I said Reading through the code I’m not sure why that is, but I expect I’ll figure it out. […]
Jumpy 2: Basic Platform Action!
I didn’t intend to return to Jumpy, but apparently it was a fan favourite (_a_ fan, singular). I also don’t explicitly intend to write a platform game, but I fancied iterating on the little, uh, thing so here we are! I imparted a new super power – moving sideways while jumping – in about 10 […]
Variable speed tracking
Quick one tonight. I’ve been chewing over the thoughts I had last time about stuff on screen needing to do stuff at different speeds and keeping track of it all, so tonight I want to try out a proof of concept throwing things into structs and having each sprite keep track of whether it was […]
Jumpy: putting some stuff together.
After the last installment, I’ve been dipping back into GamingMonsters’ video tutorials around GBDK and absorbing some of the concepts. I didn’t follow along in code, but instead used it to sort out what was the “done way” of structuring simple game code. See, I’ve done a lot of coding in the past but that’s […]
Basic sounds working!
Yesterday’s adventure was probably a little “run before you can walk”, so today I went back to basics with the help of a really nice tutorial from GamingMonsters. It did the trick – within half-an-hour I had the basics up and running as per the tutorial (no copy/pasting! I want to learn this!). I then […]
This music stuff is tricky
Back after a break (busy time at work). I figured that basic graphics and stuff was going pretty well so I’d do a quick music test. Turns out it’s a steep on-boarding. So far I have figured out three options: Make awesome music with something like LSDJ. This is geared towards making awesome music, but […]
Some more research
Mostly browsing around and dipping into topics like how to display text and what music entails. Came across a few interesting looking resources by accident too. So here’s a linkdump: Some more sprite tools, including something to convert from OGMO (a free and open source level editor) Some discussion on how music works, including an […]