Gameboy Development Forum

We (two programmers) decided to participate in this years Global Game Jam. Because our custom 3D Game Engine is not in a very good state since we started rewriting major parts and also inspired by "The Ultimate Game Boy Talk" from 33c3 we decided to make a Game Boy game. And because everyone can use C to make a game we used Assembler for a bit of an extra challenge .
We already started a simple jump and run prototype to get into the whole thing about a week before the game jam.

At the jam side at InnoGames in Hamburg, we found a graphics artist and a game designer to help with the game and later some additional help for the music and title screen. It took us about 30 hours (+ sleep) to get something playable and then we only had about 5 more hours (again + sleep) to make it feel a bit more like an actual game.
There is still an issue with a few wrong background tiles being shown sometimes and only one of the two last minute tutorial screens made it into the game because we ran out of memory and we were out of time to do anything about that.

The game jam theme was "waves", so our game is about fish being pushed by waves started by the player from the sides of the screen. There are small, medium and big fish and the bigger ones can eat the smaller ones to grow. The player fish always starts at the medium size and has the goal to grow into a big one by eating two smaller fish and then clear the stage of any other eatable fish.
There are 18 levels and this gets quite complicated after the first few.
Unfortunately there is no way to continue the game from where you left or level selection or anything, so if you want to finish all levels you'll have to do it in one play session...

The game uses background tiles for everything but the text box, which uses the window and the fishes which use 8x8 sprites.
For the music playback we used GBT Player.
Other tools were rgbds for compiling and linking and stuff and the bgb emulator.
We also managed to get some Everdrive clone a few days before the game jam as well as a Gameboy Advance SP, with the big advantage of a backlight for taking videos and making photos.

You can download the game (bundled with bgb) here: http://cld.slindev.com/iqi2

There is also a video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jhui6_wkOuY

Edit: The source code is on github: https://github.com/JustSid/Sushi It is not very pretty though

Last edited by Slin (2017-01-23 17:03:19)