Talking 'bout that game development!

Dunkr

I don’t have time to do a game jam right now but I saw the gmtk jam just started and the theme is “roll of the dice”. This is a good opportunity for me to quickly get an old idea out of my system. Originally I wanted to make it 3d printed object but that’s a lot of work. For now I just want to make it a little browser thing. More of a D6 than a game but it’s compatible with a bunch of games! You load the itch.io page and one of these images will randomly appear. Better quality or different images if I can find them but that’s it!

Any opinions about my controller choices? I want them to be different manufacturers. 5 is Mortal Kombat but could also be a guitar hero controller. 3 would have been the original Genesis controller but you can see the start button which could be confusing. 1 is Space Invaders but there’s probably a few more options there. Also, if anyone here wants to flesh this out into something more game-like you are welcome.

Dunkr

Best version of this would use nicely shot video and do a crash zoom into the buttons. Also needs an appropriate sound effect for each system. You’d also be able to reroll by clicking on the buttons.

Dunkr

It works!
https://duncan.itch.io/controller

Dunkr

I didn’t have time for any sound or animation (or a game) but I found a bunch more images and submitted it to the jam.

saddleblasters

Dunkr I’m glad you posted the original version right at the beginning of the jam, because I used it to convince my friend who was reluctant about participating to at least try something similarly small. Though what his project became turned out to be not small at all. He did all this neat 3D stuff (unfortunately he didn’t have enough time to get anywhere near finishing it): https://sonny369.itch.io/unfinished-dice-game

Here is my own extremely dumb entry, based on a pun that, like, 20 other people also used for the name of their games: https://saddleblasters.itch.io/role-of-the-dice. I don’t really like or relate to dice at all, so I was clueless for the first 3 or so hours after the theme was announced. I ended up combining all the random sketches I made while brainstorming into one not-very-coherent form.

Dunkr

saddleblasters

One thing I’m surprised about looking through entries for that jam is very few (if any?) people went for a Squid Game/Liar Game-esque “death games” premise. That was one of my first thoughts on seeing the theme, but I didn’t pursue it any farther because I figured it was too obvious, and given how big Squid Game was, I was sure that would be one of the dominant themes/genres in the entries. Instead there’s just a bunch of dice-based puzzles and games based on rpg/tabletop aesthetics. So now I’m a little disappointed I didn’t go in the death games direction! I feel like I might have been able to make something a little more immediately understandable.

Dunkr

saddleblasters I never saw Squid Game but from a quick scroll through the submissions I agree about the aesthetics of a lot of the games being similar. It’s such a vague theme which could basically mean randomness but the majority (including me I guess) seem to have taken very literally.

Ty

Excited to see people post GMTK entries! Look forward to trying them. I decided last minute Friday to jump in and happy to say I did hit the finish line! At the very least I hope you like the pun.

https://stylotylo.itch.io/dark-rouls

beets

Hi, hello.

Has anyone here worked with GBA development (homebrew). I’ve been going through this TONC tutorial (link). I understand it for the most part, but I’m having a lot of trouble with tilemaps, backgrounds especially.

I’ve been trying to use the tools grit/wingrit and usenti both made by the tutorial author but I keep ending up with empty or broken data. E.g only getting 2 tiles worth of data instead of 9.

All the documentation is so old that I’m having trouble finding any relevant info on how to properly export the bitmaps into useable data.

If anyone knows how to make sense of this window, please send help. I thought I’d ask here before I start emailing addresses from ancient webpages.

beets

I partook in the Global Gam Jam again. This year the theme was “roots”.

I ended up making an endless nonogram game for GameBoy Advance called Nonacorn (Nonagram + Acorn).

It feels good to get something out there made with this skillset as I’ve been toiling with it for the last 3 months (beets ).

Here’s the link if you want to download it. It works on emulator and flash cart.
https://sbeets.itch.io/nonacorn

beets

oh wait im dumb. when it says 4bpp thats 4 bits per pixel. My data isn’t cut off I just forget that hex eg 0xffff contains 16 bits. so each one of those has 4 pixels worth of data in it.

const unsigned short blocktesttilesTiles[144] __attribute__((aligned(4)))=
{
	0x0000,0x0000,0x0000,0x0000,0x0000,0x0000,0x0000,0x0000,
	0x0000,0x0000,0x0000,0x0000,0x0000,0x0000,0x0000,0x0000,
	0x1111,0x1111,0x1111,0x1111,0x0111,0x0101,0x2011,0x0000,
	0x0111,0x0002,0x0011,0x0020,0x0111,0x2200,0x0011,0x2200,
	0x1111,0x1111,0x1111,0x1111,0x0101,0x2101,0x0002,0x2000,
	0x0002,0x2000,0x0002,0x2000,0x2222,0x2222,0x2222,0x2222,
	0x1111,0x1111,0x1111,0x1111,0x0101,0x1101,0x0000,0x1112,
	0x2000,0x1100,0x0200,0x1110,0x0022,0x1100,0x0022,0x1110,

	0x0111,0x2200,0x0011,0x2200,0x2111,0x2222,0x0011,0x2200,
	0x2111,0x2222,0x0011,0x2200,0x0111,0x2200,0x0011,0x2200,
	0x0022,0x1100,0x0022,0x1110,0x2222,0x1122,0x0022,0x1110,
	0x0022,0x1100,0x2222,0x1112,0x0022,0x1100,0x0022,0x1110,
	0x0111,0x2200,0x0011,0x2200,0x2111,0x0022,0x0011,0x0020,
	0x0111,0x0020,0x1011,0x1010,0x1111,0x1111,0x1111,0x1111,
	0x2222,0x2222,0x2222,0x2222,0x0200,0x0200,0x0200,0x0200,
	0x0200,0x0200,0x1010,0x1010,0x1111,0x1111,0x1111,0x1111,

	0x0022,0x1100,0x0222,0x1110,0x2200,0x1100,0x0200,0x1112,
	0x0200,0x1100,0x1010,0x1110,0x1111,0x1111,0x1111,0x1111,
};

See, the data for this bitmap is all there.

This same thing happened to me last week with binary codes. I need to think more.

compositehiggs

For awhile I’ve been working on a game where you control a candy-corn munching ghost by making spooky oooOOoooo sounds with your mouth. It looks like this:

I wrote the prototype for this in Javascript with no real game engine around 4 years ago and each year I work hard on it in October thinking I’ll release it at the end of the month. But since I teach during fall semester I never get enough work done, so this year its going to be Halloween all year long.

I’ve published one game around 6 years ago but I’m not a professional developer, so I’d like advice about developing this as a “real” product/promotion/etc.

exodus

compositehiggs that’s a large question I don’t currently have time to answer but itch.io is an easy place to publish, and you can promote to some extent by putting it in bundles there!

Gaagaagiins

Via some random Facebook post:

Elon gonna find out today.

My first programming class my professor opened with a story. A new guy was hired at a company and decided to optimize some code. Specifically there was a bashed together section that allowed the program in language X use a small segment of code in language Y. After two months on it he finally finished. His entire contribution was a single comment above the bashed together segment.

“Magic Code Do Not Remove”

Syzygy

Gaagaagiins

The following code is the fast inverse square root implementation from Quake III Arena, stripped of C preprocessor directives, but including the exact original comment text:

{
	long i;
	float x2, y;
	const float threehalfs = 1.5F;

	x2 = number * 0.5F;
	y  = number;
	i  = * ( long * ) &y;                       // evil floating point bit level hacking
	i  = 0x5f3759df - ( i >> 1 );               // what the fuck?
	y  = * ( float * ) &i;
	y  = y * ( threehalfs - ( x2 * y * y ) );   // 1st iteration
//	y  = y * ( threehalfs - ( x2 * y * y ) );   // 2nd iteration, this can be removed

	return y;
}```

Chopemon

Good game dev nightmare thread about Golden Axe Beast Rider (click on the tweet to see the whole thread)

exodus

Chopemon we got a postmortem of this in game developer magazine… I wish it were easy to share online here!

beets

I’ve been slowly plgging away at this gba development stuff. It’s going fairly well.

I’ve got background and sprites rendering at the same time.
I’ve hooked up the tonc library and it compiles.

Today I added basic movement, this is very easy with tonc lib, it has a whole input class and functions for setting object position.
I decided that I wanted to zhuzh it up, with a sine wave on the movement. This was difficult as neither cmath or math.h compilied. I searched online which led me to this forum thread from 2005. I learnt about look up tables which even have it’s own wikipedia page, cool stuff!

Look up tables are used in place of triganomic functions to reduce run time operations. They were originally used by mathmaticians before they had access to calculators. The idea is the same, instead of doing math, just look it up.

Wikipedia’s gracious example for sine, cosine and tan waves were exactly what I needed. However in their code example, they create the table (an array) in an Init function using Sin(). I can’t do that on gba. I look around online but nones has what I need, so I create a c++ console application to print my 91 sine values. I then copy that into my code and make an array and the corresponding function.

Here is the result.

All this for a sin() function. These old devs had it rough. What you can’t see is the silky smooth near 60 fps screen (59.73 Hz).

Chopemon

exodus I read that one! I read loads of those over the years. I used to work at a couple of studios that made games that were of Beast Rider quality so it was nice to know it wasn’t just us.

Sredna14

During the summer, I posted the demo for Tomte Trouble, a single-screen platformer for the Game Boy Color. I wanted to share that I released the game yesterday on itch.io!

https://nextdaygames.itch.io/tomtetrouble

You play as Kimmy, who must collect her mischievous tomte to progress through sixteen bite-sized stages.

This has been a huge milestone for me as someone who has struggled to release personal projects since 2020. I cannot overstate how amazing GB Studio is for developing, especially for someone dipping their feet into pixel art and level design for the first time. I’m excited to take these skills to a different engine for my next game.

My biggest influence has to be The Fairyland Story, and I originally planned to present Tomte Trouble as a lost Game Boy Color port of a fictional arcade game. But I also played numerous single-screen platformers like Mario Bros and Bubble Bobble as references.

On average, a single playthrough of Tomte Trouble will take 3 minutes, depending on your platforming experience. You will see your total time in seconds after each stage (this timer excludes pauses, stage-clear text windows, and cutscenes). I took the Super Mario Odyssey approach by omitting lives. Instead, hitting an enemy or obstacle will force Kimmy to take a breather, locking the controls for a few seconds before sending her back to the current stage’s start position. This also ties into the reward system for the game, as a faster clear time will earn the player a better rank, which unlocks new background palette options.

I’m selling the game ROM on itch.io for $3.00 USD, but any friend of Insert Credit is welcome to a free download key. Just shoot me an email at hellonextdaygames@gmail.com. This also includes an Analogue Pocket build and a novelty N64 ROM (that is sort of a mess, but in a cute way).

Any feedback or general comments are welcome. Thanks!

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