A New Start


This is a port of my Nintendo DS version of the same game, except this one has new assets and Level designs. The game idea was based around a pacman / maze like game, where you collect something whilst avoiding enemies. I like this kind of game play and the mechanics of this, but they are a blast from the past, as these games were only really out on old 8bits like the Spectrum 48k or Commodore 64. The graphics are based on the MegaDrive Sonic Games, as I like these characters and the graphics are available to study online. The graphics in this game are tailored towards the GameBoy advanced, small 240x160 display, so actors need to be sized accordingly. The game is coded in C and uses Devkitpro for its arm compiler, to generate the GBA rom files. The graphics were designed using LibreSprite and then converted to the GBA/DS 16 colour tile format using a program i wrote myself to do this. This way I can just create PNG files, in a normal pixelart package and not worry about the underlying format that the GBA uses. All the graphics in the game are 16 colour tiles, with level art comprising of a wall tile and a floor tile, which must share one 16 colour palette between them. The music is free .it files I have found online, which fans have made, they sound similar to the Megadrive sound files of Sonic 1 and 2 on the Megadrive. Using the .it files are hit and miss, as i don't know beforehand, how many channels the creator used, some files wouldn't work on the GBA, due to its limited ability to make use of lots of audio channels. The colours for tiles have also had to be tweaked a fair few times, as the display on a non modded GBA SP 101, are a lot darker than the emulators show.  To get them to like right on the real console i have had to do a few back and forward tests of redesign and then build and load onto an everdrive cart to test on my trusty GBA. It all looks fine now. I believe I have found all the bugs and fixed them, had one where I forgot to sync the sprite engine to the vertical blank, which was causing a slight graphics tear on the rings. This one puzzled me for a bit, as i thought it was the background tiles at first and was trying to improve performance there for a bit. Anyway that is it for now, I have released the initial version with 5 levels and if enough people show support i will expand the game further.

Files

RingDash_Itchv1.gba 1 MB
Jul 11, 2024
OUT-RingDash_Itchv1.zip Play in browser
Jul 11, 2024

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