Hi devs!
Hope everything is great with you, your chips are well conditioned and your memory optimized :-)
I'm new to the GBA development, but not new to programming (it's actually what I do and teach for a living, for some years).
Dad'n Son games, the genesis
I'm creating a new project that allows me to spend some more quality time with my kid, while keeping inside the subject, and teaching him some stuff :-)
I'm calling it Dad'n Son Games. He also likes good old retro games and we play together some times. One day I challenged him to do our own (retro) new-old games ourselves: he designs, make some draws, shares his ideas, etc., I'm responsible to convert those ideas to bits and bytes.
It's been going for a couple of months now. After work and school, after dinner, an hour or 2 per day, we make some draws, record the music, we share ideas, and we do stuff.
GBA
For the purpose, I thought that GBA is the perfect platform for it. For A LOT of reasons -- when creating the official website, I'll put them there. I was a kid his age in the 90s, so SNES or Genesis would be more appropriated for some reasons, but GBA makes the bridge so much better.
For now lets say it fulfills the purpose of a videogame: "So what is a videogame? The American Heritage Dictionary defines a video game as "an electronic computerized game played by manipulating images on a video display or television screen", to quote the brilliant Jonat
han Harbour in his excellent Programming The Nintendo Game Boy Advance: The Unofficial Guide.
Don't need to put a lot of bells and whistles on it, I like simple and reliable stuff: to do a videogame, GBA is just that: the closest I can remember to bridge between my generation and his (while keeping faithful to that retro feeling).
A GBA game runs a modern browser and mobile phjone, thanks to the most excellent emulators we have nowadays.
GBA development simplicity
Since VIM is not an IDE per se, I'm doing it with the most reliable IDE I've found till today, and I was missing it, being this the best opportunity I get back to it purposefully: MS Visual C++ 6.0 (blazing fast with todays resources).
For the fun, I'm trying to stay faithfull to the technology used at the time: using windows 2k and Windows XP SP3 machines; paint shop pro;openMPT, etc. When not possible, or convenient -- afterall its an hobbie, not a job -- I'm using GIMP, LMMS. Everything either registered (for personal use) or open-source software that is freely available for educational purposes.
Following @velipso suggestion, I might write some stuff about the theme of a dev log.
Lib
For this one I'm going with the deprecated libHAM. It's simple, runs flawlessly inside the retro environment, it gets the job done of showing and manipulating pixels.
Plans
The main goal is to produce from the ground up a JRPG. I find it a great way to tell some stories while teaching some stuff, while spending quality time with the kiddo: it's my job as a dad, and it's very fun to do it -- we may thank LOTR and the Hobbit the same urge; and the comparisions end there: I'm no artist by no means, but.. lets see what happens, For the moment, I'm enjoying the experience, and we look forward to get together at the end of the day to work on some ideas.
I'll try to stay close to the 100% original material: illustrations, music and sfx.
To give you a context for the first game, I lecture programming in college as well. This semester I was lecturing C.
For the students project, I challenged them to do a Connect-4 type of game; and they challenged me back. I saw an opportunity to raise the Dad'n Son iniciative, while preparing a proper response to their challenge :-)
To gain momentum in my GBA development journey and set up a solid foundation, I completed the Aaron Rogers tutorial, read the Jonhathan Harbour book, read the Tonc tutorial, and get going adventuring to do a Connect-4 type of game. I've recycled some illustrations I already hadaquired from a professional artist for a previous custom game, and "borrowed" a music that I think its perfectly suited for the theme :-)
By now, it already allows for a two player game. I'm wrapping it up, so it can run other mini-games we have in mind to do with our Rollies.
Our goal is to be doing the games and sharing them with the world as they get done.
Wrapping it up
This wraps up the main idea of our project, and we’re thrilled to be sharing it with you as we prepare for our very first release—something we’re excited to share soon!
I'm writing to share you my experience and hear from you as more experienced devs. Maybe we can create stuff together , and put our GBA games in a better spot
This is a familiar and happiness oriented project. Here’s a sneak peek of what we’re working on. We’d love to hear your thoughts!
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