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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Cool, sounds like a really fun project for your family! The GBA is a great platform for lots of reasons, one great feature is that you end up with a single file that contains your entire game, that will work forever. Easy to backup, easy to give to people, easy to play, such a treat.

Good luck on your project, looking forward to what y'all create! JRPG sounds like a lot of work, but also sounds like fun too.

Sean

Thank you so much for your encouraging words, Sean!

You're absolutely right—developing an RPG is indeed a significant undertaking. Given our limited time together, I can't promise specific deadlines, but the journey itself is what truly matters to us. It's all about cherishable moments with my child, creating stories and artwork together. I hope to leave my child with lasting memories of our collaboration and a tangible keepsake — a finished game cartridge he can revisit anytime.

I also wanted to commend your work on Inky and your recent games. They are truly inspiring! I especially enjoyed how accessible yet challenging Inky was—it's easy to understand but hard to master, which is perfect for engaging players deeply. Your newer releases have a different flavor that challenges me in new ways, making me eager for what you'll create next.

Dad'n Son Games will be way more straightforward. The first one is set to release next month, so stay tuned!

Cool project!

If you're going to use HAM, you should use HEL too, it's going to help a lot with some typical JRPG tasks like big maps.

HEL link: http://www.console-dev.de/project/hel-library-for-gba/

GValiente wrote:

Cool project!

If you're going to use HAM, you should use HEL too, it's going to help a lot with some typical JRPG tasks like big maps.

HEL link: http://www.console-dev.de/project/hel-library-for-gba/

Thanks!

I've just reached out Emanuel (author of HAM) for buying the full version of it. He replied with instructions, and now I'm waiting to ear further news.
Hel implementation is going to be next step.

I'm sorry for the lengthy, and maybe complex post, but its the best way I can explain.

For the maps, I'm doing something a bit different, inspired (not equal for they were brilliant, but inspired) in Elder Scrolls 2, that has gigantic maps (ohh.. the so many things we can learn from the
postmortem game design) : I'll design very few maps, to path between the spots are going to be auto generated. It's something on the making, and I must devlog write about that. Meanwhile I'm writing the main idea to ear your best experienced ideas:
I'm putting the main idea (there are a lot of hoops to jump, and finesses to consider, with which I'm struggling to contemplate)
Imagine this thing :

+-----+-----+
| 1 | 2 |
| 3 | 4 |
+-----+-----+

Biomas:
1 - shore, spring, forest;
2 - shore, winter, mountain;
3 - shore, spring, forest;
4 - desert, summer, desert;

Goal: you have to go from the shore to get something the mountains,

1. you pass through different biomas, like, 7 screens of different biomas,

Per screen

• must need to know the enters and exit spots, generated randomly when assigned a quest:

• generate the visual path dynamically;
• between the path, render trees and nature elements according to the bioma, and the weather (tweaks on the pallets should do ;-) )

This way, you must render with Tiled (or similar) the city from where you get the quest, and the shrine that is in the mountain.
All the in between are randomly generated with the same few tree, bushes and vegetation tiles (with a lot of mirroring, size, and pallet tweaks so they can look different from each other)

From the start of the adventure, when you approach a border of the screen, the screen starts to be generated, and it caches the generated screens so they don't look that different of the way back :-)