e9zyI39w3 wrote:

Do you guys have full time jobs outside of game development?

Yup, 40 hours a week. I would work less, but 40 hours gives me enough extra money to commission art for my projects.

I work full time, and have been going to college part time, so it's difficult for me to make real progress on my work outside of weekends. Even those days can quickly clog up with non-GBA errands :sweat_smile:

That's a lot! I didn't really delve far into creative stuff until I graduated from uni, just because of how much time and brainspace uni took up.

How do you find the time to work on your passion projects?

My job isn't very demanding (thankfully), so I spend a lot of time at work thinking about how I'll approach problems for when I get home. Half of programming is just figuring out what you need to do in the first place.
Friday to Sunday is when I get the most stuff accomplished, but I try to knock out a bit each day. Slow and steady wins the race!

I try to schedule days after my job to sit down and do nothing but try to learn or create. It always feels like this should be my last priority, but it's honestly a great hobby that brings me a lot of joy.

Honestly, game development is the most important thing in my life. It's what gets me up in the morning. I think creative expression, in any form, is one of the best things that someone can do for themself.

The ability to upload images (for icons and posts) would be a nice QOL feature. Right now I go through GitHub and then externally link it. I know ImageMagick is useful for image compression.

SkyLyrac wrote:

Another game I really liked is "The Urbz, Sims in the City". I've replayed the 4 games several times, specially the first 3. 😅︎

The Sims games on the GBA are fascinating to me from a game-design standpoint. I know some videos have been done on them. I owned Bustin' Out as a kid and played it a lot. I would have loved to see a more sandbox-y Sims game on the system, but there's probably some reason I'm not considering as to why they didn't ever go that route.
...I wonder if that could be turned into a romhack. Like, just retrofitting one of those GBA Sims games to fall more in line with the sandbox format on PC. Hm...

evanbowman wrote:

I tried Minish Cap a couple months ago but couldn’t really get into it. Something about the color palette and map design bugged me. The colors are hyper saturated and have no cohesion, the animations are a bit too silly, the game feels like it just lacks soul compared to Link's Awakening or Wind Waker. Just my opinion, a lot of people would disagree.

No I get exactly what you mean. I tried getting into Minish Cap a while ago and felt the same way, it was just too silly. Part of Wind Waker's charm is the tone of the game. It's got a cartoon-y art style but it still takes itself seriously, and the scope of the world inspires a lot of wonder to the player. I didn't really feel that with Minish Cap.

velipso wrote:

My favorites are Tony Hawk Pro Skater 2, and Wario Ware.

Oh I loved the Tony Hawk GBA games, I played 2 3 and 4 all the way through a while ago, I think I 100%ed them. I felt that they did a phenomenal job in demaking those games while still preserving the fun and essence of the originals.

I'll go ahead and start with a game that I find super fascinating, and which never gets talked about:

Mega Man Battle Chip Challenge

This game got a really poor reception when it came out, which was understandable as it was a big departure from the rest of the Mega Man Battle Network series, and also just very weird. But I think this game really stands on its own, especially now that a lot of time has passed.

What's unique about it is that the gameplay is really, really distilled. It sort of takes the formula from Battle Network and isolates it down to just the battles, but then it goes even further to where the battles sort of play themselves out. It's closer to an incremental game in a way. But it's tough to describe, I've never actually played anything else like it. It makes a lot of weird design decisions that I don't see elsewhere, for better or worse.

I think it would have gotten a much better reception had it released 10 years later. The sort of "distilled gameplay" is something that sees a lot of success nowadays (Downwell, Vampire Survivors, Loop Hero just to name a few examples) but at the time it felt out of place. For me personally, I loved it when it came out, and I still return to it occasionally.

According to Wikipedia, there were 1,538 officially-licensed games released for the GBA over the course of its life. On top of that, there's quite a lot of homebrew!

So, which games are your favorite? Which ones are your least favorite? Which ones aged the best, or the worst? Which do you find super fascinating? Which ones stand out to you? Here's your general discussion thread for the console's library.