About a year ago I decided that I wanted to learn to develop for the GameBoy Advance, prompted by reading Kyle Halliday’s first post on the subject. For my project, I decided I wanted to try and build a turn-based dungeon-crawler styled after one of my favourite games: Crypt of the Necrodancer.
Unfortunately, since this development started a year ago and I haven’t kept very good dev notes I don’t have too much to really talk about, but I wanted to get something out before I got back to work on it. My knowledge specific to GBA dev has come both from Halliday’s articles and the articles on TONC. I’ve provided these links but won’t be going too much into detail here, if only because both are more knowledgable than myself and I’ve forgotten exactly how I started out.
At this point in time, the project is pretty bare bones, only the following is implemented: we can render a player sprite, a few different tiles, and a health bar; the player can move around the world and dig through walls if they have enough power; and enemies are technically implemented, though none exist.
The game is an absolute mess and looks roughly like this:
The next step is probably implementing some kind of pseudo-random number generator (since GBA can’t make use of the built in rand functions), as well as actually building an enemy or two that can move around and hurt the player instead of just theoretically existing. After that I’m probably going to figure out equipment. This is all subject to change, obviously, but I’m hoping that actually getting this written out will convince me to actually get this work done over the next few weeks, or at least once I’m not running around quite so much dealing with living in a new city.