Reality Factory

Ok guys. You know the good old GBA (=GameBoyAdvance), don't you? Well, i have always been a fan of the consoles world (ESPECIALLY the GBA because its feel is so...cool...simple but genious...you can take it everywhere and the games are great! Like the GoldenSun series, which just rock!) and now i have stumbled over a few sites which allow me to program GBA games on my own. My 2d art gets better and better and i have begun with programming in the world of bits. (console programmers think in bits, pc programmers in bytes)

And guess what? It's easier to display a pic than a text!

The feel of programming for GBA is just great!!! It just rocks! Really! (At least the simple thinghs. But they feel so much more natural than programming with directx or opengl)

And also, i have found an EXTREMELY good e-book that does not only cover the GBA programming, but also parts of Nintendos history, and game design...

http://theharbourfamily.com/jonathan/?page_id=89

Fact is, i love this new type of programming (and the GBA of course) so much i might even go away from RF... But no problem, i will think this decision over carefully and drop in here once in a while. I will keep you posted about my successes/failures with the GBA... (Just in case someone wonders, i use a GBA emulator, maybe i'm going to buy a card-writer soon, but then i still had to figure these thinghs out. Damn those thinghs are so costy...)

I know this sounds a bit strange from a guy that has used RF for so long, but this whole GBA programming stuff is just fascinating...

EDIT: lol you must think i have gone crazy or something maybe i truly am

http://www.loirak.com/gameboy/gbatutor.php

I've completed those tuts...Lost it from there..

Wow, I didn't know that programming games for the GBA had gotten past the time of only mad mod'ers and hackers. That's pretty sweet and I would look into it if I didn't have so many other programing and gaming projects I wish to complete. I think thats pretty awesome. Of course, maybe I'm crazy too, since I am a Nintendo fan boy and would go nuts to see my own game on a Nintendo console.

MOG mario?

sounds great man, and a really interesting idea. I suppose it feels more natural because it was originally designed to make GBA games, whereas PC coding stuff has to be more well... versatile for different applications.

I dont think I still have my GBA, I moved on to PSP and I think it got left behind somewhere

good luck with your GBA games Jay.

Well you could just get a M3 or R4 adapter so you can use sd memory cards. This way you can play other emus on the gba and still test your games.

Congrats on learning something new. I remember when i wanted to program for the psp but never really got into it and like others have said other projects are on my mind.

What kind of game do you want to make? RPG, Platformer, Shump?

Maybe just some funny senseless rpg parody.

like:

WORLD OF PIZZA
Plays in a sub-universe: The ultimate world of pizza! You walk around on a round flat world. And there is everything you need for a fantasy rpg: Magic, Swords.... (No fear, the poeple will be human and not tomatos or such)
features:
-Stupid NPCs that stand around so that you cannot pass them telling you they stand around so that you cannot pass them
-useless statistics
-nerd characters talking about how their stats have risen
-pizza restaurants
-you can hold exactly 98 of each items. Not more. No, not even 99, since this would go against the 'two-digits-rule'.
-a 'randomness' stat allowing special 'random' attacks
-creatures appering without reason in big towns
-with more experience, you get weaker and so the game gets more challenging! (Man i am soo tired of myself dealing 9999 damage on a bossthat has 100.000HP, a few levels before it was 999 damage on a boss with 10.000HP and before that 99 damage on a 1.000HP boss...I hope you know what i mean, monsters and characters get stronger at the same time and there is no big challenge because it's always balanced somehow)
-people whining how they have far less houses than people in town.
-characters screaming in the intro because the world has gone black
-in hard modus fights are easier and this way you gain exp quicker so that you get weaker quicker.
-At level 99 you have 1HP left.
-you can fall through plotholes... into other parts of the story! (This way the story advances. Remeber: We are in a static RPG world!) In different parts of the story you will have different amounts of exp...
-You can fall down the end of the world and are revived by an evil presense that does not wish you end the game this way
-evil organ music!!
-NPC jam levels where you have to move through a crowd of NPCs that all keep moving randomly. (Man i was so annoyed when those NPCs did not let me out of that corner!)
-once you have enough gold, you can buy an all-you-can-eat pass and eat up the monsters!!!


Story: There is no story. Ok well we have to have a story, since this is a rpg...
Chap from the Cheesey empire saves Tina Tomaton from the ...petersilie land? Together they are hunt down by TomZ TomatonZ TombZ ToneZ(= "He who cannot be named") who plans to get all power over the world of pizza to ...do nothing.
Other characters:
-Peter Peperonni the fire mage from the spicy country
-Tim Tamer the master of the potatoes - he can summon the feared potato monster (don't ask why... )
-Miss Chocolate who is an outsider because chocolate does not fit into a pizza world
-

And the end of the game is a trailer for the second part (which will hopefully never come):
WORLD OF PIZZA 2: TomZ TomatonZ TombZ ToneZ TomatoZ land!

LOL

First screen:

You don't see it, but i use DMA to send over the image data quickly (not pixel per pixel). I don't know how much faster this is, but i think it's at least 100 times faster. I also have page flipping implemented (well you don't see that too, but the thing with page flipping is that you don't see it!)

One thing that is not the best with the gba is that you have no files, no file system, everything has to be converted somehow to raw c-code arrays because everything has to be embedded into the program. But i can live with that.

I may change the title screen in the future, but i will first implement those dialog boxes and a font.

LOL!

.....
pizza?

read the whole thing. It's a RPG parody.

Hm. Just a question: If i use one of the fonts created with ttftofont.exe must i show a logo or something becasue i used it?

!!!! That's hardcore coding! Cool stuff!

Jay wrote:Hm. Just a question: If i use one of the fonts created with ttftofont.exe must i show a logo or something becasue i used it?

No.