New Game for the Game Boy: INTO THE BLUE

Hi!

I'd like to show you INTO THE BLUE, a new game I just released. It's for the Game Boy, but I hope it is still not a problem to post it in this section. The goal of my project was to create a game that looks and feels like a commercial game from back in the day. The result is a puzzle game that plays similar to Tetris Attack.

It's free, so please check it out on my website https://the-green-screen.com!

Here are some screenshots:



I hope that you like it!

This is cool! But I keep on having a problem with creating single columns of tiles and I can't clear them.

Out of curiosity, when I look at the ROM, I see that banks 2-5 each contain a copy of a random subset of the previous bank. Do you think it might be possible to pack this into a 64K ROM instead of a 128K ROM?

Thanks lidnariq!



The complete code of the game fits in banks 1 and 2. Banks 2 to 5 contain only music and sound data. I use a self-made music engine that stores all the music data uncompressed, so it is plausible that there is a lot of redundancy in these banks. With some compression the whole game would surely fit in 4 banks but I simply didn't care about the size of the ROM file.

I wasn't really thinking about compression. I was just observing that it tentatively looks like there's actually only 64K of data in the eight 16K banks.
Banks #7 and 8 are all 0, the last 8187 bytes of bank #6 is a copy of the last 8187 bytes of bank #5, the last 2087 bytes of bank #5 are a copy of the last 2087 bytes of bank #4, the last 2545 bytes of bank #4 are a copy of the last 2545 bytes of bank #3, the last 9240 bytes of bank #3 are a copy of the last 9240 bytes of bank #2. (i.e. your linker is doing something a little confusing?)

I guess if I add up all the maybe-padding, there's 8187+2087+2545+9240+375+5296 = 27730 bytes, which isn't quite 32768, so converting from the current 96K to 64K would actually require effort instead of just shuffling.

Same thing I noticed (even though I try to avoid such a single column, by breaking the panels underneath and by other ways). But game still seems good though.

I tried the game and it look good but I have no idea on how to play the game so I'm just playing randomly I need to learn the rule first before giving a better review. I'm not much knowledgeable about puzzle game unfortunately.

It's a match-three game (like Tetris Attack or Bejeweled) crossed with a sliding-tile puzzle.

OK, I understand. The reason for this is probably that RGBDS fills empty space with something else. As already stated, there should only be code and data in banks 0 to 5, the rest should be empty. In banks 2 to 5 there should be some space left over in each bank. This is because I wanted to keep the data for each of the four songs (title screen plus three in-game songs) in one bank. The space after the respective song should be empty (which it apparently isn't).



Normally single colums start to pile up either on the very right or left side of the screen. If you want to get better, try to clear panels on the very right or left wherever you can and avoid to clear too much from the middle of the screen. For beginners it's also better to clear panels horizontally instead of vertically to avoid building single columns.



Match three panels horizontally or vertically to let them disappear. Press B to let the next line of panels appear immediately. Pressing Start will pause the game.

Yes, I did think of that and tried to do that and that is how I managed to try. Now I can try again.

Is there a high score menu?

Hope that you like it!

Sorry, but there is no high score menu. You can check your final score on the game over screen but the game doesn't save it.

It's apparently hard enough to manufacture a production cartridge with an MBC so it can address more than 32K of ROM, let alone battery RAM to save the high score across a power cycle. Catskull cartridges are only 32K and have neither an MBC nor battery RAM, and this limit has led developers of homebrew Game Boy games to omit battery RAM support from their game designs.

Or is zzo38 playing on an EverDrive GB X5 or other flash cart with SRAM?

Looks (and sounds) good! I'm currently struggling with making compresion work for lil deflemask to gameboy (GBDK) convertor I'm working on. It plays okay but I can see massive gains in music compression. Just need to get the bugger to work properly!

Really smooth looking game, I always appreciate the work going into that kind of stuff.
However, it appears to me a lot of the symbols are ripped pretty much straight from Mario and Kirby games, is that right? At least they look awfully familiar in the way they are drawn. I think this is a game that definitely deserves original graphics.

Thanks! The visual design is heavily inspired by the games you mentioned and that obviously shows but the assets are still all my own work (the only exception being the music which consists of chiptune renditions of songs by famous Ragtime composer Scott Joplin).

It's a shame there's no real support for homebrew gameboy cartridges (to be sold) over the 32kb limit.

I'm currently waiting for an old 32kb gameboy color game I made a while ago to be put onto cartridge, although if I hear of anyone with MBC support I'll let you know if you're interested of course.

Most of the programmable logic options seem to blow the DMG's power budget.

But we could easily make reproductions of Wisdom Tree's GB discrete logic mapper.

Maybe I'll ever get around to actually designing and placing an order for parts for my "DMG mapper for self-flashing"

Wisdom Tree's GB mapper is the one that's like BNROM, correct?

Would a 2-chip mapper (74HC161 quad latch with binary counter + 74HC08 quad AND) implementing the same logic as UNROM (180) blow the power budget? (The '161 might need to be replaced with something different for clock and enable polarity.) At least it'd be mostly compatible with software designed for a standard MBC and no RAM.

Yes, Wisdom Tree's DMG mapper is basically BNROM.

You're right: as far as I can tell, a pure 74HC-based mapper should be fine, other than geometry constraints. With the caveat that using a single 74'08 restricts you to 256K of ROM. And that a 512K ROM can emulate the standard MBC memory map of a 256K ROM by modifying the image to be flashed.

True. For now, we'll cross that bridge when the scene as a whole gets to it. And right now, the scene has "got to" 64K, 128K, and 256K.

Thanks rychan, please keep me updated!

In the context of my earlier project "Retroid" I got hold of a PCB layout that works with ROMs up to 256kb. If you need that, feel free to drop me a PM or a message via the contact form on my website.

Ohhhh! Yeah, that would be interesting! I've no experience with making PCBs but I know someone local who does!

I made a topic in the GB section here listing all providers of boards. If you have new ones, can you post there?

I think it should be fixed so that the scores are not always a multiple of ten, by dividing the existing scores by ten, so that more points will fit on the display at once, because currently it is not enough.

Seriously? In endless hours of bug-testing, I managed to max out the score counter only once (and only in easy mode). In most cases I end up with a score that is way lower. I'd rather doubt that anybody can reach the maximum without a lot of practice.

I have my own cartridge design with 8 MiB of Flash, 128 KiB of SRAM (battery backed) and a working implementation of the MBC5 mapper. I have also a USB programmer designed to burn the cartridges. This should cover with ease all the needs of any homebrew GB/GBC game!

You should always expect people to take your game to much a further extent than you can mange yourself! If they do that, it's only a sign of good game design.

If anyone is curious, here is a render of the cartridge design, and a photograph of the programmer and a prototype assembled (excepting the SRAM and the battery circuit).

Lovely game. I played it for a good hour, and was getting the hang of the strategy I think.

This makes me want to try a bit of GB dev now too. Easily my favorite handheld ever, I still have mine next to my bed 25+ years later. I've just never found myself to find Z80 assembly fun though. :-\

Thanks - and yes, I agree!



I might be very interested some time in the future and will conatct you in that case. At the moment, I have a PCB design that has all I need but yours seems to have many additional features.



Thank you! I hope you try it some time. The community of Game Boy developers is very small, so every member counts.

This game is good. I made a DOS version too: http://zzo38computer.org/GAMES/MEGAPANE.ZIP