itch.io

Hey there, thanks for playing! While I wanted to do more, I only ended up having time for a few things. As far as visuals go, I made everything with the memory's limit of 256 tiles in mind. I also worked within sprite limitations. For example, the level tile sets are each 8x8 grids (64 tiles), which left plenty of room for the player and enemy tiles. The reason the player's attacks are so small is because I made it out of what would be 2 4x8 sprites on an actual system. All enemies fit into 8x8 sprites. I don't think there are any situations in game where the object limit comes close to being in play.

On the note of a small memory bank, only having 4 tracked collectibles served a dual purpose of fitting into the theoretical memory limit and giving me less to design. Games like Mega Man only kept track of developer placed pickups for this reason. I wanted to make it so enemies reset when going off screen, but there wasn't time. I believe I only ended up managing to do so for the bush spawned enemies.

As far as audio goes, the game's composer educated me on the limits of the Gameboy's sound chip. This led to the creation of a 4 channel audio system that nodes could send their sounds to with priorities. If a sound being passed into the channel had a higher priority, it would overwrite the file in the player and play the new sound. That's why sounds like the slash can override the landing or checkpoint sounds. I wanted to make it so that playing a sound effect in a channel would also mute its respective music track during the duration of the effect, but once again ran into time constraints. Besides, the unmuting of the music file would really be innacurate to how the gameboy would've processed the audio.

At the end of the day, my hope was to achieve a finished product that could feasibly exist on an actual Gameboy. While I'm no expert, I believe I hit that mark!