itch.io

I used the butano game engine
https://github.com/GValiente/butano
My source code is here (though be warned, it's VERY messy)
https://github.com/blaise-rascal/KnightOwls
If you want to try out gbadev, the following discord server is a great place to talk shop:
Discord
Overall, it was a lot of fun for me to make this GBA game, but I don't think I'll ever do another GBA project, simply because the GBA sound card is terrible. I really don't want to go to the effort to figure out how to use it to make good-sounding music.

this is amazing. should have scored way, way higher in the gbajam competition

I'm glad you enjoyed the game! I drew the sprite for Herman early in the game's development, and then just never bothered making a different final boss, haha.

It works in the browser now! Best of luck on this (difficult) game

Gotcha. Well, if you ever want to start making your own Knight Owls game, let me know. It's possible we could share the name (as long as our games were different enough from each other they wouldn't be confused)

It's a great pun, isn't it? Hopefully my game does the pun justice...

hi there! mgba is free & easy to download: https://mgba.io/downloads.html

as far as making the game playable without an emulator, that is certainly something I will look into. but it's tough; i'm just one person, and there are other things i'd like to work on with this game... only so many hours...

Thanks so much for the kind words! You should check out Slay the Spire if you haven't. It's pretty much THE deck-building roguelike on Steam. In fact, it's such a massive hit, that indie devs like me have a hard time getting out from the game's shadow and making something new. Knight Owls was my attempt to do something similarly fun, but different enough to feel fresh. (Warning: Slay the Spire is quite addicting...)

Also, thanks for the Morpheus art. Definitely got a laugh out of me

Good point! Maybe someday I can put in a pause menu, and start will be used only for that. Thanks for playing!

Thank you so much for the reply, Deft Spade!

I've managed to mostly solve my issue by choosing louder samples and cranking up their volume, to drown out the noise. (If you make your song in beepbox, the instruments that work well for this include, at the very least: contrabass, voice synth, french horn, cello, and standard drumset; just export as .mid and convert to xm by openmpt and it should work fine.) And I'm also learning to embrace the noise. It is perhaps part of the "charm" of developing for these old systems... Oh, and maybe I'll try increasing the mixing rate. Thanks so much for the help, Spade, and everyone else! Making music this way is pretty fun :)

Thanks for this guide! Anyone know why I'm getting loud white noise whenever a note plays? I only get noise in mgba, not in beepbox nor openmpt. See this video:

https://github.com/blaise-rascal/KnightOwls/blob/main/screenshots/noise.mp4

To transfer my song to my game, I'm doing the following:
1. IN BEEPBOX: Export as .mid
2. IN OPENMPT: Open the .mid file
3. IN OPENMPT: Go to View -> Song Properties and change Type to Impulse Tracker IT. Click OK.
4. IN OPENMPT: Click File -> Compatibility Export -> save it in a place where my butano game can see it.

You're welcome to see my source code as well, by checking out the github repo above. And here's the beepbox file. (Itch.io won't let me embed the beepbox link, so just click this file and copy the string into your browser.)
https://github.com/blaise-rascal/KnightOwls/blob/main/editables/beepbox-link.txt

I've tried a bunch of things, but nothing seems to be working. Any help would be greatly appreciated!

I like w3schools for practical c++: https://www.w3schools.com/cpp/default.asp

That page has example programs, exercises, and text explanations for whatever style learning you prefer.

Once you've studied a bit, it's probably a good idea to download an editor like Visual Studio Code and try recreating these programs yourself. Good luck!

It looks like the last update on the git repo was march 2020, and the last update here on itch.io was much later, in october 2020. My guess is that the developer chose to go closed-source with this project.

You experienced all of the game that there is. Thanks for the comments and tips

This is so amazing! Made it through without the walkthrough, no big deal

Cute graphics! Perhaps jumping should have been a bit slower. Nice work!

Loved the graphics! Also, it was a successful fake-out, lol.

Does the game end, or just go on forever? Also, you may want to consider adding a fire-rate mechanic, so that your fire isn't just whenever you click the button.

Loved the art, and music, and all the cute details. Not sure why the penguin would start and stop repeatedly when going upward. Great work!

Nice job! Loved the little jetpack. Some of the randomly generated layouts felt significantly easier than others.

Cute game! Loved how you interact with the environment. I couldn't figure out crafting; I would press C, then C again, and then the crafting menu went away forever.

Thanks! On the last day of the game jam, I had no main character, but I had a dino sprite that a team member had drawn in the first few days of the jam, for a unit that never made its way into the game. Lucky coincidence that it worked well for the main character!

e g g

goongratulations!

goongrats!

Thanks! There are 56 total unique eggs, submitted by about 9 different people!

Really fun & chill game. Everything from the audio design to the little movement of the red line when you change radio stations felt like it had great attention to detail. Awesome work!

An eggcyclopedia is a great idea! It'll go in the post jam version for sure. Thanks!

Thanks! Someone suggested I separate the descriptions into an "eggcyclopedia." I'd love to do that, and also tweak things so the chickens are a bit easier to keep alive. This wasn't supposed to be such a brutally tough game, haha

Excellent idea for the peaceful mode! I'll try to add it in the post jam version (if I make a post jam version)

Another thought: I really think this game would benefit from the maps being split into specific "rooms," similar to Binding of Isaac. Some of the rooms would be the same size as the game window, and some would be larger and thus require panning (again, similar to binding of isaac). Whenever you cross over into another room, the camera would rapidly pan to the new room.

The game world would still be all one contiguous piece, but I think that splitting things up with the camera would help with the cohesion of the world. It would allow me to more clearly delineate which areas of the world are different from each other; perhaps some rooms could be "challenge rooms," where you have to do a platforming challenge or a puzzle to get a clearly visible "coin." (It's becoming more and more clear that this game needs collectables.) It's also nice for the camera to remain static for longer periods of time, because then you get to see the art more clearly.

Thanks for the compliments. And congrats on the #1!!!

Thank you!

I agree that the hitbox for the raindrop is not great. As I wrote in my postmortem, this is partly due to challenges with the programming of the game; I had trouble writing the code to see which object the raindrop was directly over. Here's hoping I'd have time to fix this in a post-jam version... someday...

Thanks for the review!

Thanks!

Hmm, multiple people have suggested that the cloud should move more slowly if it's bigger, so maybe I should look into that! :)
Thanks for the review!

Thanks so much!

 The controls were definitely very "floaty." This was partly by design, though I wish I'd turned it down a bit.

And yes, there's nothing to do after reaching 101%. I could have made the game end there, but I thought maybe people might wanna continue exploring the island. Again, probably not ideal.

Thanks for the review!

Fun little puzzle platformer! The claymation isn't just a gimmick; it legitimately looks really really good. Massive kudos for creativity!

I might have preferred a mechanic where you could CHOOSE which element you want to leave behind you, from the elements you have at your disposal. At first, I was stressing out over which order I picked up the guys, because I thought I'd be unable to solve the puzzles if I picked them up in the wrong order. It ended up not really mattering, but I'd still like to offer that possibility for your consideration!