drludos
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[Beta] MeteoRain (Game Boy Advance)
🕑 Added 2021-07-03 22:24:24 +0000 UTCHi everyone!
Here is a beta for a new game I created for the Game Boy Advance, to participate in the GBA Jam 2021: MeteoRain
Meteors are falling from the sky! Avoid them as long as possible to make an high score!
This is a port/remake of a previous homebrew game I did for the SEGA Mega Drive / Genesis. But for the GBA Jam, I programmed this version from scratch as it's 100% made in Lua! Indeed, I used the wonderful BPCore-Engine by Evan Bowman that allows to create a GBA games in Lua. If you ever used a fantasy console like PICO-8 or TIC-80, it's a very similar tool, but the resulting game will run on an actual console, our beloved Game Boy Advance!
If you want to try your hand at making GBA games, I really recommend you BPCore-Engine: it's a real pleasure to make games with it. And I'm also sharing the heavily commented code source of my game if it can help you making your own GBA games in Lua: https://github.com/drludos/meteorain-gba
Looking for a challenge?
My current record is 247 points. Here is the proof:
As usual, I'll hope enjoy the game, and any feedback is very welcome, as the deadline for the Jam is in one week (July 12th).
Comments
Hi Brian, thanks a lot for your very helpful and constructive feedback (as usual :))! Regarding score display, it was actually displayed onscreen at first. But I had to remove it for performance reasons. As the game is coded in Lua (an interpreted language), it's way slower than C or ASM, especially on a limited machine like the GBA (compared to modern computers). It was really fun and interesting to make a game in Lua for GBA (and the tool I used is very well made), but it's more suited to slower paced games than action-based ones with lots of moving elements. So I had to choose between reducing the total number of meteors on screen (so less interesting gameplay) and displaying score, and I choose to focus on gameplay. But I also find that removing score display helps to focus on the meteors falling :). By-the-way, I'm cutting the meteors impact sound after a while for the same reason: when there are too many meteors on screen, playing sound effects cause slowdown. I managed to synchronize the sounds no longer being played with the music changing rhythm so players won't notice (hopefully). But ideally I would have loved to keep sound effects playing all the time too.
I could totally see this as a mini-scene in a larger game... ie, the player is moving from one base to another, and has to dash across the planet to get to the next one while dodging the hail of asteroids...
Fun! I am conflicted on the score not being displayed... It keeps you focused, but also makes you wonder how you are doing. As in-betweens, I could see having a non-digital score display (ie, a thermometer style gauge) where perhaps the bar represents your score vs prior high score (when there is one) and you still guess how far you have gone past it? At the least, I'd like to know if I beat my old score/am in the middle of a new high score (perhaps could make a sound/color pop/etc when that happens).
