FoonLudum Dare ExplorerLD46 → Keep the GameBoy alive. (on GameBoy Advance)

Keep the GameBoy alive. (on GameBoy Advance)

By timo-strating

View on ldjam.com

CategoryRankScoreCount
Overall3253.6342
Fun3383.5242
Innovation3043.5642
Theme7993.3241
Graphics8902.7941
Humor8521.6930
Mood7022.9835

Comments

team-prosit 2020-04-20 12:11

Good job! I like this kind of games where you need to concentrate, react quickly and remember difficult patterns. It'd be great having some GBA music in the background.

munkkeli 2020-04-20 13:38

Oh man... An actual GBA rom. Incredible stuff. The gameplay is also very fun and addicting. You really have to focus, and I do like that. An excellent entry overall.

watswat5 2020-04-20 23:03

As a huge fan of Ratchet and Clank, I can sppreciate this faithful remake of one of the most frustrating parts of the second game.

samueldeboni 2020-04-20 23:11

Very nice game. Just for the work to make a gba game alone this game deserve good scores, but not only that you also came up with a great mechanic.

izokia 2020-04-21 00:16

I can't get the web emulator to work

fryer 2020-04-21 00:53

I like the idea, but the progression throws a lot at you fast. I barely got past the 4th level before being overwhelmed.

xfinktion 2020-04-21 01:03

nicely done!

timo-strating 2020-04-21 01:08

@izokia I tried it on all mayor (linux available) browsers end even on mobile, but a friend of me sad that as well sometimes it just does not work. Maybe its because you are using an old browser that does not support webassembly. Or its a browser policy like a cross origin block that certain specific browsers force.

If you have any insights on how I could fix it than that is more than welcome, a screenshot of the dev console when it is not would also be very nice to have.

woergbi 2020-04-21 01:49

This game is honestly amazing. It really got me hooked. I spent more time on it than I expected. Great entry!

endurion 2020-04-21 08:21

Really good game! And boy, am I confused fast :) But still, I won! Very nice that you only set back the player one level, and not at the very beginning. Keeps the frustration low.

It's just missing some nice music.

jsec 2020-04-21 10:11

Cool game, love GB vibe B)

munmungames 2020-04-21 10:13

Funny idea, simple but efficient. Going one level back when you loose is raging, yet addictive somehow :laughing: Congrats !

adry 2020-04-21 10:31

had some visual bugs on visual boy, also i got mad because i had the emulation speed at 200% and i wasn't able to beat the game. Very nice making a real gba rom, good job.

vaanrile 2020-04-21 11:37

Really nice game overall ! Although quite simple, it gets tricky very quickly. I am not the biggest fan of the fact that if you fail twice, you go back to the beginning of the game, but it forces you to get better at the game, so it is helpful to finish the final levels. Also, knowing that the game works on a GBA emulator is really impressive, so great job !

100th-coin 2020-04-21 17:40

Wow, neat work making a gameboy game in 48 hours! It's pretty tough, and i kept begin sent back to a previous level when i died. That doesn't feel intentional, but perhaps it is.

mightycode 2020-04-21 17:56

This game is very impressive when we know that it work on emulator. Good idea too for the mechanic of gameplay according the theme. Great Compo.

jvdwijk 2020-04-21 22:01

I liked this, it had a very interesting mechanic and it is really cool that its a gameboy game.

zanthous 2020-04-24 01:11

Cool game concept, just feel like a bit more time before the first action is required on some levels would be nice to have.

mlho7 2020-04-24 11:03

This is simple and addictive, not that easy, very well done. +1 overall point for the gba rom, great idea.

manimal 2020-04-24 19:46

Pretty hard, simple controls, for me some nostalgic music is missing, try beepbox.co

timo-strating 2020-04-24 20:55

@manimal thanks for the recommendation. A friend of me did the implementation of running a midi file on a gba back in 2019. So it would not have been to difficult. But he said that the sound chip was not documented at all. He only got 3 channel music working in the end, with some strange bugs like the first note that gets skipped. So because I knew it would be hard te get it to work and because i knew most people would play it in the web emulator (the webemulator is not that fast and may change the music) I skipped it.

It is definitely something I should improve in upcoming events. In some of my old entries (5x unity) I have used audiotool.com but that software has crashed more times on me than that i have exported melodies from there. So i will definitely give some other tools a try next time around. Thanks for the tip.

meelo 2020-04-25 01:30

This was fun - once I got into the groove of it, I really enjoyed the simple mechanic and the challenge of watching the little dots (electrons? haha) move around. I wish it had lasted longer though - I think I finished the game in about 2 minutes total. It might have been nice to have a bit of time before each level began to examine the setup in order to avoid the "oh no, I don't know how to respond to this at all" feeling when things happen too soon. I'm not sure how I feel about being set back a level on losing. I sort of enjoyed the extra tension, but I can imagine that getting old real fast if the challenges were more substantial.

bentglasstube 2020-04-28 04:48

This was a simple but addicting puzzle/timing game. Despite initial concerns about how simple it was, I found myself playing it for quite a while. I never played the Ratchet and Clank games, so I'm guessing the reference there is important to understanding why you made this for the GBA, but kudos anyway. That's too bad about the complexity of making music on the console. Even some simple sound effects would add a lot to this.

mango-malarkey 2020-04-28 15:31

Neat little game! I think you nailed the difficulty in this short game. At least for me, it took a couple of tries, but I managed, making me feel good - just the way a game should. It is a little short and small in scope, but interesting challenge in making it work for GBA! Good job!

ithildin 2020-04-28 22:14

Cool entry! Deceptively simple, but it gets challenging FAST (not complaining, eventually you get into the zone and start learning the patterns).

I tried it on a second-hand GBA and it ran without issues, even if the contrast was a bit low in occasions (it could be the hardware).

Congrats for targetting that platform, I've checked TONC tutorials in the past for GBA and NDS, but never gathered enough inspiration to try and do something, even less for a 48-72h jam :sweat_smile:

Amazing work! :D

timo-strating 2020-04-28 22:48

wow thanks @ithildin, nice to hear that it worked on a actual gameboy. In the first gba game that I made with some other developers we had the exact same issue regarding the lighting. When you have a modded gameboy with a IPS screen everything is fine. But indeed the normal gameboy screen is very dark. So back then we just made the contrast very big so that it would look normal.

chaotikza 2020-05-09 14:11

Wow very interesting! I can get to about level 5 or 6, but then stuff happens too fast for me to follow, so didn't get beyond that. Level select rather than playing through the previous level again would've been nice for seeing more of the levels.