PAF Day 1: Hello world!
by ChatPion
I hereby declare that this devlog is open! What is this devlog about? We, team Kirby, are going to make a The Binding of Isaac-inspired game for the original Game Boy and we will talk about our ideas, plans, difficulties and progress here.
Today
Here’s a quick recap of what happened:
- Install party
- Setting up our environment on GitHub
- Crash course in gameboy assembly language
- Practice
Install party
Basically, we ensured everybody is able to assemble assembly programs and run it on a gameboy emulator (vba-m or BGB)
- Setup the Windows Subsystem for Linux (to make everyone use the same assembly toolchain)
- Setup the assembly toolchain
- Setup a gameboy emulator (vba-m, bgb)
GitHub
We properly set the git repositories up:
- choose our workflow (one protected master branch + pull requests + code reviews)
- manage permissions
- setup the devlog using Jekyll
We intend to use as many available features as we can (pull requests, code reviews, releases, github pages, etc.)
Gameboy assembly language
Basically, we used this repository made by our dear Jean-Marie from Team Rocket.
Even though this language is not complex per se, we still struggled because of some subtleties, such as :
- not all combinations of instructions and operands are available, like
ld (nn),nn - spaces are important: labels are written
label:and notlabels :
What kind of game are we going to make?
Whilst the other team plans to make an accurate reproduction of The Binding of Isaac (and adapt the twin stick shooter gameplay to the gameboy), we intend to keep the spirit of the game (a roguelike + some features) and make our own game.
Coming up next
During the week-end:
- complete tutorials (code a Pong)
Monday, we planned to do the following:
- give a git crash course (redo the basics if needed and show our planned git workflow)
- define the calling conventions
- define the gameplay
Random thoughts
- a crash course in debugging using vba-m or bgb would be nice
- we should consider pair programming