25 June 2020

PAF Day 5: Halfway through

by ChatPion

Today we are exactly halfway through this project’s allocated time − time really flies when you’re having fun! Anyway, here’s today’s program: struggling with Jekyll, struggling with gbdk-2020, map generation, more character movements, and graphics.

Blogging with Jekyll

Jekyll is really handy for blogging, but for some reason, it fully displayed @Ametheek’s post instead of only showing its excerpt. What’s more, the contents of her post (in Markdown) looked exactly like the other posts. After some digging, it turns out that Jekyll does not like Windows-style line endings (CRLF - \r\n). It may be possible to configure Jekyll to avoid this problem, but frankly, I don’t want to spend more time setting this website up…

Struggling with gbdk-2020

Switching from assembly to gbdk-n to gbdk-2020 was not an easy feat. While some of us did not have any problems compiling gbdk-2020 and running the include examples, @RoussyE couldn’t even compile it. Fortunately, @nazebzurati’s comment fixed his problems. He could finally run gbdk-2020’s sound example and listen to Twinkle twinkle little star on an emulator. Hopefully, he’ll be able to decipher the sample’s source code and play music on his own.

Map generation

I began to implement the room generation algorithm in C. It’s funny how I have to be wary of everything: inlining functions as often as possible (and avoid stack overflows), using as few bits as possible and in general, being extremely aware of the amount of memory I’m using. Worst case, I’ll have to write some parts in assembly if optimizations are required. If I’m lucky, I may be able to generate rooms tomorrow.

Character movements

By refactoring the original code a bit, we were able to easily add diagonal movements. For the time being, we will not create animations for this because the number of required animations would explode. Now, next step: dashing!