PAF Days 6, 7, 8: Back from Pains Perdus HQ

Before we dive into the technical side of things, and because what makes a project is the team behind it, it is worth mentioning that the last few days were a bit special. Until then, two-thirds of our six-person team had been collaborating IRL in an Airbnb we rented specifically to work on this project. Our goal of smoothening out the development process by providing an enjoyable collaborative environment shared with some of our dear competitors/friends from Team Rocket was achieved, but all good things must come to an end, and on Friday, we said goodbye to what would henceforth be known as Piney’s birthplace, and crawled back into the familiarity of our student apartments as we mentally prepared for the last sprint to the Thursday deadline…

Here’s a summary of what was achieved since then:

• We switched our main ROM from gbdk-n to gbdk-2020 as planned. It works, inline assembly can be used (like so: __asm__("ld d, d")), but some oddities were discovered: for example, using inline on functions causes our compilation times to explode. We’re talking 15 seconds for a few hundreds of lines! The cause is unknown as of yet; uncovering it might require a deep dive into SDCC, which would take more time than we can spare, so we might just have to bite the bullet and pay the price of function calls or use macros.

• @ChatPion and @PaulVez respectively got tile-based collision handling and the dashing feature up and running. They were working on their own separate branches, and I (@yberreby) worked on integrating their code, which proved excruciating Game Boy programming comes with a lot of limitations that make writing clean, modular and efficient code extremely hard. A significant number of hours were spent trying to get bugs out, and the movement was so glitchy that things were downright comical at some points, but we eventually got everything working, and published our very first release! The provided pod.gb was tested under BGB:

• @RoussyE has been making solid progress on wrapping his head around the Game Boy sound system, @Ametheek on enemy design, and @AdameBf on enemy handling code. Their work should be detailed in upcoming blog posts!