I've recently begun alpha testing SATTERM!
It's honestly been great so far; I've found things where I was like "this thing needs to be a feature", one of which is viewing mission flags!
#gameboy #indiegame #retrogaming #gamedev #retro #indiedev #gbdev #nintendo #rgbds #RTS #pixelart
SATTERM is slowly getting ready for its first playtests. I managed to implement the resource quota system today!
#gameboy #indiegame #retrogaming #gamedev #retro #indiedev #gbdev #nintendo #rgbds #RTS #pixelart
Looking to introduce some ✨spice✨ into your money making efforts? Look no further than paying less on transport costs by increasing the risk of your rocket exploding in space!
#gameboy #indiegame #retrogaming #gamedev #retro #indiedev #gbdev #nintendo #rgbds #RTS #pixelart
I've also finished designing the event item viewer for SATTERM. Only the sprite, acquired year, event shortname and artist name will be displayed.
Actual non-programmer art soon to follow!
#gameboy #indiegame #retrogaming #gamedev #retro #indiedev #gbdev #nintendo #rgbds #RTS #pixelart
Managed to finish the new report reviewing system accessible through the Console in SATTERM!
The feature is meant to avoid a low-cash softlock.
#gameboy #indiegame #retrogaming #gamedev #retro #indiedev #gbdev #nintendo #rgbds #RTS #pixelart
For real though, the team that designed the current set of Lidl Mini plushies did such an amazing job.
I bought one of the banana Lidl Mini plushies from Vinted. I am a grownup man, with grownup money, that just wants a silly banana plushie.
A quick reminder that our Homebrew Factory service allows creators to produce and finance physical versions of their NES, Game Boy, GBC, and Mega Drive/Genesis games.
You can also follow all these projects on the dedicated account @homebrew-factory.com
➡️ creator.homebrew-factory.com
In terms of the technical side of this feature: all the data will be retained in save memory. My plan is to have a ROM ONLY for distributing these event gifts. Lastly, there will probably be a load of additional tweaks to this system.
Progress update for the visual viewer of the in-game gift system.
In order we've got the date acquired, the art piece's name, the artist that made the #pixelart, and the location acquired (think gaming events).
#gameboy #indiegame #retrogaming #gamedev #retro #indiedev #gbdev #nintendo #rgbds #RTS
#screenshotsaturday of the in-game gift system I'm busy working on. The plan is to use the Game Boy Color's IR port to transfer sprites over as game convention gifts.
#pixelart #gameboy #indiegame #retrogaming #gamedev #pixelart #retro #indiedev #gbdev #nintendo #rgbds #RTS
Native inhabitants of the planet you're on now appear and can move around!
If bothered by your activity enough, they might try to get you off planet! 😉
#pixelart #gameboy #indiegame #retrogaming #gamedev #pixelart #retro #indiedev #gbdev #nintendo #rgbds #RTS
I didn’t know I need this in my life, but now I do.
we need to talk about that Ring Super Bowl ad
Right, so I want to expand a bit on this. I discovered trying to do math involving exponents is a performance nightmare. Luckily for my needs I can just have the compiler do the work and put preset values on a graph in a data table.
A screenshot of SATTERM showing the alien unit query results of a position on the world map.
I've been working on the in-game alien AI so it's able to launch unit expeditions on the player's location. Super happy with the result so far, even though the math still needs some tweaking.
#pixelart #gameboy #indiegame #retrogaming #gamedev #pixelart #retro #indiedev #gbdev #nintendo #rgbds #RTS
I'm going to need to convince my fiancé to allow me to put this on the coffee table.
The fourth book is live! It includes the Game Boy, Game Boy Color, Game Boy Advance, Nintendo DS, and PlayStation Portable studies.
I'm really happy with the result. You can get a copy here amazon.com/dp/B0GLP3Q8HB
I’ve pondered the whole “I am the god of the world I created” thing as well, and eventually just came to the realisation that what makes the whole process so fun is telling a new story and defining the parameters that the story will fit into. Every idea is possible in the beginning.
The feature can be toggled off on the Game Boy Color as well. 🙂
I just want to clarify that text isn’t doubly stored in the ROM, instead I’m doing a check to see if it’s a DMG, and if so, only write the text as capitals.
Two side-by-side screenshots showcasing different font styles on the original Game Boy versus the Game Boy Color which has more video memory.
It works! The dynamic font selection works!
Left is what text will look like on the DMG and Game Boy Pocket. Right is the Game Boy Color and up!
#pixelart #gameboy #indiegame #retrogaming #gamedev #pixelart #retro #indiedev #gbdev #nintendo #rgbds #RTS
*load, not loan 🫠
Of course the wrench in the works here are icons. I’m able to add icons into my bodies of text. It’s super elegant and efficient, but the current state of my text macro means I’m getting the issue shown in my screenshot. It’s fixable, but I definitely went down a rabbit hole for this feature.
5/5
Back to the font situation. The #gameboy Color has a second VRAM bank. This means it’s the perfect place to load those lowercase fonts into the exact same memory addresses their uppercase counterparts would be, and all I would need to do is change my text macros to account for that.
4/a few
Satterm’s windowing solution doesn’t allow me much room to swap out “unused” tiles from VRAM since it might be the case that those tiles would be drawn behind the window you’re viewing. This I felt would add too much complexity for little gain.
3/a few
Since the game is compatible with the DMG and I can’t do palette swapping to have white on black text, I need to loan 2 coloured variants of the same font into VRAM.
This leaves me with a lack of VRAM space to do the same for lowercase fonts purely because of Satterm’s windowing solution.
2/a few
Since my #gameboy game will support both the original DMG and the Color, I’ve been wanting to add some more Color only features since it has more WRAM and VRAM. One of said features is lower case fonts. It’s been going about as well as you’d expect… #gamedev #indiedev #retro
1/a few
Discovered some amazingly rendered planets made by @screamingbrainstudios.itch.io recently, which just absolutely coincidentally fit what I plan on going for with the box art of #SATTERM!
#gamedev #indiedev #retrogaming #retro #gameboy #gbdev
The intention behind the rework is to have the console view *do more*. The game will include a manifest review system allowing the player to earn more money outside of shipping resources off planet.
