Thordar's Adventure (early in-dev)

[DelphiMarkus]

Hi!

As it currently is rather quiet on the forums, I thought I might present my current project for Gamebuino. I want to create a small adventure / RPG for the Gamebuino currently named "Thordar's Adventure". It is set in world with Vikings (e.g. the protagonist), real monsters like wolves and some fantasy-like monsters I don't know about yet.
I'm looking at games like The Legend of Zelda and Final Fantasy to get some inspiration and to get a view what might be possible to implement on GB and what is probably too resource hungry. RAM is the most critical resource we have on the GB which influences dynamic in complex games like an adventure. So I try to get as much out of our little RAM as I'm able to do which includes many compromises.

Currently all map data is stored in ROM but I think about moving it to the SD to conserve ROM for game logic and quests. I would really appreciate if I manage to move map and quest data to the SD card which would enable some modding and great expansion. Therefore I try to separate the game into two parts: game engine and game content (maps, quests, ...).

And now for a picture of the current state:

First test with a sprite on the map.

Thordar_rev3_1.png (1.58 KiB) Viewed 7144 times

For some more information about building the game and some technical information see README.md.

I created a BitBucket repository:
https://bitbucket.org/DelphiMarkus/thordar-for-gamebuino/src/
Which does contain the current development builds as ELF and HEX:
https://bitbucket.org/DelphiMarkus/thordar-for-gamebuino/src/default/bin/

[Matrix828]

I love the idea

[erico]

Me too, really great!
Look at some of the 8bit rpgs back on commodore or trs80 color for some inspirations.

[DelphiMarkus]

Hi!

Thanks erico, for the tip to look for RPGs from the Commodores etc. I took a look at Ultima IV but I want to have a little more action like in The Legend of Zelda (I'm talking about the first Zelda game, not current ones. ). Ultima is somewhat "round-based" but still great inspiration.

Just a quick update on the current state. Sprites and bullets(/projectiles) are implemented, so I can start to implement the first enemies. I added petit_fatfs library to read map data from SD card which works fine. To be compatible with gbsim, which does not support reading files from an SD card, I introduced a switch PROGMEM_MAP to turn off the sd card and enable loading the map from ROM.

I created a small video showing most (if not all) current implemented features:

[rodot]

Nice ! I really have to look at you source code because when I tried to run the petit fat FS library along with the gamebuino library the screen would stay blank. Did you use the libraries provided on git hub ? Did you alter them ?

[DelphiMarkus]

I used the libraries from the Gamebuino repository and altered/improved them in terms of memory usage. E.g. I don't need to read folders and no 32 byte buffer for a path the original petit fatfs library uses. So I removed everything I didn't need and it saved me several bytes.
I changed nothing about the communication to the SD card. And it runs fine on my Gamebuino...

[Myndale]

Weird, I just tried the HEX file and it runs fine on both my Gamebuinos. Runs fine in my emulator too and the RAM dump shows there's no problem memory-wise.

[DelphiMarkus]

The version of the HEX file (and ELF as well) does not load the map from an sd card.
I think I should add a second version which loads the map from sd. With the map loaded from sd card, there is less RAM available as I need to hold the map in RAM. Which adds 258 Bytes to the RAM usage, plus some structs used by petit fatfs to read the fat16 file system.

[albertinjo]

This game looks great, I can not wait to try it on my "fakebuino".

[erico]

I get the style you are looking into,
some of these examples could inspire graphic wise maybe.

Pairs, top to down:
Old Dark Caves 2, Legends, Legends 2, The Magic Candle.

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