[WIP] Elventure Port

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[WIP] Elventure Port

Postby wuuff » Mon Sep 05, 2016 2:37 am

Hello,

I am mostly done with a port of Team A.R.G.'s Elventure (http://www.team-arg.org/elv-manual.html), and thought I would post it here for comments.

While I'm not new to programming, I had not written anything "on the metal" before. Therefore, I wanted to get started on programming for the gamebuino with a simpler project than making a game from scratch, so I looked for a game I would want to play on the Gamebuino to port to it. All of Team A.R.G.'s games are pretty impressive examples of the capabilities of the Atmega chip, so I chose Elventure, one of their older games, to try to port.

Elventure is a very simple Zelda-inspired game with a large world map and exploration, but a very simple interface and less detail than some of their later games. Considering the Gamebuino's small screen, this was a plus.

However, the Gamebuino's screen was still far too small to fit the contents of each room on screen at once: 12x8 rooms of 8x8 tiles far exceeded the 84x48 screen's dimensions. Therefore I wrote a script that deleted certain rows and columns from the room data, and so every room in the port is slightly more cramped. Also, some rooms lack the center pillars that they had before. I also moved the health and item icons to stack vertically along the right side, where there are 4 pixels of extra space.

The entire game is fully playable, so all the room changes didn't break anything. Changing the graphics drawing library calls wasn't too bad. However, I had much more trouble trying to convert the game music to work with the Gamebuino libraries. I tried to use the documentation to determine how to convert the sound data to the format needed, but I don't have as great an understanding of music theory as I would like and I have not figured out how to convert it right. Instead of sounding like Zelda music, it sounds like the screeches of tortured bagpipes, so I have currently commented out the music playing code and only play a few default sound effects instead. If anyone is interested in taking a look at that part, feel free.

Here's a video of it running on an emulator:



Here's the source:
https://github.com/wuuff/elventure-gamebuino
Last edited by wuuff on Sat Oct 29, 2016 11:21 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: [WIP] Elventure Port

Postby frakasss » Wed Sep 07, 2016 5:33 am

Waw! Looks nice!
Was the original dev done for the Arduboy? (I think I already saw the game here)
If so, is it hard to port games from there to gamebuino?

I'm asking because I saw really interesting games on this gamebuino's sister :-)
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Re: [WIP] Elventure Port

Postby wuuff » Thu Sep 08, 2016 5:49 am

frakasss wrote:Waw! Looks nice!
Was the original dev done for the Arduboy? (I think I already saw the game here)
If so, is it hard to port games from there to gamebuino?

I'm asking because I saw really interesting games on this gamebuino's sister :-)


Thanks!

The original was written for the Gamby Arduino shield, and then they converted it to work on the Hackvision. (For some reason I used the Hackvision version instead of the Gamby version for this port. I think at the time I thought that version might be easier to port, although in retrospect I'm not so sure.) There does appear to be a port for the Arduboy now, but I think it came a while later.

Even though I haven't done so, I expect that porting games from the Arduboy shouldn't be too hard except for a few details. The Arduboy has a 128x64 screen, compared to the 96x64 Gamby screen and 84x48 Gamebuino screen. That's a lot of extra pixels that Arduboy games can use that a Gamebuino game can't, so somehow you would have to crush down the graphics into a smaller space. Also, I'm not sure, but the Gamebuino libraries might be larger than the Arduboy libraries, which means that you could have problems with the game fitting on the device after converting the game to use the Gamebuino library if the original game was hitting the space limits of the Arduboy. Other than that, it should be mostly just swapping out library calls for their equivalents in the other library.
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