Jess' Cool Forum

Here's my cool side project: I've been working on a maze game for Game Boy Color that stars my mouse fursona Maffi and features her going into randomly generated mazes in a cyberspace world. I have Splatoon-inspired combat where you attack with paint and it marks the ground, with limited but regenerating ammo. All of that combines to make something where you have to be strategic and you'll duck behind randomly generated walls to take cover while your paint restores, and I think that's neat! I haven't prototyped it quite yet (I'm working on that) but I think the gameplay will involve searching the maze for lost critters and taking them to an exit.

I was originally going to do this as a small 32K game and see how much stuff I could fit into that, which gave me the idea to do a game with randomly generated mazes, to try and get a lot of replay value without being able to fit a lot of level, but I realized I was actually really passionate about the idea and I wanted to expand beyond that, and give myself room to do multiple tilesets and lots of animation and not worry about space. It probably won't be more than 64K or 128K though.

I like what I'm currently going for where my main project is on SNES and I'm doing smaller stuff on Game Boy, which feels fitting kind of? A lot of game series in the 90s were doing the same thing, like Kirby. Though SNES + Game Boy Color is anachronistic in a fun way.

It does work on the original Game Boy, and I spent a lot of time trying to optimize the code to be fast enough for that (it turns out the DMG makes the NES look fast haha) though it's a little tricky to play a fast 60 fps action game on that screen. There's always Super Game Boy, though, and I've been having fun playing with getting that all set up. I'd like to draw a proper border, but in the meantime I have the status bar and playfield colored differently, because that's about all you can really do here given the way Super Game Boy does colorization (based on regions of the screen, not tiles and sprites like Game Boy Color does) though I feel like the way I have things looks more colorful than it could have been. There visually end up being areas of the screen that are distinctly "white" or "blue" or whatever the maze wall color is, which I think could change around. There's a lot you can do with just four colors, as I've seen demonstrated with fantasy CGA palettes.

Random generation on Gameboy sounds terrifying, I can't imagine what that code looks like under the hood.

Thankfully, you don't have to imagine it!

It's pretty simple - I just used a maze algorithm from https://museumofzzt.com/article/view/49 ... ostmortem/ (the simple version, not the version that guarantees a solvable maze) but with a chance of not putting a wall, and I do a flood fill to make sure all tiles of the maze are reachable, and I attempt to do simple fixes that allow a tile to become reachable by removing one nearby wall tile.