Space Raiders Game Boy Jam 9
Role: Programmer, Artist
Date: September 28th, 2021
Game Boy Jam is a yearly 1 week long game development jam, held purely for fun, to challenge one’s self into making a game that would roughly work on the original DMG Game Boy.
Previously I had entered some years ago with Pirate Pop Plus, this did well enough to turn into a real boy on the Switch.
This year I decided to turn my hobby interest of 3D graphics on 8bit computers, into something more tangible. Putting to use my research on the topic and many pot shot questions I’d fired at game devs who had experience in this field, like Dylan Cuthbert.
The result is a game that borrows from many places, let’s be honest it mostly borrows from Star Fox on the Super Nintendo, and applies imaginary constraints from X on the Game Boy. (Dylan Cuthbert was a programmer on both)
Recreating this kind of thing in Unity isn’t particularly straight forward, and I had to do a fair bit of research on GL line drawing and make a bunch of custom shaders, and a custom camera stack.
Creating this was very cathartic for me. I got a good look into some of the questions that must have arisen back in those days, and why certain design decisions were made. The ships control system using only d-pad, locking the player into a linear track and so on, is standing on the shoulders of others who figured this stuff out way before I came along. All I had to do was reverse engineer using c# and a bit of guess work. Theres so much more I wanted to add, maybe best saved for another project.
The game turned out to be fun, go play the game right in your browser at https://hawken.itch.io/space-raiders!
