Technologies used: Z80 language, RGBDS, GBTD, GBMB
Golden Sacra is an adventure, RPG or nethack game, for the original Game Boy, which
is influenced by titles such as Pokémon Mystery Dungeon or Shiren the Wanderer.
The game works by turns: there will be a turn for player action and another for each enemy.
Each time we attack, move or use an object, our turn will be consumed. The gameplay is
mainly developed inside a dungeon, composed of different floors that we can access thanks
to some stairs that can be found in each one.
It is done entirely in assembly language or Z80, from scratch. As a final defree project, this took around 11 months to be developed. Not only because of the difficulty of the language, but also the fact of programming in a totally unknown environment.
At the beggining, I started with small goals, like just showing one sprite, animate it and making it move. No physics or collisions check for the moment.
As months passed I was able to implement the basic logic of the game, as well as some enemies, transitions, some random audio and menu popups. There was a huge problem though: the game was way too slow. For that reason I spent some months reprogramming the entire project, from an Object Oriented to an Entity-Component-System archquitecture. In the following twits you can appreciate the difference in performance:
Almost all that was left to do was to improve the graphics and add some real sounds. Even though I couldn’t finish all the goals I had in mind since the start, I think I got a great small game overall. In the future I’ll probably continue to develop it: