Super Retro Beat: TURBO

SRB: TURBO title screen

Inspiration

Well our Team Lead, Daniel, has been a child of Game Boy Assembly code for many years. In his free time he enjoys disassembling Pokemon Roms and creating mods for his favorite old school Pokemon games. Naturally, He dragged Austin and Zach Down the Rabbit Hole for a frustrating, yet very rewarding weekend.

What it does

A true test of skill, determination, and most of all: Timing! Super Retro TURBO is the guitar hero in your pocket that you never got to have! So dust off that 'ole gameboy and play a rhythm-based game.

How we built it

Built ENTIRELY in ASSEMBLY. Yes you read that correct. (Our Git Hub technically says 99.2% Assembly and .8% Makefile, but what can you do). Everything is of our own design, from the pixel art that ends up being the screen in the game, to the sounds engine that drives the wonderful selection of 3 songs. (We transposed the songs ourselves but you may recognize a few of them...)

Challenges we ran into

A lot of the Game Boy Developer information was not publicly released or was very poorly documented. Mostly in the terms of how the Audio Registers work exactly on the GameBoy. There was a large portion of our weekend dedicated to just getting a sound to fire just because of how the behavior of the vaguely named sound registers was unpredictable. There were some technical challenges, but we eventually were able to work through most of them and derive the solution.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Well Once we got the sound engine figured out, we were able to make the game run really successfully and well. Yes there Is actual music even though we didn't think it was going to happen for a bit. There are little details from the score being incremented so smoothly to the powerups that players get after streaks of 10, to the animated flames on the title screen. These are what we are proud of.