This is a project I’ve been working on:

Prefrontal Mega is an asteroids-like shoot ’em up come memory puzzle.

It uses the excellent SGDK and as such the project is written in the C programming language. The sprites are all created with Asesprite and GIMP. It has been a lot of fun to create this project up until this point and working with the dockerised SGDK toolchain has been a relative breeze. In some respects working this way is even nicer/easier than working with e.g. SDL, as this provides animated sprites for example out of the box.

You do have to watch out for some potential foot guns such as defaulting to lower sized integers can result in unexpected overflow related bugs. An overflow with a 16-bit integer causing a strange collision detection bug took some troubleshooting. The fact that there are no floating points means some work around is needed there.

The SGDK does in fact provide fixed point types however I opted to simply do pure integer arithmetic for the most part which can be accomplished relatively efficiently in a lot of cases by multiplying by 1024 (and using right shifts/left shifts where appropriate) which is very close to just using a multiplier of 1000.

I’ve had a lot of fun with the horizontal scroll features of the hardware to create these phase in-out effects featured in the video. I don’t have a recording of this at the moment, but I can confirm that it works on physical hardware at this stage and with good performance.

If you enjoyed this post and would like to see more on this project and other game dev related ventures, give me a like to let me know you’re out there!