Carazu

Info

Game Name: Carazu
Platform: Gameboy
Programming Language: Assembly
Engine: None
Genre: Sidescrolling Platformer
Team Size: 1

Links

Gamejolt Page
ROM Download
Source Code

How To Play

Play as Carazu the mouse and explore a fantasy world with spikes and creatures that are trying to kill you. Collect power ups as you progress to give Carazu new abilities!

Controls

A to jump (mapped to Z on keyboard)
B to fire Bass Cannon after finding the Bass Rune (mapped to X on keyboard)
D-Pad to move (mapped to arrow keys)
Press Up on DPad to go through doors and to proceed to next level
Press Enter to continue game after receiving an item.

Gameplay Video

Comments

Carazu is a platformer I made before entering FIEA to practice my assembly programming. At FIEA we had to learn 68000 assembly so I decided to practice with Gameboy assembly. Carazu was developed over the span of 2 months, however the first month was spent mostly learning the Gameboy’s hardware. By the end of the first month I had a small single-screen demo where the player could jump and collide with the environment, but that is all.

When I was 6 years old, my parents bought me a Gameboy Pocket, my first gaming console. At that moment I knew I wanted to pursue game development. I was fascinated by the worlds that were created in this little box. Therefore, making a Gameboy game was a very nostalgic and emotional experience. Seeing Carazu running on the very same system that my parents had given me 18 years ago gave me chills.

The limited memory and the slow processing speed of the Gameboy made it a challenge to program. For instance, you only have a small window of time every frame to upload data to video RAM. This made map tile streaming very difficult, and it took a lot of optimization to make it work within these time constraints.

Another obstable was sound. Playing music and sounds were not nearly as simple as with a modern game engine. The gameboy uses 4 sound generators, and to create music, you have to program them through code. I created a simple engine for playing music, but it had several constraints and it definitely wasn’t very efficient memory-wise.