Other Posts in This Series
- Introduction (You’re here!)
- Graphics
- Physics
- Collision Detection
- Computer AI
- Screen Transitions
- Postmortem
Wow! My first blog post. Let’s dive right in.
Rocket Pocket League’s Inception
Recently, Psyonix announced that they would be bringing their hit Rocket League game to mobile in Rocket League: Sideswipe. The top voted comment in the announcement thread on Reddit got almost 3,500 upvotes with a joke about how Psyonix should have named it Pocket League.
This, needless to say, got the wheels churning about whether or not the game could be ported to something like… A Gameboy Pocket?
I had previously coded a game for the original Gameboy that I called Ronin (don’t play it, it’s terrible. Seriously). It served more or less to get myself familiar with the hardware, learning one of the main libraries for Gameboy development, and how much I suck at C. I mostly write Ruby for work, and didn’t go to school for CS, so C and C-like languages are totally new to me, but I had a good idea and was excited for the challenge.
With that experience in hand, I set out to port a game that doesn’t even exist yet to the Gameboy Pocket. I present to you: Pocket League!
(Of course I own goaled this…)
Now What?
As of this writing, Pocket League’s latest release is 0.1.1. Development is ongoing, and the last major hurdle is to tackle sound effects and background music. All in all, I’m really happy with how Pocket League came together. I learned am learning a lot from the project and I hope that you can, too.
Plans for This Blog Series
- I’d like this to be around 4 to 8 entries long, more or less as I get feedback.
- Graphics – Pocket League uses four 8x8 pixel sprites per car and rotating the car is actually very complicated
- Physics & collision detection
- AI – How the CPU car predicts where the ball will be and reacts accordingly
- Sound (hopefully, if I can work the kinks out)
Thanks for reading!