The Best 2D Space Shooter Ever Made...

...was of course Gradius 3. Some may argue with that statement, but that game gave me countless hours of enjoyment on the Super NES. Even today I still have fun playing it. So when a fellow hobbyist game developer clued me in to the world of homebrew GameBoy Advance games, I pretty much knew immediately what game I'd love to make for it. Doing Gradius 3 for the GBA would pose few problems, if any, since the GBA is essentially a hand-held SNES.


Creating a GBA game for my second dev experience seemed like a good fit because I would be working in a console environment, but without the scariness of jumping head-first into full-blown 3D. It turned out to be a very fun project, I thoroughly enjoyed having to design for a limited-memory and limited-capability system (getting all five of the parallaxed starfields to operate within just one of the four hardware tilemap layers was quite a challenge in itself).

The video below is the demo game I put together. Sadly I stopped working on it before it could be considered a "complete" game - it was reaching a point of diminished returns for my time and effort, so I thought it would be better to move on to something else. The entire thing is written in C and was tested on the VisualBoy Advance GBA emulator.



The video is a bit choppy (to keep the file size down) but the game runs at a smooth 60 FPS. Well, technically it runs at 59.73 FPS (2^24 clock speed with a full screen refresh taking exactly 280,896 cycles), but who's counting...