At this point I had fulfilled my goal, I made a GBA game, a GBA version of Breakout. It also filled all the criteria for the final project, so I could have just been done with the entire thing, and submitted what I had. But I wasn’t satisfied. I could have gone along and finished my version of Scorched Earth, but it was lacking something that most official GBA games made use of. Sprites.

Up until this point, I had been using bitmap video modes on the GBA, but most official games don’t use these modes because they are slow. The GBA has specific Sprite and Tile based video modes which use some clever tricks to run much faster, and this is what most games used, and is what gives most games of the time their signature look. I wanted to learn how to use sprites, so that is exactly what I did.

Sprites and My Little Pony

So I knew that I was going to make something with sprites, but before you make something, you need to have some idea what you are going to make. I did some brainstorming and came up with a number of ideas. One idea was making a version of the puzzle game Columns for the GBA, and keeping the original art style. However, I didn’t do this because Columns Crown, although having a different art style than the original, did already exist on the GBA.  I also contemplated making a version of the NES puzzle game Yoshi, but I ended up not doing so because, to be honest, I have never been able to wrap my head around how to code the logic for puzzle games (this was another reason why I did not make Columns). I was also thinking of making a platformer, but I knew it would take a lot of work to get the various systems set up, not to mention needing to design multiple levels and creating a lot of art. My final idea was a side-scrolling shooter, or shootemup, which was similar enough to a platformer in that it is 2D side-scrolling, but without setting up all the physics or needing extensive level design. All I needed now was a theme.

Sometime during the semester, someone convinced me to watch the newly released My Little Pony: A New Generation movie on Netflix. I like watching cartoons and animated movies in general, and I actually enjoyed the movie. One thing leads to another, and I found myself watching the MLP Friendship is Magic series, which I had grown up around, but never watched. It was cute, colorful, and wholesome, with comedy, pop-culture references, and a decent plot. I really ended up enjoying it because of this, it was something different, more lighthearted and wholesome, that I didn’t see in many other shows. So of course I had the idea to make it MLP themed.

This provided me with a number of things to work off of. First, with MLP:FiM being as popular as it was, I was able to find some character sprites I could use that someone else had already made. (Big thanks to My Little Gauntlet for creating the Rainbowdash sprites, and letting others use them). Second, because it’s a TV show, I had plenty of material to work with and reference when creating all the other art assets in the game. Third, I found a way to incorporate the theme into the game rather well. Rainbowdash was a weather pony, so I made the goal of the game to have her get rid of rainclouds. Being in the sky also provided a perfect opportunity to make a parallax background, with multiple layers of clouds scrolling past.

So now that I knew what I wanted to make, it was time to get to work.

First I had to get the sprite on the screen. Following Tonc, I used a tool (Usenti) to convert the spritesheet into a format useable by the GBA. Then I had to load that spritesheet into memory, and finally draw it on screen. After that, I just added a loop to go through the animation, and some code to change the sprite position when the d-pad is pressed and I got this.