A bit of dev info

Some impressions on doing this project:

The goal for this entry was not only to win all the wins in the GBA Jam 2021 jam and to make everyone playing it depressed, but also to actually make something with the interactive Forth system that I had been working on in the previous months.

It was my first time actually writing in Forth, and it was a really fun experience. Functions are really light-weight, partly thanks to Forth being a stack-based language, but that stack-basedness also makes you do a lot of mental gymnastics just to get arguments in the right order for the next function call. Really did my head in sometimes.

In the early stages of development it became clear that compiling the code at runtime on the GBA would be way to slow, so I needed to write a simple cross-compiler. What I ended up with doesn't do Forth justice at all. No compile time evaluation is the major pain-point. But I ended up with something that was good enough for my needs.

At the end of the day I ended up with a fair amount of library routines for things like collision detection, sprite management, text boxes, etc.. I also actually got to understand the GBA a LOT better, which I had on my todo list for a looong time.

Unfortunately I didn't have too much time to work on the game. An adventure game needs a lot of content, and I ended up with just a sketch, but I did try to make something coherent and fun to play. I hope you like it. In the future, hopefully I can use the assets and the game logic to make something a bit more expansive. Perhaps I'll change the game category to an RPG or a visual novel. Let's see. I might sign my soul to the devil for some extra time in my life.