Jetpack Samurai

GameBoy Advance Tech Demo

Fall 2019

In my most ambitious project to date, we commenced our senior capstone series by attempting to build a game for the Nintendo GameBoy Advance system. I was inspired by my love for retro systems and retro gaming, and a conversation with a professor about designing with constraints breeding great creativity.

Our progress was slow due to there being very little support available for development on the GBA right now. The project ultimately had to disband due to recommendations from the faculty and a burnt out engineer.

Jetpack Samurai is meant to be a tactical sword-dueling adventure. I am still in love with the game concept and the tech demo we were able to achieve. It took us all out of our comfort zones and we learned so much about the process of game design and teamwork.

Team Size

Dev Cycle

Nine weeks

Softwares I Used

BFXr

BoyScout

Ableton

Git

Visual Studio Code

My Contributions

Game Design Lead

I was among the 44 students that pitched a game idea for the UCSC senior game design capstone project. My project was greenlit along with 26 others, and I interviewed and built the game team.

My primary goal in leading the concepting of this game was for it to be entirely collaborative. I really wanted each team member to feel like they had a significant part in contributing to the initial designs of this game.

As a game lead, I primarily functioned as the creative director, working alongside the producer I hired to propel the development.

Sound Design

Alongside being the Game Lead, I was the Sound Designer for this project. Sound design on the GameBoy Advance is very difficult as it uses hexidecimal values to determine the sequence of notes that the processor hits on its clock. Said another way, the timing and notes are indicated by hexidecimal values. We attempted implementation briefly, but as the project was disbanded, we didn't get a chance to work through implementing the sounds.

Composition & Sound Engineering

Music

When writing the main background music for this game, I wanted to implement some traditional Japanese instruments, as well as synthesizing my own instruments to play alongside them. The complement of traditional cultural instruments and electronic instruments emphasized the aesthetic that I coined, "technofeudalism."

In the main background music, I attempted an "overture-style" track that would have themes from characters and scenes appearing later on in development.

After production was halted, I discovered that composition for the GameBoy Advance consists of two parts. One is a primary main track, sampled using the direct sound processor channel. The other is using the processor's native sound channels, inserting smaller sounds and adding accents.

Sound Effects

I tried using two different programs to create the sound effects for this game. I was working on learning BoyScout - a GameBoy Advance music tracker. The Menu sound effect here was made with that program. The other sounds sampled here were made with Bfxr, a program I have more experience with.

Overture Music:

Boss Music:

City Down Time Music:

Sound Effect - Block Attack:

Sound Effect - Jet Dash:

Sound Effect - Menu:

Ideation & Prototyping

In order to pitch the game idea, I had to have a prototype. I followed a tutorial and tweaked it enough to produce this small red gradient square using assembly language and C. I spent two solid weeks getting just to this point and was so proud of the result.

The idea for a game called Jetpack Samurai was bouncing around in my head for years, even before my arrival at UC Santa Cruz. It may resurface in my future work. But for this project, the direction of the game was very collaborative, as we decided on it in the first few weeks after getting the team assembled.

In retrospect, I think our game would have been more successful if I had come to the pitch with a more well-formed idea. We spent a long time on ideation, and while that was fun, it ate into valuable development time.

Programming

Programming a game using C++, C, and even Assembly Language on very limited hardware proved to be the most difficult work I've ever done. While our team had engineers and programmers, I did contribute some sword enemy AI behaviors to the code.

Artwork credit: Edward Finsness & Sarah Saenz

Website by my awesome wife.