Minicraft for GBA

This is a demake of Minicraft by Markus Persson (aka Notch), a game made for Ludum Dare 22 in two days.

My aim is to make a version that is as close as possible to the original. Of course, the GBA has some hardware limitations but, since the game isn't too complex, I could port it without too many problems. When the limitations were impossible to overcome, I had to hack a few things, change others, put limits and so on.

To improve the experience, I also added a pause menu and a way to save and load the world.

Differences due to Hardware limitations

	Original	GBA Demake
World size	128x128	112x112
Entity limit	∞	255
Chest limit	∞	32
Inventory size	∞	128

Game Light

The light system is completely different, both visually and in how it works.

The original Minicraft calculates the light for each pixel: that is, for various reasons, impractical to do on the GBA.

So I had to find another way, and the best one seemed to use tiles, because the GBA is very good at handling them. That gives light a 'blocky' look, but it seems acceptable.

Running

Download or build the ROM (.gba extension). Then open it with your GBA emulator of choice. If you don't have one, I highly recommend mGBA.

If you have any trouble with the save files, try to manually set the save format to 128 KB Flash ROM.

Performance Overlay

By holding the L and R buttons down and then pressing Select, the performance overlay is enabled.
Four hexadecimal values and two decimal values are written at the top of the screen:

FF <--- vcount after 'tick'     entity count ---> FF
FF <--- vcount after 'draw'     sprite count ---> FF

60 <--- tps (ticks per second)
60 <--- fps (frames per second)

Building

To build the game, I use the Makefile present in the files. You will need the gcc-arm-none-eabi compiler. I've not tested any other compiler and, if you want to try, I cannot guarantee that the game will work or that the performance will be as good (since it's optimized for the GCC compiler).

Run make: it should build without any configuration.

License

The original game Minicraft was made by Markus Persson in 2011. I do not own it, nor am I affiliated to it.

This demake of the game is released under the GNU General Public License, either version 3 of the License or any later version.