notenogram

notenogram

(read as note-nogram)

Chill analog-styled Gameboy Advance picross/nonogram/hanjie/griddler game made with Butano for GBA Jam 2022, with some gameplay elements inspired by Battle Picross by Sean Reid.

Features (WIP, subject to change):

• 21 original 12x12 picross puzzles to solve
• cringy Japanese anime girl voice clips provided by me
• fancy bossanova module music not made by me (not now at least)
• story mode that puts one's strategy skills to the test and has three different endings based on said skills
• tutorial mode that explains picross basics and some solving strategies
• creator mode that allows making puzzles and sharing them via GBA save files (any save files)
• more original character cameos?

Controls:

• A button - color the square the pen cursor is pointing at/confirm menu option/skip text
• B button - cross out the square/exit menu
• D-pad - move the cursor (hint: pressing and holding a directional key while holding A or B on the picross grid will mark otherwise empty squares as either "on" or "off" in the selected direction)
• Select - exit puzzle screen
• Start (in creator mode) - write current puzzle to SRAM
• L or R button (in creator mode) - switch custom puzzle slots in SRAM to write to (only three slots available for now, writing to a full slot will overwrite its contents)

Issues

• VBA-M saves not being written to during gameplay - FIXED (probably, done by updating to latest Butano version)
• Broken font on exiting to main menu state - FIXED, now to prevent any shallow copies of bn::sprite_text_generator pointers

TODO

• Completely replace boolean arrays with unsigned integers for quicker reads, writes and condition checks (pending, reduces ROM size by about 2kB, but makes mistake detection harder to implement)
• Figure out how to design the main game state interface class to avoid any chaos in overridden methods and simplify game loop coding (and reduce used backgrounds)
• Update story mode with better graphics and more exclusive puzzles
• Create a tiny app for converting hex data/image files into game code-readable data
• Add option menu for customizing visuals and gameplay
• Make some lo-fi tracker beats to solve griddlers to
• Bwehh