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