More text!

The game now displays PRESS START, GAME OVER and can be played as many times as you want!

Good luck beating the game… (let me know if you get the maximum score of 323!)

Game Over text

Now the game says Game Over! (had to redraw text tiles)

GUI!!

After designing a pixel font (by hand…) the screen now displays a score and a border!

Redrew the snake, the pattern on the snake is more visible now

Snake sprites

Designed the snake to look like… a snake. The apple also looks like an apple now.

GBA VSync Interrupts!

Finally figured out how to use interrupts to make the VSync not burn the CPU :D

Apples!

The snake can now eat apples to grow longer.

Much time was spent debugging a very slow apple placement function.

Building Website

Spent an hour wrestling Github Actions to build the GBA file AND publish it to Github Pages.

The game is available to test on https://rayzchen.github.io/snake-gba/

Controls!

After messing with interrupts and realising they won’t work with the basic functions I’ve written, I ended up scrapping that feature (lazy CPU waiting for vsync).

Instead, I implemented the snake as a list of positions and moved it around the screen!

Basic setup

After not developing for GBA for a few years, I have had to read up on the memory mapping and general features. Here is a simple map comprised of an “apple” and three “snake bodies”.