Tag: Megapong

Alright, we have a complete and working game now. We have graphics, gameplay, scores, game overs…sound is still missing, true, but that’s a topic for another tutorial. However, we can still add something to make our game a bit better: The almighty Juice.

In order to juice things up as it were, we’re going to make the ball flash when it’s hit by the paddle. It’s a small effect, but an important one when it comes to retrogaming. Hitting Robotnik wouldn’t be as satisfying if he didn’t flash, after all. So let’s do this!

Time to finish this game of ours! This time we’ll add a fail state and some general polish to complete the Megapong experience. Let’s jump right into it! Making Things Easier for Us First, let’s make things a bit easier for ourselves. We’ll have to show some messages on screen soon and we can create the following helper function to help us out: /*Draws text in the center of the screen*/ void showText(char s[]){ VDP_drawText(s, 20 - strlen(s)/2 ,15); } As you can see, this function takes a string (that is, a char[]) and then draws this string in the center of the screen using VDP_drawText and the power of math.

It’s the final stretch! We already have the core gameplay, but right now our game is less a game and more of an activity center. We should add a score to make it a bit more challenging and exciting. Let’s do it! Score and HUD First we’re going to define the variables that we’ll need. At the beginning of the file, next to all our other variables, add this: /*Score variables*/ int score = 0; char label_score[6] = "SCORE\0"; char str_score[4] = "0"; int score will store our current score value.

It’s physics time! We got two moving parts, now it’s time to smash them together. SGDK has built-in collision stuff, but we won’t need that for this simple project. The method we’re using to handle collisions is called AABB collision detection. It uses axis-aligned bounding boxes, which sounds really fancy, doesn’t it? Basically that just means we’ll be using rectangles to check for collisions, instead of the actual sprite graphics. It’s a very simple and efficient method of handling collisions.

We have a moving ball now, but a Pong game needs paddles. We’ll add one now and learn about handling input in SGDK at the same time. Let’s go! Creating a Paddle First we’ll have to create a paddle for players to control. The process is very similar to the one in the previous post, so I won’t go into as much detail this time. First, download the paddle image here.

Now that we have a background, it’s time to get things moving! Sprites are different from tiles, so we have a few new things to learn. Let’s get into it and make a bouncing ball! Importing Sprites First of all we’ll need a sprite for our ball. You can download it here. Here’s what it looks like (scaled up 4x so you can see it better): Note that you have to download the file from the link above, right-clicking and saving the above image will not work!

Update: I expanded the explanation on palettes a bit and removed a reference to PAL4, which of course doesn't exist. D'oh! Last time we put a tile on screen, which was awesome. But the color was wrong, which wasn’t so awesome. Also, one tile doesn’t really make a background, does it? So we’ll take care of all that this time around. Let’s get started! About Palettes Okay, so why was our tile white instead of the color it should’ve been?

Last Updated: May 18 2021 Update: Improved the section on resources.h and made the steps less error-prone. Welcome back! Last time we set up our development environment to make things easier for us. This time things will get a bit more exciting, as we’ll import a graphic and use it to draw the background for our game! We have a lot ahead of us, so let’s rock. You can either use the project from part 2 or create a new one.

Last Updated: May 18 2021 Update: Updated instructions on how to set CMD as the default console. Welcome back! Last time we set up SGDK and made sure everything worked. This time we’ll set up a proper development environment, which will make things a lot easier and more fun for us. Believe me, it’ll be worth it! Development Environments Code for SGDK is written in C, so you can use basically any IDE that supports C.

Welcome to my new tutorial series on Mega Drive development! In it we will be creating a Mega Drive game from scratch using SGDK, the Sega Genesis Development Kit. This awesome piece of software allows you to program games for the Mega Drive in C instead of ASM, which makes things a whole lot easier. I will show you how to set up your development environment, how to import graphics, how to put things on the screen, how to control them and have them collide…