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How I failed to make a game: Raycasting on the GBA
Today I am releasing my raycasting tech demo for the GameBoy Advance. Although it falls short of the goals I set out in the beginning – which included releasing a playable game –, I think there are some lessons worth sharing with the world.
On GBA, the entirety of the cartridge ROM shows up as addressable memory, so instead of embedding custom binary formats and filesystem images, I just decided to generate a C++ header with the compiled data for each asset. Unless you are willing to spend a lot of time experimenting and guessing, I would now say that having strong benchmarking capability built-in is essential in such a project sensitive to “detail optimization” (I don’t know if there is an established term for this – what I mean is that changing e.g. the alignment of some function or structure can make a 1% performance difference, which quckly adds up. In any case, it always feels great to see your code run on real hardware, but after already being somewhat burned out with assets, it really drove home the latter two points above, providing a final straw to kill the project.
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