Rhino Express for GBA

More than two years after the release of Minicraft for GBA, I am now releasing another demake for Game Boy Advance: Rhino Express for GBA.

Rhino Express#

Rhino Express is a puzzle game in which the player helps a Rhino make deliveries, trying to avoid dangerous pits and using obstacles to its advantage. Made in just 48 hours by Seb_gamedev, the game won first place of the Ludum Dare 53 competition and was released as a browser game.

GBA port of Rhino Express#

Why I ported it#

I like working on the GBA for a few reasons.

• Widespread emulation: thanks to emulators, the games I port can be played on a great variety of devices.
• Consistent experience: the console’s specifications are fixed and will never change, unlike other gaming platforms like computers.
• Technical challenge: the GBA is quite limited in many ways, forcing the programmer to be efficient with CPU and memory usage, and having to interact with the hardware directly without an operating system.

Rhino Express, a 2D game with pixel-art graphics, was a great candidate for a GBA demake, matching the console’s capabilities and retro feeling.

Differences#

Because of the GBA’s differences and limits, I had to change or adjust a few things when porting the game, such as replacing mouse controls with a keypad-based cursor and moving UI elements to match the different aspect ratio. There is also a noticeable loss in audio quality, caused by the inferior GBA sound system, but I find that it adds to the retro feeling.

Conclusion#

For those of you that like GBA games, now you have another one to try out! See the links below to download the game. If you have any questions, contact me. For bug reports or suggestions about this demake, open an issue on GitHub.

Download: click here
Source code and instructions on how to play: click here