Minicraft for GBA

Minicraft for GBA is a demake of the game Minicraft, made by Notch for the 22nd Ludum Dare.

When I started coding, studying the source code of Minicraft helped me learn the basics of how a videogame is made. I thus decided that my first project for the Game Boy Advance would be a demake of Minicraft.

Porting the game to the relatively less powerful console brought with it some technical challenges, so I had to be careful not to overuse precious resources such as CPU clocks or RAM. After spending much time learning how to best use the GBA’s hardware and optimizing the game so that it could run smoothly, I ended up with a game that is very close to the original.

What I learned

Firstly, I learned how to write games for the Game Boy Advance, a platform that is surprisingly enjoyable to code for. Since the GBA has no Operating System, I also had to learn how to directly interact with the hardware through hardware registers.

What I learned#

What I learned