How I failed to make a game: Raycasting on the GBA

> What didn’t work

> Content. Brace for an obvious statement: it is one thing to imagine a grand, Daggerfall-scale game in your head, and a completely different thing to actually start building the pieces that make it up.

This is what always kills it for me. It's not so much that there aren't good off-the-shelf content packs, its that unique gameplay ideas with unique visualizations don't have ready made assets. Even for a simple game like pong, if you want to do something graphically unique with it (make the paddle shake, charge up, or have a power bar embedded in it that fills up whatever), then you better be prepared to become an artist or find someone who will be your game's artist.

And also like the article points out, the latter is fine if you're looking to commercialize it, but it doesn't seem like there are many artists offering their skills for free games made casually in a developer's spare time. It seems there's a critical threshold of game development "seriousness" that needs to be committed to by all involved to make it worth the time and effort of others.

The one that blew my mind as a kid was Need for speed underground:

https://youtu.be/36U2xN-196c?si=T7xSCeKxss_at3S0

This reminds me of playing Ecks vs. Sever on the GBA. A raycasted 2.5d doomlike game based on a crappy movie. It was pretty impressive for a GBA game, and it ran well, never stuttering. It had some pretty cool levels, I remember one where you fight through a hotel using IR night vision. It also had a sequel which added a guided missile launcher and some crazy Robocop ED-209 type enemies. As I recall both had multiplayer deathmatch but good luck finding a friend who also had the game and a link cable.

One thing I took full advantage of as a kid was that both games had some cheesy behavior with the sniper rifle scope implementation.

In the first game, while zoomed in with the scope you could use the D-pad to move your view a few clicks left/right/up/down to refine your aim. However, this was not really turning you, it acted more like you were a ghost side-stepping and poking his head up and down. So, you could crouch behind a box, scope in on the box, then D-pad up to look over it and shoot an enemy mob who still couldn't see your character and wouldn't engage you. Or stand just slightly behind a corner, scope in, and D-pad right to shoot around it.

The last level of the first game involves fighting a boss character who has a powerful weapon and a ton of HP, and is surrounded by his infinitely-respawning goons. There's no way kid me would've beaten it without abusing this trick, which reduces the challenge to avoiding his attacks while fighting enough lower-tier enemies to obtain their precious sniper rifle ammo.

In the second game, the D-pad moves a crosshair around a fixed viewport rather than shifting the whole viewport around. So the trick doesn't work exactly the same way. If you zoomed in staring at some obstacle right in front of you, you couldn't move the viewport to see around it like you could before.

However... when you zoomed in, it worked like you were a ghost moving forward in space, instead of narrowing your FOV from your original vantage point. So you'd instead stand about 10 feet back from a corner, zoom in past the edge, and voila: you were able to see more around the corner just as if you'd walked up next to it. Sure enough, you could slide the crosshair over and snipe the enemies now visible in your viewport despite your player character still being safely 10 feet back around the corner.

Good times. They were still great GBA games even with this exploit, it just made the (scarce) sniper rifle ammo even more valuable to the player.

I distinctly remember Spider-Man 2 on GBA having a 3D overworld. It was my first introduction to the concept of "low framerate" in a videogame haha. Incredible what people were capable of doing with the hardware back then.

There was actually a fully 3d platformer released for the system during it's production run, Asterix & Obelix XXL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b0pknb4ghUA