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Minicraft for GBA

This is a demake of Minicraft by Markus Persson (aka Notch), a game made for Ludum Dare 22 in two days.

My aim is to make a version that is as close as possible to the original. Of course, the GBA has some hardware limitations but, since the game isn't too complex, I could port it without too many problems. When the limitations were impossible to overcome, I had to hack a few things, change others, put limits and so on.

To improve the gameplay experience, I also added these features:

  • a pause menu
  • saving and loading the world
  • a way to respawn, with or without keeping the inventory

Differences due to Hardware limitations

Original GBA Demake
World size 128x128 112x112
Entity limit ∞ 255
Chest limit ∞ 32
Inventory size ∞ 128

Game Light

The light system is completely different, both visually and in how it works.

The original Minicraft calculates the light for each pixel: that is, for various reasons, impractical to do on the GBA.

So I had to find another way, and the best one seemed to use tiles, because the GBA is very good at handling them. That gives light a 'blocky' look, but it seems acceptable.

Running

Download or build the ROM (.gba extension). Then open it with your GBA emulator of choice. If you don't have one, I highly recommend mGBA.

If you have any trouble with the save files, try to manually set the save format to 128 KB Flash ROM.

Performance Overlay

By holding the L and R buttons down and then pressing Select, the performance overlay is enabled.
Four hexadecimal values and two decimal values are written at the top of the screen:

FF <--- vcount after 'tick'     entity count ---> FF
FF <--- vcount after 'draw'     sprite count ---> FF

60 <--- tps (ticks per second)
60 <--- fps (frames per second)

Building

To build the game, I use the Makefile present in the files. You will need the gcc-arm-none-eabi compiler and Python 3.

First, run make res to convert the necessary resources. Then, run make to build the ROM.

License

The original game Minicraft was made by Markus Persson in 2011. I do not own it, nor am I affiliated to it.

This demake of the game is released under the GNU General Public License, either version 3 of the License or any later version.