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Minicraft v1.0 GBA port.

Vulcalien recently announced a GBA port of Minicraft, a 2d adventure game from the original creator of Minecraft (and very much in the same theme) first released back in 2011 as part of a coding contest in which you had 48 hours to code something. Ports having previously been seen for the 3ds (newer fork still) where it is one of the more popular pieces of homebrew for the platform.

Vulcalien's release announcement said:
In the past months I've been working on a GBA demake of Minicraft, a 2D game made by Markus Persson (aka Notch) for the 22nd Ludum Dare.

I think this GBA demake would be a nice addition to the great collection of games published in the website.

Here is some information about the game that might be useful to you.
• The game is fully finished; it's not a demo.
• It should run and save without any issue on hardware.
• The save file is 128 KB Flash ROM (1 Mbit).
• The license is GPL3+.

readme said:
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 experience, I also added a pause menu and a way to save and load the world.

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 are written at the top corners:

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

Building

To build the game, I use the Makefile present in the files. You will need the gcc-arm-none-eabi compiler. I've not tested any other compiler and, if you want to try, I cannot guarantee that the game will work or that the performance will be as good (since it's optimized for the GCC compiler).

Run make: it should build without any configuration.

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.