Boba Buddies
Download: BOBA_BUDDIES.nes Emulation via JSNES
Instructions
Save your boba bubble buddies! Use left/right to walk. Use the straws to move between levels and recover your bouncy boba powers.About
We made this game for the 2025 Global Game Jam in 48 hours! This was my 6th NES game for the GGJ, and I think it turned out just great! I worked with Sam (programming) again this year, and we added Lyla (pixel art), and Stephen (chiptunes).
It's a bit buggy as jam games tend to be. We ran out of time to get all the animations right, there's no sound effects (they cause a terrible crash... 😬), no ememies or hazards, no collectibles, etc. BUT... We made a mini-metroid game for the NES! 😄 I was really worried this was out of scope for such a short jam, yet we pulled it off.
You can visit the GGJ page to see more, or checkout the code.
Bank Crash!
I figured out the sound crash! I moved the sounds to an extra ROM bank at some point, and it crashes if you trigger a sound when it's not mapped. I do map the correct bank in when running the audio update routine from the NMI, and I thought that was enough. Nope! You can hear them in action in the designer's cut.
Random Fun Approximate Facts!
- Approximately 450 lines of C code
- Approximately 100 lines of 6502 assembly (for sprite clipping)
- Approximately 200 lines of hand entered "data" (sprite and animation defs mostly)
- Approximately 150 bytes of RAM used
- Approximately 24,000 original pixels
- Approximately 900 bytes of music
- Approximately 500 bytes of sound effects
- Approximately 12 kiB when compressed!
ROM Map
Here's a fun visualization I like. This is all the data in the ROM file interpreted as the NES's native graphics format. Each pixel represents 2 bits, and is arranged into tiles. It's fun to "see" the whole thing, and how little there really is. You can kind of see where the various data segments are, and even see a bit of the graphics even when they are compressed.
