If it’s odd, then sprite is swapped to the second tile, which is simply drawn with a faux 45 degree offset. They are moved just like in the move_car_sprite function, but take an additional tick parameter based on the game’s current tick count.Each tile in the sprite is the same, but rotated to make a “ball”. They only have 2 tiles (to simulate rotation).I’ll keep it simple here as there is much less going on with the other graphics: Void move_car_sprite ( UINT8 n, UINT8 x, UINT8 y, UINT8 rot ) This data is generated by the Gameboy Tile Designer, which doesn’t look like much but lets me draw sprites and spit out the data inside a big array of hex values: Here’s how Pocket League draws cars to the screen:įirst, we have to initialize all the tile data for the car.

Together, this means that when we need to move a car in Pocket League, we actually have to move FOUR car sprites (five if you count the boost trail, but we’ll get to that). In fact, the only sprites that aren’t represented by an array of four 8x8 sprites are the score numbers, the boost, and the player arrows. If you look closely, the first four sprites in VRAM correspond to the Player 1 car. Well, as some have already guessed, the sprites for almost everything in Pocket League are larger than 8x8 pixels! They’re actually 4 sprites each, so 16x16 pixels. Whoa! Let’s ignore the bottom left quadrant – those are the background sprites, and we can talk about that in a bit. If you’re playing along at home on BGB, you can right lick the game, then go to Other -> VRAM Viewer. I’m sure that was word salad, so lets open up BGB and look at the VRAM (video memory). The Gameboy can perform simple transformations for sprites, such as flipping it along the X or Y axis (or both), change the palette, or move it from foreground to background.Up to 40 sprites can be on screen at the same time.Only when a sprite is assigned a tile and the sprite is moved to a coordinate position on the screen is it displayed.Graphics are stored in 8x8 tiles, which can then be assigned to a sprite.A Gameboy’s display is 160 (width) x 144 (height) pixels.More specifically, how sprites work, as they’re ultimately more interesting than how I made the backgrounds for the game. Today I’d like to talk a bit about how the graphics for Pocket League work. I’ll bring up other tools as their knowledge is required. It’s tested on PC using BGB, but it also runs on a real Gameboy.įor the purposes of this blog, all the code was compiled with the help of GBDK and ran on BGB. I should mention that Pocket League is written in C using the Gameboy Development Kit 2020.

Rip game boy sprites sheets