A realtime strategy game for Gameboy Advance. watch the trailer!
A detailed RTS game for GBA, inspired by FTL. Created in a couple of weeks for a game jam, and then improved over the course of a few years.
Skyland is jam-packed with stuff, some of the highlights:
- Roguelike Adventure mode, some similarities to FTL
- Isometric 3d island building macrocosm mode, with freebuild creative mode
- VS multiplayer and Co-op multiplayer modes
- Skyland Forever, a procedurally generated endless arcade mode
- Share macrocosm islands and adventure mode highscores on skylandgame.io by scanning QR codes
- An integrated lisp interpreter
- Uart serial console, serves a shell or a lisp repl over the link cable port in developer mode
- Builtin filesystem and text editor, as well as onscreen lisp repl, available in developer mode
- A checkers AI
- A robust event-driven game engine with support for fast-forwarding and even rewinding gameplay
- Scriptable button combos in lisp, similar to emacs keybindings
- A builtin Unicode engine, with support for English, Spanish, French, Italian, Russian, and over 2000 Chinese words
- A scriptable tutorial system
- Support for saving on several types of bootleg flashcarts
- Builtin glossary system
- Extensive help documentation for the scripting API
- Install all of the standard devkitpro libgba stuff.
- Make sure you have python3 and the PIP image library
- Install cmake
cd build && ./set-gameboy-advance-toolchain.sh(a shortcut for running cmake with the correct toolchain file)- run ./build.sh
See here. Why so many releases? I like to have build artifacts in case something breaks. The program takes a few minutes to compile, so it's nice to have old builds when tracking down issues.
I designed the Skyland to be moddable, and wrote all level scenarios in a custom scripting language called Skyland LISP. The script in modding/unpack_rom.py extracts the game's filesystem from the Skyland.gba ROM, producing a SkylandEngine.gba ROM and directories full of lisp scripts. The encode_files.py script in the extracted tools/ directory repacks the filesystem into a file called fs.bin. Then, simply run cat SkylandEngine.gba fs.bin > Skyland.gba to repackage the gba game. Skyland uses unicode internally, and you'll find much of the menu text in strings/strings.txt. You'll find the rest of the text scattered throughout the lisp scripts. See help/localization.txt for more info.
All artwork and music assets are proprietary. The software and source code are provided for personal non-commercial use under the terms of the included license document. I originally licensed this program under the terms of the GPL license, but I've since realized that Open Source licenses are not a good fit for all projects (pirates sold copies of the game, failing to understand that only the code, and not the assets, was free to use; steam refused to publish GPL code; etc.).