SKYLAND
A realtime strategy game for Gameboy Advance. watch the trailer!
Overview
Introduction
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.
Features
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
Building
1) Install all of the standard devkitpro libgba stuff.
2) Make sure you have python3 and the PIP image library
3) Install cmake
4) cd build && ./set-gameboy-advance-toolchain.sh (a shortcut for running cmake with the correct toolchain file)
5) run ./build.sh
Releases
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.
Modding (no C++ toolchain required!)
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.
License
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.).