On the small screen
In version 0.2.1
What is in it
- The traveler's map opens at once: a quarter of a second instead of a second and a half of black screen (its ground was asking the fog ten times a cell).
- Enemies on the road: the cart's screen shows a quarter of what the Godot game shows, so every chunk now rolls twice the spawns and they keep half the distance from you (6 tiles, not 12: just off the screen's edge, as on the big screen).
- Fog of war that matters: the sight and its fade are halved for the small screen. A warrior sees 3 tiles clear and the mist closes at 5, a rogue 4 and 6: the same proportions the Godot screen has. The SIGHT stat keeps its number; only the disc on the road is scaled.
- The battle panel re-laid: the class and level stand over the hero's head like the foes' names, the plate holds HP, the bar and the level, the menu runs three rows across the panel's whole width (long names fit) with one line under them about the lit row. The cursor no longer covers the warrior's level and names no longer run into the next column.
- Everything 0.2.0 had: the 14 themes as chiptune, MUSIC VOLUME, the gallery's MUSIC page, the whole game from the Shattering to the ending.
What is not
- The text is the same size: m5x7 has one size on the GBA, so the panel was re-laid instead of the font made smaller.
- Saves and options from 0.2.0 carry over; a 0.1.0 cartridge's options read as the defaults once.
- Portraits and a few ornaments of the Godot game are left out; the art is the Godot art halved. Not yet run on a real cartridge or flash cart.
Play it
Put the .gba file where your emulator or handheld looks for Game Boy Advance games. mGBA on a computer, a handheld's GBA core (Knulli, muOS, RetroArch) and the real thing with a flash cart all work; what it needs is 32 KB of battery-backed SRAM for the two save slots and the options.
| Button | Does |
|---|---|
| D-pad | walk, move through menus |
| A | talk, search, open, confirm |
| B | cancel, close, skip a card |
| Start | the pack: gear, arts, quests, status, awards, settings |
| Select | on the road, the traveler's map and the shard-road to a raised waystone; on the title, the gallery and sound test |
| L and R | tabs in menus, the gallery's pages |
Found something? Builds are announced in the Freedom Forge Discord, where the bug and feedback channels are.
Where it comes from
This is Aether Shard, the Android and desktop game, rebuilt from scratch for the GBA: every rule is ported from the game's own scripts and checked against them, its data is imported, its art is halved to the GBA's resolution, and its 14 themes are transcribed into chiptune on the GBA's four voices. No ROM hack and no other game's code or data: the cartridge is written in C++ on Butano.
Some of the game's music was generated with Suno, as disclosed on its store pages; the cartridge plays chiptune transcriptions of it. Pixel font m5x7 by Daniel Linssen.