A shoot-em-up space shooter for the original gameboy. Gameplay is focused on fast difficult dodging, shooting, and when you die: instant restart.
Rounds start with a medium boss flying circles while light attackers shoot and dive bomb you. If you manage to destroy the medium boss the fight turns to the main boss.
Mass Driver is a hard to master game. Everytime I return I find myself relearing my reflexes. Doing well is a product of skill which you must relearn during each session.
In Mass Driver you start with 5 lives and killing the most medium and heavy bosses with those lives is your measure of skill.
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Main stage with medium boss
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Main Boss fight
Mass Driver uses the GBDK compiler. We've developed against GBDK 2.95-3 and 2.96a. It should work against newer versions of GBDK provided these contain fewer compiler bugs.
GBDK requires the environmental variable "GBDKHOME" to be set to the full path of the GBDK compiler. Our make file then reuses this envar.
If you do not set "GBDKHOME" you will get errors where make cannot find the compiler.
Linux
make
Mass Driver is written in C against the GBDK compiler. This compiler is old and often produces incorrect code. When you write code make sure to test often. Avoid writing large chunks of code between play tests. If you do encounter mysterious bugs try isolating the broken section rewriting it.
In far too many cases rewriting a section to a logical equivalent has avoided incorrect code generation. Even something simple like applying De'Morgan's law to a conditional has fixed bugs.
I would like to thank Chris Antonellis for his GBTDG image converter. We used it to convert most of the bitmaps in Mass Driver.
I would also like to thank Dr. Aycock for teaching CPSC 599.82. Mass Driver was developed as our group project for 599.82 and I appreciated the opportunity to demo our game to our classmates.
My group consisted of myself, Daniel, Phil, and Ryan. Both Phil and Ryan are grade A+++ programmers and I am proud to have had the chance to work with them.