Writing a Gameboy Game in 2021: Part 6 -- Postmortem
She's dead, Jim. Wrapping up development on Pocket League.

August 30th, 2021
  1. Introduction
  2. Graphics
  3. Physics
  4. Collision Detection
  5. Computer AI
  6. Screen Transitions
  7. Postmortem (You’re here!)

Postmortem

This post will be short and bittersweet.

It's Dead

Development on Pocket League has ceased. I have run out of time and energy to continue working on the project. My knowledge of C was effectively 0 before starting this project, so I had to learn both the language and the hardware at the same time. It was an incredibly rewarding challenge, but if you’ve been reading some of my other posts you know my life is very busy at the moment and those obligations take precedence over a silly port of a video game to 30+ year old handheld consoles.

Unfortunately, time commitments paired with seemingly insidious audio bugs has sapped my willpower and available time to continue developing Pocket League, so updates will cease for now.

Where It Stands

The core gameplay loop is feature complete with the obvious omission of working sound effects. There is an existing PR on the main repository for Pocket League that attempts to write an audio player, but debugging this was tedious and difficult, so I have little motivation to continue working on it. It’s been over 5 months since I’ve touched that code and it seems that’s a good amount of time to call it quits.

For those that want to play Rocket League, the latest release can be found here. This release continues to run on Gameboy hardware.

If you’d like to pick development on the project, feel free to contribute code to either the existing audio PR or open an issue to add new features.

I hope you’ve enjoyed the series, and thanks for reading!