#Agon Light

In this abridged video, I walk you through the process of building a text adventure game from scratch on the Agon Light. Rather than a deep dive into every line of code, this video focuses on explaining the overall structure and design choices behind the project.

In this video, I’ll show you how I built a tilemap system from scratch in C for the Agon Light, and integrated it into my existing game engine. Getting the physics engine to handle collisions with the tilemap was no easy task, but I’ll walk you through how I made it work. On top of that, I explore some game design, sketching out ideas for where the game is heading.

Join me on a journey as I attempt to write a game for my Agon Light using nothing but raw C programming. In this second episode I figure out how to make a very basic 2D rigid body physics system work.

Join me on a journey as I attempt to write a game for my Agon Light using nothing but raw C programming. In this first episode I figure out what kind of game to make, look at some shareware games of the past and get a basic game engine working, using nothing but C code – no external game engines or modern development tools.

Writing games is hard enough by itself, requiring a lot of different skills. So how can I make this even harder? How about I do literally everything myself, starting with nothing but a blank source file and write all the code by hand. No game engines or libraries. If I need something, I need to write it myself. And since we’re doing this the hard way, let’s write games for an embedded microcontroller based around a Z80 CPU.

Early computers weren’t powerful enough to draw full-screen moving graphics, so they had to use clever tricks. Let’s explore how Nintendo’s techniques for creating tile-based games on the NES can be applied to modern hardware. Using these methods, I built a scrolling tilemap system for the Agon Light using C programming.

The end result is a fairly pretty scrolling text routine that demonstrates how to draw multiple bitmaps to the Agon Light’s display using VDP commands.

This builds on my previous Agon Light C Programming video where I explained how the Agon Light’s screen works, and how to draw lines and shapes.

My aim is not to simply program the Agon Light by cloning the Windows 3.11 screensavers, but to learn how to program the Agon Light at all. Ultimately I want to learn how to program games for the Agon Light.

It’s the Easter holidays and I’ve got two weeks off work. Amongst highly exciting things like weeding the garden and waiting for a new washing machine to be delivered, I’m doing some programming.

I’ve been having a bit of a play around with my Agon Light, trying to come up with some ideas for a future video. I’ve discovered it has quite a nice 320×240 64 colour video mode that has just enough pixels to be interesting.