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Hearts Café

About

Hearts Café is my biggest project for the Game Boy Advance. It is not the first program I made for that system, but indeed it was the first game - and I'm quite happy with the results.

It all started in August 2002. I heard about the compo by browsing the GBAdev.org website, and I started to think about it. I came up with a lot of schematics, diagrams, and stuff on paper, in roughly two weeks. Then for the next six weeks, I did absolutely nothing, and I even started to wonder if I was going to ever code anything.

The main problem was, as a matter of fact, the artwork. I'm a programmer and I had no idea on how to do nice drawings on a computer. I wanted to do a "Shuffle Puck Café"-like interface, where a lot of different characters could be playable.

This was too ambitious - I managed somehow to create four "characters" for the game, one derived from my own portrait, one that had some traits of my girlfriend, and the two others totally imaginary.

I started to use the Gimp, and to help myself dealing with the strange GBA hardware, I used an existing code library : the SGADE.

Hence the result, after 8 days of coding / gimping : Hearts Café.

Screen Shots.

The intro screen, The player select screen,
Some in-game screen,, again,
again, and again.

Download

You can download the binary program, which should run fine on any emulator (and, of course, on real hardware). It contains a readme explaining how to play.

And if you're interested in the dirty secrets of the game, you can download the source code. The original pictures are not included, but the .dat files contain the media, and it should compile after modifying the makefile to suit your needs. You will need an ARM-gcc compiler, should work with devkit-advance.