Nerd Herder GBA

Nerd Herder
Nerd Herder
General
Author	Philip Mallory
Type	Other Games
Version	2011
License	Mixed
Last Updated	2011/10/10
Links
	Download
	Website
	Source

Nerd Herder is an arcade style game that demonstrates a GBA's features. Written in C.

Features

Direct Memory Access (DMA) to load the tiles/tile map, sprites, color palette, and to keep the sound buffer full.
Animated sprites with transparency.
Scrolling background.
Music (pcm encoded, not beeps and boops).
Inline assembly to access BIOS functionality.

User guide

Story

You are Brandon Whitehead, head TA. It is your sworn duty to guide students to their academic destinies. You must encourage Georgia Tech's best and brightest to fulfill their potential, while also seeking out those who can't make the cut and eliminating them.

Your task in NerdHerder is to coral your best students to their dorm (located on the west edge of campus) so that they'll study, while separating out the flunkies and sending them to the M-Train (on the east of campus).

The tools at your disposal:

Intimidation - You instill fear into the hearts of men. Everyone nearby you flees.
Mountain Dew - If you are carrying Mountain Dew (green and red can) nerds will flock to you instead of running. The power-up only lasts a brief time, use it wisely.
Natural Light - If you are carrying Natty Light (silver and blue can) bros will follow you. The power-up only lasts a brief time, use it wisely.

Get as many nerds to the dorm as possible, and as many bros as possible to the M-Train. Everyone that winds up in the wrong destination detracts from your score.

How to play

Move around the map herding bros and nerds. NPCs are removed from gameplay when they are entirely on top of the dorm or M-Train. Pick up a power-up by standing on it.

The power-ups only last long enough for you to walk across the map, and they can only be used once. You are allowed to walk on top of the dorm and M-Train to drive NPCs away from them.

The game ends when every bro/nerd has been sent to either the dorm or the M-Train. The score screen gives a quantitative and qualitative score.

Extra cool stuff

To start a new game from the score screen it uses inline assembly to call the BIOS's soft reset function. That seems easier than going through and reinitializing all the variables and reseeding the RNG and stuff.

There is background music. It doesn't work on VBA for Linux during testing, but it does on Macintosh and Windows. And the music loops, the timing is done by vblank intrupts and DMA is used to keep the sound buffer full.