I wanted to see if I could bring the "Small Web" / Brutalist aesthetic to 1998 hardware. Sudokrypt is a narrative-driven terminal puzzle game built for the Game Boy Color (C/GBDK).
The Technical Challenge: The GBC usually handles text in 8x8 pixel tiles. To get that dense terminal feel, I wrote a custom renderer that performs real-time bit-shifting to pack a 4x8 font into the VRAM. This effectively doubled the character density on a 160x144 screen.
The Workflow: I originally prototyped the puzzle logic in Bash for terminal play. To move it to the 8-bit Game Boy architecture, I used Gemini to help port the logical frameworks into C. I then wrapped the GBDK ROM in a GB Studio web interface to make it playable online.
The Lore: You are an operator decrypting raw human data and pushing it to cold storage to hide it from a global surveillance coalition called The CABAL. The deeper you go, the lower your buffer gets, and the hardware begins to glitch as the scrapers close in.
The Hardware: It is fully compatible with original hardware, and I have the tools on order to flash my own cartridges. Give it a shot to uncover the different endings!
I wanted to see if I could bring the "Small Web" / Brutalist aesthetic to 1998 hardware. Sudokrypt is a narrative-driven terminal puzzle game built for the Game Boy Color (C/GBDK).
The Technical Challenge: The GBC usually handles text in 8x8 pixel tiles. To get that dense terminal feel, I wrote a custom renderer that performs real-time bit-shifting to pack a 4x8 font into the VRAM. This effectively doubled the character density on a 160x144 screen.
The Workflow: I originally prototyped the puzzle logic in Bash for terminal play. To move it to the 8-bit Game Boy architecture, I used Gemini to help port the logical frameworks into C. I then wrapped the GBDK ROM in a GB Studio web interface to make it playable online.
The Lore: You are an operator decrypting raw human data and pushing it to cold storage to hide it from a global surveillance coalition called The CABAL. The deeper you go, the lower your buffer gets, and the hardware begins to glitch as the scrapers close in.
The Hardware: It is fully compatible with original hardware, and I have the tools on order to flash my own cartridges. Give it a shot to uncover the different endings!