itch.io

Thank you for your wonderful comment! As for the invalid URL parameter error, sometimes I've seen certain QR code readers erroneously shorten a long url, leading to a malformed link. Someone has brought up a similar error before, and the solution was to use a different QR code reader APP (https://github.com/evanbowman/skyland-gba/issues/7). Sharing in case this works for you, if not, I can look into the problem more!

Oh, I missed your edit somehow! Thank you very much for the update. I am uncertain what would be causing the issue, but maybe I'll figure it out someday!

Thanks! Every so often I have new ideas and keep adding more stuff to the game :) People have given me some good feedback and it's helped me improve it more

Hi! I'm not to familiar with the rg35xx, but sometimes the game doesn't run very well in certain emulators. Are you able to select from any emulation options on this device? mGBA is relatively accurate, for example. Someone in the other comments below had a similar issue with the rg280v, and was able to resolve it by changing the device settings somehow.

Hi! Yes, the title screen track is called shadows, and a production company called Music2Hues composed and recorded the song. I thought this particular track was really well done and I bought the rights to use it for Skyland, thinking it would fit the title screen nicely. Unfortunately, Music2Hues has since gone out of business, and I don't know where you can still buy the song. However:

You could use the copy of the music track included in the game. You would just need to convert it to something that your computer can play, as the music data for the gba game is encoded in 16kHz PCM samples. You can fetch the raw data file here: https://github.com/evanbowman/skyland-beta/blob/master/scripts/data/music/shadows.raw (click the download button or "view raw")

Next, open the file as raw 8-bit signed 16kHz PCM samples, and export it to mp3 or something. In the free Audacity music editor for example, File->Import->RawData (Encoding: Signed 8-bit PCM, 1 Channel Mono, Sample rate 16000)

Hi! Currently there's no way to turn it off in-game. Here's a version with the rumble disabled, and I'll make it possible to change in the settings in future releases:

https://github.com/evanbowman/skyland-beta/releases/tag/2025.2.2.0-rumble-disabled

Hi! Unfortunately I don't have any emulation handhelds to test the game on. The cause of the crashes is inaccuracies in the emulator, where it doesn't emulate the gba correctly. This must be the cause, because the game runs well on a real gba. If I knew which way Regba was inaccurate, I could create workarounds and patches to try to get the game running on it, but I'm not sure. It seems that Regba is based on gpSP, an older emulator, I suppose I could try to test the game on gpSP and see if I can track down the issue.

But the sound will always be glitchy even if I fix the other issues. Regba is a recompiling emulator that tries to translate the gba program into an executable that runs natively on the target device. While this is great for performance, it can greatly affect the timing in ways that alter how music sounds.

Oh no! I've never seen this happen before. I have the same everdrive cartridge and I haven't seen this issue yet.
1) Do you know your everdrive firmware version? You can get the OS version by pressing select on the everdrive menu and picking device info.

2) Are you using the latest version of the Skyland.gba rom?

3) Would you be able to attach the Skyland.srm file from GBASYS/save/Skyland.srm? If we are using the same cartridge, the same rom, and the same cartridge firmware, then I suppose the save file could be corrupted somehow, and if so I'd like to investigate.

Hi! Daniel Remar open-sourced hero core, and the instructions in the code say that you can create ports and mods as long as you aren't selling the game. I also messaged  Daniel about the port and he seemed enthusiastic about it.

I could technically add rumble support in the course of a few minutes for rumble carts, but it wouldn't be very fine-tuned.

Hi! Thank you for your nice comment! I can work on supporting cartridge rumble, I already know why it doesn't work. In mGBA and the miyoo mini, the rumble does work, as you noted, because Skyland supports GameCube controller rumble when played on a gameboy player attachment for the GC, which mgba emulates.

Unfortunately I don't have an EZ-Flash cartridge, although I do have an insideGadgets rumble cart. It takes forever to flash code to it, which is the main reason I haven't added support for it yet -- my method of working on projects usually involves making small incremental tweaks until I like the result, and it takes 10 minutes to flash this cartridge, which kills my motivation to do it :) I will put it on the todo list! To be honest, the  existing rumble support could use some more work. A couple of years ago, when I first added rumble support, I just made the controller rumble whenever the screen shakes visually in the game, but I could work out something much nicer feeling if I find some time to do it.

Hi! Interesting idea, I'm always happy to consider suggestions for improvements! So in this concept, after finishing the game, you could go back and continue exploring? That could be doable.

As for remakes: the game's license allows the code to be reused for non-commercial purposes. The artwork is not allowed to be used, but I would probably allow it for non-commercial projects.

If you wanted to use any existing code, the easiest way would be to implement the game's Platform class for the desired target platform https://github.com/evanbowman/skyland-beta/tree/master/source/platform. There is a folder containing the GBA implementation, and other folders containing other incomplete implementations of device/OS-specific code.

Feel free to let me know if you have any additional suggestions in the future! I will consider the postgame exploration idea and work on it when I have some time.

Hi! I pushed some fixes recently that may resolve the issue, but I’m not sure. I’ll try to dig out my old windows laptop and test VBA CE sometime

Sorry, I'm not sure! Do you have any details about the Yu-Gi-Oh cart? Some cart writers like FlashGBX will give you details about the flash chip and cartridge configuration.

Thanks! Unfortunately I don’t have a 3ds to test it, I only tested consoles with a gba flash cart,

Thanks for playing!

Hi! That's a really interesting idea! I hadn't considered that, one thing that I did think of is giving people the ability to combine weapons together to forge new more powerful weapons.

I’ll consider your suggestions! I may not find the time to make the changes to macro mode anytime soon, though. The macro mode is definitely the weakest part of the game right now

I can work on changing this, the reason I haven’t fixed it already is that changing the logic would also make enemy missiles that land at the same time do even more damage, making the game harder for the player.

When selecting a weapon target for a weapon group, there’s a barrage mode that you can enable by tapping the right shoulder button, causing the weapons to fire one after another. I’ll play around with the 100ms spacing idea as well!

Thank you! I'll think about ways to add more groups!

Speaking of a homing weapon, I actually do have a prototype for that lying around. I just have to think about how to add it without affecting the balance of the game too much, it could be overpowered. Maybe a knight cannon like you're suggesting would be easier to fit into the game!

About the shop soft lock: I will fix the shop to prevent this from happening, perhaps by giving the player extra terrain if there's no space. The "choose place" selection still lets you access the salvage menu, so you can remove blocks with the B button, although I admit that this isn't obvious.

Great job winning! The hard difficulty has a more challenging version of the final boss.

Thank you! I was able to recover some data from the save file, but unfortunately, I have not been able to reproduce the issue exactly. I am sorry about the bug and I will look into it more when I find some free time! Thank you for letting me know about the issue, I try to fix all issues with the game wherever possible.

Thanks for finding this! Do you have any way of sending me the broken save file? Which version of the game do you have?

Thanks for making this, it's lovely!

Thank you! I've been working on it for a long time. Enjoy :)

Glad you're enjoying it!

In the macro mode, mining regular grassy terrain also gives you 10 stone:

If you want to build without any resource requirements, there's also a creative mode in the extras menu:

I just started playing today but I love it so far! The dialog and world building are really well done. Looking forward to seeing what else you make!

Thanks! Glad you enjoyed it!

Ah yeah, I need to block off the top left of the map until I can figure out how the original game calculates room entrances and exits. Basically the gamemaker source code for the original puts the whole map in one giant room, and I'm still trying to reverse engineer how some of the view transitions work. Thanks for letting me know!

If you get stuck in the top corner, I think you should still be able to hold A+B to warp out

It doesn't, I mainly used C++, unfortunately it's not possible to make a large gba game of this size in lua due to cpu and ram limits.

It's one of my favorites too, a really underrated game. When the desktop version stopped working in my linux install, I ported it to gba to preserve it. Hopefully I'll finish implementing the rest of the features soon, after taking a nice long break. Thank you for your comment!

Much newer! I've been working on the code from a private repository, it's about 2000 commits ahead of the public repository from last year's gba jam.

Thank you! There's actually a new version with lots of updates, available here: https://skylandgame.io/beta/

Excellent work on this port! I'm enjoying it.