Play demo
GBADEV Containers's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Technical | #8 | 3.667 | 3.667 |
| Originality | #28 | 3.333 | 3.333 |
| Polish | #30 | 3.000 | 3.000 |
| Overall | #32 | 3.000 | 3.000 |
| Audio | #34 | 2.500 | 2.500 |
| Graphics | #41 | 2.500 | 2.500 |
Ranked from 6 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
Judge feedback
Judge feedback is anonymous and shown in a random order.
- Containers can be very useful for development, so it’s nice to have documentation about them.
- Great idea! Sometimes I wonder how many gba projects will be possible to compile a decade from now. At least the containerized ones will be possible to build! I hope people consider using your container environment!
- Nice entry! I like the idea of reproducible containers, so everyone can share the same environment.
Jam ROM submission
Type of submission
Open Source Repository URL
https://github.com/BreadMakesYouFull/gbadev-containers
Existing assets
* Butano game engine https://github.com/GValiente/butano
* Compiled via devkitProARM: https://devkitpro.org/wiki/devkitARM
* Third party licenses: https://github.com/BreadMakesYouFull/gbadev-containers/tree/main/licenses
Assets:
* GBA Jam Logos and banners made by GBA Jam 2024 Organizers, licensed under [CC BY-NC 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/)
* "JAM 2024" logo text font — Over Drive by [Graphic Arts Unit](https://www.graphicartsunit.com/gaupra/index.html)
* [Font besciii](https://github.com/damianvila/font-bescii) (Damian Vila) [CC0 1.0 Universal license](https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)
* basic-studio.blend by FnaX https://blendswap.com/blend/30270 CC-0 “No Rights Reserved” https://creativecommons.org/public-domain/cc0/
* Gameboy Advance Cartridge (GBA Cart) STL by @Dave https://www.printables.com/model/190861-gameboy-advance-cartridge-gba-cart/files CC BY 4.0 - Share / Adapt by attribution https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
* Music my own created before jam "binary"
Itch.io demo embedded additional info:
* Emulation courtesy of EmulatorJS https://github.com/EmulatorJS/EmulatorJS/blob/main/LICENSE GNU General Public License v3.0
* Open source BIOS https://github.com/Cult-of-GBA/BIOS MIT
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Comments
Good idea, this enlivening presentation, too bad the technical demo preamble only shows color changes and movements and doesn't show what the gba has up its sleeve ^^.
Thanks! I somewhat ran out of time, but still wanted to join the Jam. It's a little bit of a meta-entry as a lot of the time was spent on the containerfiles, reading what was available, and experimental gimp -> butano bmp export rather than the rom itself. I'd restored my gba for fun and only discovered the Jam by accident, I was super impressed by how accessible making stuff is, and how elaborate the community has managed to go with full games compared to other platforms :)
Seeing how much you put into a jam you found by chance, I hope it'll inspire you to go on and create other games!
I think this is a neat idea. Essentially utilising the power of containers to make the setup for developing gba games much more accessible to people. As someone who deals with deployment issues in my day to day, seeing stuff like this makes me wish we adopted docker sooner :D Excellent work!
Thanks! I feel your pain on the docker adoption in a commercial setting. To be fair there can also be security and other technical implications involved.
I'm a little confused by your usage of the word "container", but I'm even more confused why a toolchain for homebrew would need 10 GB of space. The latest version of the relevant ARM toolchain for GCC is only 2 GB, so what's the other 8 for?
Thanks for taking a look and giving some feedback! Hopefully I can add some context that might help:
Docker or Podman are build tooling that can bypasses the complex manual setup for developers, and gives a package a known stable platform. Defiantly not something necessary or fit for everyone, just a possibility! gbadev has a lot of approaches and resources... but they're a little manual and don't always make great choices on install methods. Also a lot of projects are made open source but really as "it works for me".
If you've never heard of containers before I'd definitely encourage you to give them a go!
https://www.docker.com/resources/what-container/
Use cases
You can read the project readme where a previous jam entry is used as an example. Its very much build-able... but only with specific versions of butano (understandable but less accessible for others to explore). A Containerfile, often called dockerfile could have described the build steps concretely, as well and been a reference others in future.
A 10gib container is for bundling whatever you like, but doesn't have to be that big! In this case all of Debian's goodness, gimp, mgba, devkitpro, butano, vim and whatever you'd want to extend it with, inside something that can run on mac windows linux! It would be trivial to make a leaner image though.
Containers are also great for CI/CD setups, allowing you to run your code in the same environment from development to production, which can save a lot of headaches, test test test.
I hope that helps add some context, it's not the right fit for everyone, but development in general has been shifting for a while now and probably will continue to with projects like nix, guix, atomic blue and so on.
It might be that this approach isn't really right for the homebrew/indie community but I thought I'd give it a try anyway in case anyone finds the example helpful :)
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[Update: some concrete use cases I found on itch.io where people have used docker to overcome something]