Dispatch № 08 · gba-snake
GBA Snake
Snake game for the Game Boy Advance
- C
- Game Boy Advance
- Makefile
A classic Snake game built in C for the Game Boy Advance, written close to the metal for CS 2110 at Georgia Tech.
By the numbers
- Wrote a complete Snake game in C for the Game Boy Advance, programming directly against the hardware: VRAM, button registers, and a fixed step game loop.
- Implemented continuous movement, collision detection, growth and scoring, and a title, gameplay, win, and game over state machine on small 4×4 pixel tiles.
Close to the hardware
No engine and no standard graphics stack: the game writes pixels straight to GBA VRAM, polls the directional pad and START or SELECT through the hardware button register, and paces itself with a fixed game speed loop.
Game logic
The snake moves continuously in the last input direction, grows by three segments per food, and ends on a wall or self collision. A small state machine drives the title, gameplay, win, and game over screens with a running score readout.
Context
Built for CS 2110 (Spring 2025); sprite art was generated with nin10kit and compiled with the devkitARM toolchain through a Makefile.