Hi all!

I'm here to finally announce and release the game I have been working on for the past 5 or so years!
TInymon is a turn-based monster-collecting RPG greatly "inspired" by the first release of a popular game series



I've tried to pack as much content in there as I possibly could. You have a whole overworld to explore with 8 cities and boss arenas, 16 different monsters to pick from, a complex battle mode with items, stats, types and many different attacks. It even comes with link cable trading and battling! From testing this myself and watching a few friends play, it takes between 5 and 8 hours to beat.

Alongside the game, in the zip, you will find a manual filled with lore, tips and trivia about the game. I highly recommend keeping it nearby as you play this, it helps with planning battles.

This game is a bit massive weighing in at 9.4KB compressed (and 14.8KB uncompressed, so you will need at least 24KB of available memory to run). It runs on stock TI83 using ZX7Load ( http://ceme.tech/DL2524 ). A TI83+ port/director's cut of sorts is planned but that won't be for another few months at least as I want to focus on other projects for a while.

The game is available at http://ceme.tech/DL2587
The source (as unreadable as it is) is available at https://gitlab.com/_targz/tinymon

Enjoy!

Nice release! The graphics quality is nice

I'm fascinated that you wrote this in C with zcc: I know of practically no TI-83 [Plus]/TI-84 Plus projects that make use of it, given what I understand to be a relatively inefficient codegen compared to hand-written assembly. The project looks great, and I look forward to trying it. I'm glad to hear that a port to the Flash calculators is coming soon - that will substantially open up your audience.

Keeping the size down with zcc was definitely a struggle, the codebase definitely reflects that.
I wanted to use C wherever possible since it made larger routines (like the battle code) so much easier to manage. I really couldn't have done it in 100% ASM. So I had to do a lot of "unholy" things in that codebase to reduce generated code size. At one point I considered moving to sdcc as that seemed to generate better (smaller) code, but that would have required a rewrite of pretty much all ASM routines so I had to give up on that.

As the codebase grew bigger and bigger it became a lot harder to do anything. Towards the end of development I was too afraid to touch any of the code as changing one tiny thing would break ten unrelated routines, that's why the code base is so messy now. It's bodge on top of bodge.

If i were to sit down and go over the entire codebase on a weekend I could probably get the game to fit in my original goal of 8KB (when compressed) and make things more readable but I just really wanted to get this out as soon as possible. I need a break haha