It's been a little while since I wrote about a demake here on Retro Dodo. I've missed it, to be honest, so seeing a Portal demake called Vector for the Game Boy Advance popping up on Itch.io has got me very excited. It works on actual hardware too and any emulator, so you can play it on the original GBA you had as a kid!
The game's creator, charger0277 has made it in homage to Valve's masterpiece Portal. The concept of Vector is the same, with players making two portals to move themselves and items between spaces. The game is currently a demo with six chambers to it, with players needing to carry cubes and then drop them onto buttons, with sentry turrets that you'll need to shoot in order to clear rooms. There are different platforms you'll have to reach and elevators you'll need to navigate.
The levels are all drawn by code; in fact, charger0277, everything is drawn by code. Written in C with devkitARM, there are no hand-drawn images in the game, and everything from the character to the fonts is created by Node scripts.
The room layouts are a text file, fifteen characters by ten, one letter per block — and there is a drag-and-drop editor that reads it, draws the real game pieces, shows the light cones, the laser runs, the elevator travel and the jump arc, and on save rebuilds the .gba.
I know what you're wondering, and the answer is yes, AI has been used here, but at least charger0277 has made it very clear where it's been used.
The cover image and the title screen artwork were generated with AI, then reduced by hand-written code to the console's limits: 240x160 pixels and sixteen colours. Everything else in the game — the character, the walls, the portals, the fonts, every tile and sprite — is drawn procedurally by scripts, not by a model. The C source and those scripts were written with the help of an AI coding assistant, directed and reviewed by a human.
So it sounds like AI has had a rather large part to play in this demo, which may or may not put you off checking it out. I would have loved this to have been made 100% by a human, in all honesty, but that's just my stance on AI in this industry; a dev would have made this without the use of a coding assistant back when the GBA was made, so why can't that happen now?
Head to Itch.io to check out Vector and play on your handheld or emulator!
