This demo of Space Invaders was written for the Gameboy in C and can be run on a Gameboy emulator.

The game utilizes the Gameboy’s “Mode 0” to make tiles and sprites appear and move around the screen. The player is the tank at the bottom of the screen and can fire up to 2 bullets at once. They must clear the aliens that are descending to win, but getting hit by alien fire too many times will cause a game over. The video above shows this in action.

I also created the visual assets for the demo, including a pixelated version of the original title screen as well as alien and player sprites inspired by images from Space Invaders. The backgrounds are 256×256 images that the hardware converts into tiles and the sprites all exist on a single sheet. (Note that these images were created for the Gameboy’s 160 x 240 screen and are therefore small).