Fledgling Go

Fledgling Go is a music/rhythm game developed by the team “Cats Nudged the Assembler”. The game runs on a single-board computer called the Raspberry Pi. You play as the bird named “the fledgling”, dancing with the flock among the clouds following the leading bird.

Game screenshot. Against a background of colourful clouds on a pink sky, an orange bird flies among a flock of birds, following the feathers left by the leading bird.

Video footage

🎞Fledgling_Go_RPi.mp4(4.8 MiB, 01:12, 960x540)

Executable programs and playing instructions^🪐 can be found in the source repository. Gratitude goes to the roommate who kindly sponsored the keycap tester in the video.

The instructions for the coursework were to “implement in assembly language an application that you think will be the best.” We reached the concensus that the best application would be a music game! It resulted in this project codenamed “in you” (pronounced similar to “music game” in Chinese), or “fly bitch” as we sometimes call it. The design of the game was inspired by Rhythm Heaven, but most of the graphics, sounds, and program logic were created by the team.

An orange bird flying among a group of blue birds. The background is rainbow-coloured, with clouds in the shape of the words “IN YOU”.

The game logic is written in ARMv6 assembly. We built a simple single-tasking operating system environment that runs the Raspberry Pi Zero single board computer and also supports development on desktop computers with an emulator. The Raspberry Pi version runs directly on bare metal without depending on a complex desktop OS, and games can be swapped by simply copying files on the SD card. Rounding up, we have made our own handheld gaming console (indeed).

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