Retrogaminghomebrewneo geo pocket color
Civilisation Pocket Squeezes Civ Onto the Neo Geo Pocket Color, and Losing Everything Just Leaves You Watching the Rivals Play
Chris Ahchay is writing a Civ-style strategy game in C for SNK's 1999 handheld: a 64-by-64 world map, three computer rivals, research and specialists. There's no game over yet, so a player who loses every unit and city keeps watching the others take their turns.
“Can you lead your civilisation to world domination?” asks the itch.io page. On a handheld SNK pulled from North American shelves in June 2000, with a 160-by-152 screen and 12 KB of RAM for its main processor, that’s a big ask.
You start the way Civ players expect: one settler, one military unit. Move the settler somewhere better or build a city on the spot, and the game names the city for you. Warriors explore, fortify, or sleep to heal, and “If you are attacked while sleeping, your defense is weakened.” Press Option on any unit menu and you’re in the Civilisation manager, where you edit cities, pick research and set taxes.
The repo on Codeberg lists the scale in three lines: a 64x64 world map, “3 Non Player Characters,” and “A unique discovery tree and research approach.” It’s 75 commits of C so far, and the newest landed this morning.
Then there’s the known bugs list, and it’s the best sentence on the page: “There is no game-over detection yet, so if you lose all of your units and cities then you’ll just be stuck watching the NPC chars doing their thing.”
History keeps going without you. Ahchay is chipping at it. Today’s devlog post adds “an ‘end turn’ menu if you lose all of your units,” which “gives you a chance to open the City Manager in these cases and change production if you need to.” Lose your cities too, and you’re still a spectator.
The TODO file reads like a designer thinking out loud, and it’s the best part of the project. Diplomacy: “Really have no idea about this yet… Might not actually bother.” A science victory gets a shrug about the space race not fitting, “but either that or discover the cure for cancer or something.” World wonders might skip construction entirely and switch on for whichever civ makes the matching discovery first, which would fold the science and cultural victories into one.
Every system gets cut down to the version that still feels like Civ, and some, like diplomacy, may not make the trip at all. Capturing enemy cities, smarter rivals and government types are all still on the list.
The open question is the last line of the game itself. A Civ game is defined by how it ends, and this one doesn’t end yet. Whether Ahchay goes with conquest only, or squeezes wonders and a science win into 2 MB, decides what kind of Civilization fits in a pocket.