GB Studio – Retro adventure game creator for Game Boy | Hacker News Reader

GB Studio – Retro adventure game creator for Game Boy

gbstudio.dev

295 pointstosh29 comments

Oh hey, Hacker News! Just wanted to say I've been really pleased with how this project has been received, wasn't expecting it to blow up this much! My Github issues list is going crazy right now! :-D

It's been a side project of mine for quite a while as I was learning Electron and C/GBDK at the same time so don't judge me too harshly on the code hehe.

It's early days for the project so not quite decided how I want to expand it out just yet, maybe to more genres, maybe to allow more JRPG functionality. What ever I end up doing though I want to make sure it's as simple as possible for beginners to make something as easy as possible!

Question about the download - I see you have it labeled "win32-x64", does that mean it runs on both 32-bit and 64-bit Windows? Asking because my only machine with a good copy of bgb is an x86 / 1Gb RAM unit.

Hi, sorry for the delay replying, weirdly Electron names the output win32-x64 even though it's only for 64-bit, I think the naming convention is platform (win32) then architecture (x64). Either way I've just built a 32-bit version which hopefully will work for you https://github.com/chrismaltby/gb-studio/releases/download/v... though I'm not sure how it's going to manage with 1Gb RAM.

Hmm, seems like game maker tools for retro consoles are growing in popularity a bit recently. Remember seeing something similar to this for the NES getting some traction on Kickstarter a while back.

Either way, kudos for the project. Nice to see the Game Boy get a bit more attention with stuff like this.

There is an immense amount of joy in the simplicity of how the infrastructure of these old systems is structured, and how well-exposed and accessible all the components are.

Limitations also seem to breed a certain type of creativity. I’ve found myself ‘lost in a sea of options’ when developing for newer systems having started my development experience on the SEGA Genesis and moving onwards to the Game Boy Advance and Nintendo DS.

There is also an immense amount of joy in the now-accessible ability to test on hardware.

I have a theory, of sorts, that popular retro game consoles are the most cross-compatible and future-proof software platforms we have.

Gameboy emulators are relatively simple to make and basically always in-demand. And the Gameboy "specification" can never change—a feature you relied on will never be deprecated or removed.

You can also write your software in TeX, that will never change either.

Reminds me of NESMaker

http://www.thenew8bitheroes.com/

I was definitely inspired by NESMaker, yeah!

This is incredible! And just in time for Ludum Dare 44 this weekend ;)

Didn't realize that LD44 was this weekend! Thanks for the heads up, looking forward to compo!

The ease and functionality of the environment is fantastic. I especially like the easy visual cues used to denote what attaches to what/where! Really looking forward to this maturing! I'd love to see a more full scripting environment!

I'm impressed by the presentation and the project as a whole looks very well put together. I don't even game anymore but when I was a kid this would've been very appealing to get into.

Agreed! The landing page/site you have for the project is very nicely presented and I love the little video! It looks like a very fun and easy tool to use

Been having a great amount of fun making a game using this, fantastic app!

Fantastic! What extra steps would be required to support the GBC? Do you have to provide dual palettes? Or does the GB guess? (are there other differences aside from colour? I guess for the transparent paks)

I believe I just need to assign a colour palette to each sprite and background tile but it’s something I’ve not played around with just yet. I kind of like the simplicity of the original greyscale myself but GBC is a highly requested feature so I’m sure I’ll look into it!

Wow, this looks fantastic -- I've been wanting to work on a simple JRPG for a while but without having to learn RPG maker. There's an obvious caveat here being that RPG Maker, Game Maker and Unity all have a gigantic ecosystem of 3rd party packages and assets that may make them better for pure game making. Perhaps my question is whether there's value in something like this which seems far more minimal?

It targets gameboys?

It makes ROM files for the original Game Boy and they can run on an emulator or a real console https://imgur.com/a/oR9aNdK but it also outputs a web build with touch controls using a fork I made of the js emulator GameBoy Online https://github.com/chrismaltby/GameBoy-Online

This is wonderful! Im going to look for my old GB just to spend a few weekends on this.

I thought Jeff Gertsman went insane and started a game studio.

Looks awesome! I noticed that it doesn't yet support in-game progress save functionality yet, but will definitely give it a try when it does!

Saving/loading is definitely on my todo list. The game I built this for originally was only small and was intended to be finished in one sitting but I’ll be adding support for saving soon.

similar, but to tech about 10 years previous to this was Adventure Construction Set. Very cool, but I lacked the imagination/art skills to make anything compelling with it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adventure_Construction_Set

I bought this when it was in stores, but lacked a PC powerful enough to run it! All my elementary school self could do was read the instructions over and over and dream :)

Oh, how cool is that?! Will give it try!

Wonderful, was looking for something like this to play around with making GB games!

This looks awesome

Reply on news.ycombinator.com