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GB Studio: Drag and drop retro game creator for GameBoy
- gymbeaux 3y agoI’m hoping somebody ports Pokémon Colosseum to GBA/GBC
- CyberDildonics 3y agoWhat does this have to do with GB Studio? Was Pokemon Colosseum made with it?
- whateveracct 3y agoI think it's more that the game would be more fun as a 2D pokémon instead of the 3D it was. It's a niche request by GP for sure!
- gymbeaux 3y agoThanks homie. Not everyone gets it. Pokemon Colosseum is the Deep Space Nine of the Pokemon games.
- NegativeLatency 3y agoHm I haven’t played it but I did really enjoy DS9. Is it similar because the colosseum devs had more room to experiment, or grittier or something?
- whateveracct 3y agoI would say both? It's gritty by Pokémon standards (it's no Pokémon Reborn, which blows canon Pokémon out of the water). But gameplay-wise: - Doubles-only - No capturing wild pokémon. You steal shadow pokémon and heal them. - I found it generally more difficult than normal pokémon games. I'm sure GP has more to say :)
- gymbeaux 3y agoIt’s the “anti-Pokémon”. I’d say stealing Pokémon instead of catching them in the wild is the main difference, but the soundtrack was very “unlike the others” (strong rock vibes), the mechanics of doubles battles and colosseum “tournaments”. That you yourself were a criminal was unique too.
- whateveracct 3y agoHave you ever played the Reborn fangame? It sounds like you may like it.
- ihappentobe 3y agoGB Studio is a great way to mess around with making a gameboy game! It exports a rom that can be flashed onto a blank cart, and played on real hardware—with recent versions adding gameboy color support. The recently hyped McDonald’s Grimace game was reportedly made with GB studio: https://gbstudiocentral.com/news/mcdonalds-celebrates-grimaces-birthday-with-a-gb-studio-game/ https://gbstudiocentral.com/news/mcdonalds-celebrates-grimac...
- exhilaration 3y agoIs there a recommended blank cartridge and flashing tool? I'm totally new to this. Edit: to turn my own question, here's an article that goes over all the options: https://gbstudiocentral.com/tips/getting-your-gb-studio-games-on-real-hardware/ https://gbstudiocentral.com/tips/getting-your-gb-studio-game...
- ihappentobe 3y agoOh! That page is a great resource! From the options listed there I’ve used the stuff from https://www.gbxcart.com/ https://www.gbxcart.com/ It took a bit of reading to make sure I was getting the right cart for the job, but the flasher hardware worked well.
- philistine 3y agoI made my third book’s cover with GB Studio to make sure I had the perfect look. Gameboyessentials.com/book
- navanchauhan 3y agoPrevious: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19717558 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19717558 (4 years ago) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26979879 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26979879 (2 years ago)
- jhbadger 3y agoYeah, I assume this is posted again because of the buzz over the Gameboy Çolor game that was created using it that McDonald's released in a recent promotion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36311378 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36311378
- wk_end 3y agoI haven't really looked into it in detail, but AFAICT GB Studio is honestly incredible. I program the Game Boy as a hobby; this machine has basically no RAM and a CPU that's - depending on how you measure a "cycle" - either ~1MHz or ~4MHz, with a shockingly limited and non-orthogonal instruction set (and don't even get me started on dealing with bank switching). Historically games for it have been almost exclusively coded in assembly. And yet someone's come along and built a seemingly fairly flexible WYSIWYG game engine for it? If it didn't exist I would've told you it was impossible. I still don't quite believe it's possible, despite the proof being right in front of me.
- chrismaltby 3y agoThanks, one of the things I’ve always tried to do (at work, before I started on GB Studio) is make difficult things seem easy and accessible. Though I’d have also told you this was probably impossible before starting too! I just built it up slowly, making small tools to help me make sense of what was going on while learning GBDK, before I knew it pretty much had something I could package up. I’ve had a lot of help along the way though, untoxa’s [0] engine rewrite, and the work pau-tomas [1] did on the music editor have been especially helpful to the project. Been a bit absent from the community recently, not had the time, but hoping to get back on it again soon! I’m always amazed at how many awesome games people keep making though, it makes me really happy as this the first of many failed side projects that I pushed on through to completion. [0] https://github.com/untoxa https://github.com/untoxa [1] https://github.com/pau-tomas https://github.com/pau-tomas
- mysterydip 3y agoThanks for the incredible tool!
- mattl 3y agoI love GB Studio. I plan to use it to make a movie but will release my “games” too. Are you active on Mastodon or Bluesky?
- londons_explore 3y ago
- Waterluvian 3y agoWOW. What’s the compile pipeline to get to valid ROMs?! I need to dig deep when I get home. This is frankly astounding.
- djxfade 3y agoI used to contribute to the project back in v1 days. I'm not sure if the architecture has changed since then, but basically it worked by compiling the game logic as a kind of byte code that got interpreted at run time.
- Waterluvian 3y agoLike on top of the CPU’s opcodes? I imagine you mean the opcodes. That CPU probably can’t handle much abstraction. What impresses me the most is that to get performance out of these games, they’re often very carefully coded in the Sharp/Z80/8080 assembly. This compiler must be quite something.
- ehaliewicz2 3y agoIt actually does interpret bytecode, you can see the opcode definitions here https://github.com/chrismaltby/gb-studio/blob/1f995a976bd3aa5579ed86678912f59ed3a42ddb/appData/src/gb/include/vm.i#L52 https://github.com/chrismaltby/gb-studio/blob/1f995a976bd3aa... The trick is that a lot of the heavier stuff is implemented in assembly and this is mostly used for scripting (from what I understand).
- djxfade 3y agoYes exactly. It's not a zero cost abstraction, but it's a very simple format, each byte code oppose maps directly to function and passes its args. So it's basically just a conditional jump
- Waterluvian 3y agoOh wow. So surprised this is viable on a 4 (1, really) MHz processor. Thanks for clarifying and sharing, you both!
- slowhadoken 3y agoOh cool GB Studio is still going. Good for them.
- kixiQu 3y agoJust in case anyone doesn't read deep enough to run into it: > You can generate ROM files that can be run in an emulator, on a web page or on real Game Boy hardware. Being able to play these on the web is very, very cool.
- esotericsean 3y agoI've been making a game using GBDK (C) and a little engine called ZGB for the past several years, but the work that Chris and the team have done on GB Studio makes me want to switch to the platform. I'll still finish my game using C because I'm so far into development now there's no point in starting over, but if I was starting fresh, GB Studio would be the way to go. That said, I'm glad I made my game in C because I've learned so much more about coding. I feel like I get better every day. Not sure I would have that same experience using GB Studio. One day I want to try using ASM...
- zgluck 3y ago[flagged]
- asynchronous 3y agoNo, the game development is “drag and drop” not the game mechanics.
- zgluck 3y ago[flagged]
- pradn 3y agoIt's amazing that this software exists. And any game you can make with it can be played on a range of new emulator hardware. There's the Pocket Analogue, which is the high-end option that runs games directly from cartridges using two FPGAs, no emulation at all. https://www.analogue.co/pocket https://www.analogue.co/pocket And there's the cheap Miyoo Mini and the Anbernic handle-helds that let you run everything up to PS1 games on a tiny handheld. They have SP-style (vertical) and PSP-style (horizontal) versions. It would be so cool to make a game and flash it onto one of these to show to your friends.
- ralusek 3y agoSurely making a browser game would have the same benefits with fewer limitations?
- Waterluvian 3y agoAre there any projects/tools for ripping existing game boy sounds/music and importing them into this format? It would be a great way to learn how various effects are produced, remixing them, etc. It seems do-able: essentially an emulator whose APU implementation records a time series of the data/config passed to each of the four channels.