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GB Studio, a "Game Maker application" for making your own custom Game Boy games, has just released (UP: GB Studio 2 + Analogue Pocket support in Aug)

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delete12345

delete12345

One Winged Slayer
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Nov 17, 2017
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Now supports REAL colors (thanks, modoversus )


New version coming in August will include an option to export titles directly to the Analogue Pocket.

Will also support new genres including 2D plataform, side scrolling shooter, point and click adventures, and possibly it's own solution for combat.

Full color support, too.







Now supports colors:




Source:

https://github.com/chrismaltby/gb-studio

Homepage:

https://www.gbstudio.dev/

tl;dw

  • Visual game builder with no programming knowledge required.
  • Design your graphics in any editor that can output PNG files e.g. Photoshop, Tiled, Aseprite.
  • Example project included to get started right away.
  • Make top down 2D JRPG style adventure games.
  • Build real GB Rom files which can be played in an emulator or on device using USB Carts.
  • Build a HTML5 playable game that also works on mobile and can deployed to any webserver or uploaded to Itch.io.
  • Built for macOS, Windows and Linux.
  • Supports both macOS light and dark mode.
  • Includes the full tools that were used to build Untitled GB Game, free to play on Itch.io.

The author:

eldritch_holla said:
Thanks for the support everyone just released GB Studio 1.0.0 and open sourced the project on GitHub! Get ready for the Game Boy's 30th birthday and make yourself a game of your own!

The actual game engine part is using GBDK but the application hides most of that away.

It's true that you will be able to get better performance from assembly and gbdk can be a pain to work with but the game engine as it is at the moment has been benchmarked to run at 60fps with pretty much anything you could do in the editor. An assembly rewrite is something I've considered if performance ever gets to be an issue though.
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This is the included Sample Project, compiled into a GB rom, which then can be played on actual hardware:

TIL1iEU.jpg





GitHub is promoting GB Studio to celebrate Game Boy's 30th birthday.

Additional Supplementary Resources:

Introduction to Game Boy Development:
https://gist.github.com/tobiasvl/664ec1b2dcdaf627d27bb0ba961429de
 
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delete12345

delete12345

One Winged Slayer
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Nov 17, 2017
19,731
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Theoretically, it should. This is as easy as it can get for all developers, otherwise, anyone would hate to create games for the Game Boy because it would be all in assembly language without GB Studio.
 
Pororoka

Pororoka

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Nov 1, 2017
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Can this be threatened (or C&D'd) by Nintendo?

It is very neat and I will definitely give it a shot this long weekend!
 
Why would you do that?

Why would you do that?

Member
Oct 25, 2017
4,803
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That's neat. I'm glad it's free and open source.

I recently started learning about programming a Game Boy game in assembly, I programmed a few things, it's really fun and not terribly difficult. The hardest part is learning about the hardware I/O. I wouldn't be surprised if a tool like this could ease new GB programmers into it by teaching them a little about the hardware in a simpler, easy way.
 
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delete12345

delete12345

One Winged Slayer
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Nov 17, 2017
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Why would you do that? said:
That's neat. I'm glad it's free and open source.

I recently started learning about programming a Game Boy game in assembly, I programmed a few things, it's really fun and not terribly difficult. The hardest part is learning about the hardware I/O. I wouldn't be surprised if a tool like this could ease new GB programmers into it by teaching them a little about the hardware in a simpler, easy way.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

You be even more surprised when you find that this app uses the Electron framework.
 
retrobotjr

retrobotjr

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Jan 10, 2018
2,024
Got really into game boy this last year, and have always thought about making a game, so here we go I guess
 
Aquova

Aquova

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Oct 27, 2017
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This is super cool. I messed around with GB-dev stuff in C for a while, and a little in assembly, but this is super slick and really open. A lot of GB-dev stuff is old scripts and programs from decades ago, so it's bizarre to see a modern day program focused on this stuff. I'll eagerly check it out.
 
Silver-Streak

Silver-Streak

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Oct 25, 2017
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This is cool as hell. It reminds me a lot of GDevelop (Free, Open source, can export to web, platform (PC), or mobile, etc. www.gdevelop-app.com/) which I've been learning a ton recently.

However, I really like their scene linker system. That actually seems easier than anything else I've seen before (even compared to Stencyl/GDevelop, which are the easiest engines I've found for 2D stuff)
 
SoH

SoH

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Oct 25, 2017
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I'm a little confused about the capitalization in the title. Does this have some association with Game Maker or YoYo Games that I am not seeing?
 
SoH

SoH

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Oct 25, 2017
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delete12345 said:
The only relation is that the author used "Game Maker" to describe the ease-of-use of the IDE. It has no bearings to the "Game Maker" applications by Yoyo Games.
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Got it. Thanks. I did look through the site and github and didn't see the author make the comparison anywhere so the context was lost on me and read like some fancy accreditation like a "Spike Lee joint"
 

Deleted member 8166

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I just wanted to create a thread about this. it sounds like an awesome idea and I already have an idea for a game...let's see how fast I can do something with this.
 
eldritch_holla

eldritch_holla

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delete12345 said:
You be even more surprised when you find that this app uses the Electron framework
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

It was originally going to be a web app but I couldn't manage to get the GBDK build tools compiled to javascript (using Emscripten) and I didn't want to pay to run a web server for it :-D Hopefully I've managed to make it not FEEL like an Electron app! Hope you all enjoy it.
 
TrashHeap64

TrashHeap64

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Dec 7, 2017
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I've been playing around with it a bit at work today (whoops). It's a really neat toolset and I'm excited to play around with it some more.

Thanks for making it open source! This has the potential of becoming a really powerful tool
 
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delete12345

delete12345

One Winged Slayer
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Nov 17, 2017
19,731
Boston, MA
eldritch_holla said:
It was originally going to be a web app but I couldn't manage to get the GBDK build tools compiled to javascript (using Emscripten) and I didn't want to pay to run a web server for it :-D Hopefully I've managed to make it not FEEL like an Electron app! Hope you all enjoy it.
Click to expand...
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Oh hey, I didn't expect the author to be here. :P

Welcome aboard!
 
GSR

GSR

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Oct 25, 2017
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This is super cool. If I have some time this weekend I'm gonna dig in to this.
 
modoversus

modoversus

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This looks great, will try it during the weekend as well. I love that there are now so many tools for beginners to try making their own games and demos on retro game consoles.
 
TheChrisGlass

TheChrisGlass

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Oct 25, 2017
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When I attended DigiPen, we had a Game Boy development class to help teach us assembly in partnership with Nintendo.
We wrote assembly on the original Game Boy and C for the Game Boy Color.
We used No$ at school to debug our work. That was the official class software they wanted us to use.

As long as it's not using copyrighted material, it should be in the clear. Looks fine to me at first glance.
 

Deleted member 2620

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How accurate is the self-assigned "adventure game creator" description? Is this not well-suited for action games?
 
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delete12345

delete12345

One Winged Slayer
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Nov 17, 2017
19,731
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TheChrisGlass said:
When I attended DigiPen, we had a Game Boy development class to help teach us assembly in partnership with Nintendo.
We wrote assembly on the original Game Boy and C for the Game Boy Color.
We used No$ at school to debug our work. That was the official class software they wanted us to use.

As long as it's not using copyrighted material, it should be in the clear. Looks fine to me at first glance.
Click to expand...
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Did you happen to have some of your course materials available?
 
TheChrisGlass

TheChrisGlass

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delete12345 said:
Did you happen to have some of your course materials available?
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I saved everything from school. Backed up all of it. It's not as clean as I like, but hey, it's all on an Amazon Drive.

The main thing you'd be looking for the Game Boy Programming Manual.
The one I have is "Version 1.12"
DMG-06-4216-001-D
Released: 10/10/2000

However, it is clearly out of line for me to personally distribute that. But you can find similar versions online if you look.
 
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delete12345

delete12345

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TheChrisGlass said:
I saved everything from school. Backed up all of it. It's not as clean as I like, but hey, it's all on an Amazon Drive.

The main thing you'd be looking for the Game Boy Programming Manual.
The one I have is "Version 1.12"
DMG-06-4216-001-D
Released: 10/10/2000

However, it is clearly out of line for me to personally distribute that. But you can find similar versions online if you look.
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I see. Thanks for the info.
 
Setsune

Setsune

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I'm really digging this so far. This is one of the slickest interfaces for a "simple game maker" that I've seen in a while.

Two things I'm running into:
  1. I'm swapping out some of the extended characters I won't be needing, so I can have extra characters and an italics set of the font, so I can type "ÙÏ×ÚÁ ÿÿ" and get "YOWZA!!!! " as an example. I've done alright hunting through the Windows Character Map, but compared to that, or other tables online, it does seem to skip around a little bit. Maybe I'm looking at the wrong things. Is there a table of the text characters used in matching order? It would be super cool if the Studio could pop up a picture of the ASCII table, then let you click on it to dial in the text you wanted, filling it into the text blanks.

  2. I downloaded the MOD trackers suggested, thinking I might be able to throw something together for background noise, but that's obviously going to be a job and a half learning. Is there any resource for free-to-use Game Boy compatible MODs, like OpenGameArt? I realize that's a very specific niche...
 
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Setsune said:
. Is there a table of the text characters used in matching order?
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Currently, the editor only has the ASCII text map. I think you can find it somewhere in the source project.

You may want to check the Github Issues and do pull requests for the author. He needs a lot of help, given this is a 1-man project to begin with. The author is looking for Japanese character maps, and someone else requested for Hebrew character maps.
 
Steezy

Steezy

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Jan 7, 2018
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Thanks foe bumping this. I missed the thread the first time round and it looks really cool. I'll have a play around with it later.
 
Amspicora

Amspicora

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Oct 29, 2017
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First NESMaker, than GB Studio. Interesting times for developing games for retro console. I wonder if we'll got something like this for SEGA related retro-consoles in the future.
 
Pancakes R Us

Pancakes R Us

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Oct 27, 2017
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Oh nice. I don't think I have the time or patience, but will hopefully get to play a creation by a member here.
 
Birdie

Birdie

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Oct 26, 2017
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This makes me excited even though I doubt I have the patience or skill to do much with it---

How easy would a basic RBY-style Pokemon game be?
 
Ginger Hail

Ginger Hail

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Oct 25, 2017
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I doubt I'd have the patience to fully make something, I'd love to just mess around with this for a bit.
 
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