I made a Game Boy game last year.

a while back I made some GB Studio fan games these two games were F0 project and Star Fox grounded at the time I was working at a mobile game studio so I didn't really have a lot of uh free time doing this took about like four-ish months each I I was impressed and surprised at how well he did I think it helps that I kind of focused on communities that don't really get games that much anymore so I thought they were pretty good quality in in all honesty Flash Forward about two years I hadn't even touched GB Studio I had been working predominantly in unity uh and a little bit in unreal but I haven't made a single game besides just little small little things I was working on a game jam with my brother at the time and I saw that GB Studio 3.0 had been released I was very interested in it started fiddling around with it a little bit and saw some of the new cool potential updates they had bigger Sprite sizes they had better control they had new color palettes I kind of thought to myself well I've I've I've never made my own project something that I own from GB Studio everything I've made has just been these sort of fan games I looked around at the environment and saw that there's a lot of really cool projects coming out of it and said you know what maybe I can make a little quick thing something that's a little bit more unique [Music] thank you foreign [Music] and that's when I decided to make a quick project emphasis on the quick I thought about taking advantage of the systems that were available in the engine for this I looked at what I haven't done and it was the platformer bit I don't really like bullet hell style Shooters things that are on Rails I'm not too fond of so I decided to just go with the platformer and with the platformer an added benefit is you can have a lot more animations because you're not using the four directions for each character I set the platformer settings up to my liking uh things like speed and height acceleration deceleration as I was going through and testing things I kind of noticed the ladder system that's available in the game and it really got me thinking of an old game I used to play called MapleStory MapleStory kind of has this more hack and slash system in a platformer essentially you know you climb these platforms and most levels kind of just go up you hit them with the single attack button but you have access to other skills and different things you can unlock through classes or other things like that foreign Studio has this bullet function where it essentially shoots things and this is used for a lot of their versions of attacking or killing enemies I figured if I just don't have it move very fast it's basically a slash then making the slash effect I moved into the cooldown logic because you can't just be you know swinging non-stop as I was making this I thought well it'd be pretty nice if you could upgrade your speed for this I assume so I put in some Logic for that later now I I had this working and since I made it I was really proud of it I thought maybe this is good enough to have most of a whole game and it could maybe be but for this I I looked at MapleStory I was like okay what makes the combat a little bit more interesting and it really is having special skills so I thought I can't have what they cut on the screen there's too many Sprites I can't really you know leave it up to the player to just like imagine or remember this stuff like I had done with Star Fox grounded so I used the combat menu kind of logic that they have I figured if I can open this mid-combat then we're gold then I that's that's perfect luckily that was the case it stops time and you're able to select an attack and go for it I initially had thoughts of a magic meter but I didn't really like it I kind of liked where you have to actually hit the enemy to gain magic so that you can use the abilities I don't know if it makes combat actually repetitive at least your magic kind of carries over but that's that's that [Music] so then the skills I I figured I should just have a base set um I shouldn't get you know caught up in making like way too many swappable ones or things like that for this I initially started with fire slash it just does big damage really simple it's basically just your slash but you know more damage and then Blitz this initially was a speed increase so that you'd actually like get faster but I ran into issues and I made it basically just like a quadruple slash type attack I wanted something that could actually stop enemy attacks more of a defensive skill so for that I added silence it just stops the enemy of sex and then finally I I realized that the game needed some kind of healing type thing so you're not always having to to run back and heal so I added a heal spell although I made it optional you don't have to get it but it's kind of the last ability a little you know underwhelming for our last ability but what can you do so for most of these abilities they're unlocked through the story as you progress I wanted you to gain more abilities I could tie them into quests as well and then you know have an incentive for the player to keep going I also went out of the way to add some platforming sections to upgrade health and stuff like that [Music] so the initial story thought I really didn't want to touch it that much I know for these I like to approach the gameplay first really settle in the gameplay and the story can come after I'm honestly really inspired by a lot of how mangaka seemed to create their story where they just kind of think of it on the spot really organically I really don't want to plan it out I've done that too many times and it always ends with way too big of a story way too ambitious and it's always bad for me I thought it could be fun to have themes of forgetting since you know the Game Boy itself is almost this older forgotten Relic for most people but it's kind of like making a you know it's still alive so I thought that was kind of neat we could bring it into the characters as well as you know we could have amnesia or something like that I knew it had to be some sort of fantasy because I had added these special abilities that essentially are magic being like fire and speed increases and stuff so it had to be some sort of magical thing uh I did a loose lore kind of goes like this so there are people the world that can use magic if they're born in specific places there is a pretty chill Global Peace where magic people would help out and trade with the normies and the normies did the same back yada yada Good Times eventually the normal people somehow got magic I don't really know maybe they just figured it out maybe eventually spread to the rest of the world uh I don't know they just got it eventually since the normal people didn't really need magic anymore they literally just forgot about them pretty much with that I bet you're kind of wondering how the magic actually works the magic users have magic potential in their body they can release the Magic by putting it into a catalyst where they can do pretty much anything with the most common uses are making the Catalyst harder or faster or coated with an element um you know sharp basically just like enhanced in some way the Catalyst can be pretty much anything so long as you're skilled enough some examples are rocks swords leaves boxes barrels limbs guns fire air blood axes Souls food uh hair it's extremely soft and by Soft I mean doesn't have any rules and it can be very open-ended you know it allowed me for a lot of creativity with characters in this way so the game has you returning to the Village frequently so I knew it needed some talents people since the characters kind of grew up in the town I really didn't want it to be like you know they're these people that don't know you so they needed names and they needed to interact with the main characters a little bit I made about seven of them mainly because that's how much the screen could handle in terms of Sprites tasso is the main character he looks kind of like the kid from Dragon Ball Heroes he's pretty much just a simple kind of main character kid is taso's best friend he's a bit rebellious and energetic very excited about getting his magic and he kicks off the story basically this is my friend's least favorite character and I found that funny if this is the self-appointed mayor he has no magic for some reason and he essentially raised tasso and city noldia is the Talon's blacksmith who uses her fists as Catalyst to shape hot metal I honestly don't know why the town needs a blacksmith but she is there AMA is the depressed mother archetype I was not skilled enough to write her with more nuance and interest so she just kind of that basic depressed mother Vitus is on this kid he's very young and is always has Oodles of energy and lastly there's Lavo who wears a Neato mask costume thing he's a Healer guy and he likes herbs I I like to believe he just put a bunch of herbs in the soup for some reason I don't know why so these are the village characters initially I didn't really care if they had names or personalities I didn't want to go down that path so much but since they're tied to a lot of quests and the Spells I needed to give them more importance and I can't just have them be like go back to the mom in the village you know because how's the player supposed to know in the game I have them all their names just like pop up hopefully the players remember probably not though these are all the characters I made definitely didn't forget any of them any important characters I I didn't forget any of them at all um that might make sense nope so this next bit I'm going to be spoiling uh the game's pretty short honestly it takes about one to two hours to beat it you can play it in browser and on mobile [Music] okay difficulties this is yeah this is the main bit which I mentioned earlier I had a full-time job when starting this uh as well as I was coming right out of Christmas holidays and I had just finished a pretty uh game Jam for me I was up most um most hours of the night it was supposed to be one month um but it kind of turned into about five months of weekends and nights anywhere I could really squeeze in Dev time I use GB studio uh which came with a lot of limitations the limitations in DB studio is obviously the same ones for the Game Boy so there's color limitations although they do have different palettes it's kind of hard to access all of them to their full list though it takes a bit of time there's obviously a lot of sound limitations um I think TV studio only really gives like a couple of noise and like a Boop thing that you can use you essentially have to download other things to get better sound out of it the Sprite Talent limitations were the main one so every Sprite is kind of broken up into certain Dimensions before it was mostly 16x16s for for characters Maybe by eights for backgrounds um but recently I believe they broke up the characters even further to eight by six so it's basically like cut in half and you can use those each scene has a certain amount and if you go over the limit then Sprites kind of start using each other that happened a couple times when I tried to make new magics because of these Sprite limitations I couldn't really use as many animations for the enemies as I wanted so they're kind of just like all of them are hovering they don't really walk I mean that's easier for me but it looks kind of weird sometimes there's also a limited amount of enemies on screen I I kind of wanted to have a little bit more just to get that maple story kind of flavor back but I couldn't really have that many enemies from that if characters shared code like the all the enemies kind of have the same basic code I couldn't really change it once somewhere and it changes everything I I could sort of uh change if things were already made when the characters were made I could change them all together with a custom script but the problem is around the end I had to keep adding a lot of stuff so I did have to end up like going to each character and clicking on something and changing stuff it added up to a lot of time initially I had a lot of issues with things like the health bar it was going to be Sprite on top of the screen but it was taking up a lot of sprite space for a lot of these issues I ended up needing plugins which was amazing that the GB Studio Community is so awesome because I was able to actually really get things that I needed and I didn't have to like ask hey does anyone have something like this I really didn't have to do that which was awesome the plugins I needed was a text on screen plug-in a sound effect generator and better menus for things like inventory and stats and that stuff for the project I had to kind of make my own music and that was a whole new process I used the wonderful tool beatbox and with a bunch of weeks of trial and error I was able to make a couple of tunes here and take a listen thank you [Music] I think they sounded really good when I exported them but bringing them in there was a lot of issues that I ran into just because the whole system is different and you're running with Game Boy sound obviously things would change and warp but sometimes they would like Melodies would go down a key or up a key in certain areas and it would really just mess up the song and that was a little Annoying that I had to work around by the end of it I was losing track of a lot of variables that would lead to to what and when this is my bad I should have been planning this out better probably just literally writing it down somewhere or putting more comments in but I took a break for a while and when I came back I had forgotten what variables did what and it was really it was really hard to deal with I had a screen Shake bug that would just tell the actors on the screen I had a bug where the players hit animation would break the game so I couldn't use it and then eventually when I was reach the end I had a really big issue which was I didn't really like playing it I had replayed and played so much that I was getting really sick of it and sick of trying to find issues and and errors and stuff to fix I knew leading up to release I had to replay the game from start to finish to make sure if there's any problems and I just dreaded doing it this kind of sucks because it makes you think like oh is this game not good I literally have no idea sometimes when I would play it on my actual game boy I'd be like oh yeah no this is all right actually but you know most of the time playing at these last few bits I was like I don't know I literally don't know all in all I'm obviously very proud of doing it there's a lot of last minute changes mainly to the Arts I wasn't initially going to add the actual cut scene images but I'm really glad I did because I think they're the best part I wasn't going to do my own music but I'm glad I did for the beginning half of the game you weren't gonna have any magic but it was really boring so I added just a simple spell just that little bit spiced things up enough my biggest regrets with the project was that I left at a cliffhanger that's like the main thing I wish I would have wrapped up the story even if that would have added like another month or two while I was reaching the ending I just kind of thought like well maybe I'll come back to maybe I'll make another one and you never know like I could finish the story but for then I was like I really just got to be done with it and I know the story would go on it wouldn't just end that's my biggest regret it's a cliffhanger and currently I don't really have plans on finishing it up I'm sorry my biggest achievement I think with this was uh I think the art turned out pretty good um I I like the characters and all this stuff I mentioned the cut scene stuff before I think that stuff turned out pretty good people uh liked that it kind of was a little bit Dragon Ball you looking yeah I was impressed with those as well as I was really impressed by the music I've never done music before and it's not great but um it's not horrible I I don't think ultimately I was really happy I was able to kind of pull off the vision that I wanted although you know there's issues and and I could have changed things I wanted to change some quests around but I was really running on energy by the end of it I needed to finish and to move on will I do another Game Boy project in the future I I don't know I um I have ideas I would like to recently Star Fox grounded got um just like a couple of like videos and things people talking about it and that's super cool to see it's super cool and sadly my own personal projects can't really Reach people that way um you know but fan projects tend to be able to do that so I've had the thought of maybe doing another fan project although like I said before it's not mine I can't really do anything with it so I don't like spending you know months of work on something that I I can't do anything with obviously I can pivot it towards my own stuff like let's just swap out all the characters but I don't know I like GB Studio a lot it's it's it was such a wonderful engine to discover at the time I I had been really feeling bad about myself and what I could do so that to have this engine that for once was easy to learn and easy to make stuff with and where I felt like I was making things that were actively decently you know good just an update I went back to it a bit after I said it was done and I added a couple of boss fight things and uh some Collectibles to share and an interior of tasso's house which is so cozy I think it's pretty cool I added a little bit of things that kind of do more World building round out the characters a little bit more and a whole Sleeping dungeon system that sucks but it's content and uh it actually gives you a lot of benefits if you if you make it through so update again uh it's possible I could get a physical release we're still looking into that though

Channel: suitNtie22

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Keywords: game, boy, gameboy, nintendo, suitntie

Id: ejl08UnwvqE

Length: 16min 38sec (998 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 05 2022