Make a real GameBoy game easy & user friendly [Tutorial, Gamedev]

this video is sponsored by skills here skills here is a online learning hub with over 25,000 courses they got causes on anything from game development ah Road animation and many many other things and on the topic of animation if you want to continue your journey in learning pixel art animation and in this particular case particle explosions címon overrun skills here has a cause for you to check out with a skill here membership you get unlimited access to all their classes for less than $10 a month and if you use the link in the description right now you'll get two months for free everybody today I want to show you a really neat software that it came across recently it's a software that can export out real game board game so you can actually play these games on the real hardware and not only that it's a really cool challenge if you want to try and work with some awesome limits so yeah stick around if you want to learn more about this alright so the first thing we got to do in order to get this software is head over to GP studio dev I love you asleep it a link in the description for you to check out over here you can download the software for your current system and if you need it for a different system you can click on more downloads to find a system that fits yours once you've downloaded it you extract the file and open up the setup file and it will start installing QB studio on your device and that's all we needed to do to install GP Studio now let's create our first little project here somewhere called my game here for video tutorial down here you can see we only have two templates a blank and a sample project for this video I'm gonna use the sample project for us to see a little bit what QB studio you can do if you want to change where the game is saved on your computer you can change the folders down here but I'm all good with this so let's just get started great alright so here we can see the same project for the first time and there's a lot of things going on here so let's just quickly go over what is happening here so we can get an idea of how TV studio works there is essentially three things to GV studio an actor a trigger and a scene one of these maps here is a scene this is the environment your player will walk around in or a menu or whatever you want to make a scene to be cytosine you can see we have these red blocks here that's a collision that's what the player will walk into and stop the player you can create a collision by clicking this button over here and then just start drawing your collision onto the map left-click will draw and if you left-click on top of a collision it will start erasing that collision everything is locked to an 8x8 grid but we'll get more into that in a bit another thing with the scene is that if we click on this scene here you can see this bar over to the right changes and we can see all the things we have in our scene we can click on one of these to get more information about them and if we want to add a piece of script to the screen you can edit down here this is also where you can change the name of your scene and what image you want to use this will come in a bit as well now let's take a look at an actor and this is an active object like a NPC a sign or anything the player should be able to interact with or that should have some kind of motion in your game let's click on this dude here here you can give the actor a name for this specific scene this is nice if you want to keep order of your actress in all the scenes we can change what sprite we want to use this will cover in a bit as well we can change the direction we want the actor to be looking and if we want him to wander around randomly we can also change his movement speed here and if there's a lot of things going on in the scene you can add a note to a specific actor where you can write something that might be good for you in the future to keep track of what's happening now if we scroll down here you can see the action script that we have added to this actor and whenever you interact with this actor this script will play we'll cover this in a little bit as well now let's talk about triggers and you can see we have two triggers in the scene one here on the door and one here on the cave these will trigger automatically when you walk into them so let's click on this one you can see when we log in to this one it switches to the scene called cave and it places two player at the position 9 and 15 and the player direction will be up when it entered the next screen and the fading speed is 2 you can see when we have a switch screen action here you can see these blue lines appears and they basically show the next screen that the player will go to on the trigger you can say it says 9 and 15 which is this position here but you can also change this dynamically by moving this blue thing around and you can see from the cave there's a trigger that goes back out here and same with that we can move the position around dynamically so that's a little bit of the basic of the few mechanics that is 2gb studio now let's go a little deeper into all this and how everything works but I'm going to remove everything here except for our title screen and our logo then we'll run through some of the basic stuff for you to get started to make your own game alright so the first thing I want to do is go up here to the right you can see there's a little folder icon when we click on this you can see that it opens up our project folder so if we click here on assets you can see this is basically everything our game contains right now as you can see the backgrounds here are basically the scenes so there's no map editor in TV studio but you basically just save every map as an image this can be a good starting part if you want something to work from but in my case I'm just going to delete everything except for the logo and the title screen the backgrounds here were our maps and then music is obviously any music that the game may contain sprites is where we have all our playable actors and NPCs and these are a little important and I want to cover them in a little bit because they need to be set up in a certain way in order to work in TV studio and last here we have the UI which is all the interface in your game if you're less experienced I would say don't worry about this this is all good for now and if you really want to dig into the UI of TV studio there's also a documentation page on the website where you can read more about how everything function but before we start creating anything for our game I just quickly want to show how I managed my project because GP Studio is so limited you won't have a bunch of sprites and maps so usually contain everything in a single image like this and then once I want to export it I simply wanted to copy it create a new file paste it in there and export it but for now I just wanted to mention that you can contain everything in a single image in a sprite or whatever art software that you're using and if you're running out of space simply go up and extend your canvas and just make it bigger so the first thing I want to create for my game is a map so something like the house here perhaps the thing with GV studio is that required to use certain colors in order to function on a real game poem you can download the colors here for Photoshop or a sprite and if you're using a different software you can also find the color codes here it's also important that your map is minimum 160 by 144 or at maximum 256 by 256 if you go over these limits it won't work on the Game Boy either and it also says here it can contain more than one hundred and ninety two unique 8x8 tiles at once suited to the memory limit and that is the tricky part but also the really fun part about GP Studio so to kind of showcase what that means if we take this scene here I'll copy this into a new file paste it in turn on my grid so you can see here on this map I'm trying to reuse the same tiles as much as possible so for example on the carpet here all these tiles right here is the same so this just accounts for one tile now the couch itself is a little bit different and it has a lot of unique tiles as you can see in fact I don't think there's anything that can be covered pasted here except for the middle part to extend the couch so these are three unique tiles but because I covered them over like this they stay as a single tile and won't count more for three tiles even though there are nine tiles here so in other words you can only have one hundred and ninety two unique tiles so you can see that's why there's a lot of repetition in some of my maps is to try and keep the tile limit as low as possible on a small scene like the house here it's not as much as an issue as it can start to be on a bigger scene here so if you do want to have a very complex looking scene I would suggest go with a small scene and if you need something that is okay having a lot of repetition in it you can work with a bigger screen but that's just my suggestion it's nothing you have to work with anyhow let's take this scene here and export it into GB studio so you want to save the scene inside the background folder and you want to make sure that it's a PNG and name the file something that you can remember so I'll call this one for house once that is exported you simply go back into GV studio press the little Add button here select a scene and click somewhere you know I'm not 100% sure but I do think that it always exports into the latest scene that you put into their folder but I might be mistaking if you're getting a different scene all you have to do is go over here to the background and select the name of the image that you exported and I'll call this map for house all right so the next thing I want to do now is to add a collision so if we take our player here and places him in this map and try and play the game you can see that the player can run over everything because we have no collision in there so let's add a collision now like I mentioned earlier it's this little Lego block over here you press on it and you just start painting where you want the collision to be and you can now see when I play the map the player is unable to walk through any of all these walls here but my character here is not really themed Animal Crossing like everything else I've made let's try and import one of my Animal Crossing sprites you can see how the process of importing a sprite is alright so back over here and the documentation page you can read all about the limits that the sprites need to contain within and what types of sprites that you can add I obviously go over this but if you want to read more about it the page you see it for you to find like the background we need to work within a certain color limit but this times it's a little bit different because we actually only have three colors and this last green color here is our transparent color if that is a little bit confusing don't worry about it just draw a sprite with these colors and once you're done drawing your sprite simply select the whole sprite take the green color and use your filling tool to fill out everything that's transparent now let's take a look at the four types of sprites that you can add if you're importing an active sprite that doesn't need any animation you can keep it a single 16 by 16 image one example in my game I have a mailbox it doesn't need any animation so I can just contain it a single image like this if you want a looping animation you can simply have a sprite sheet where you just have all the frames in a long row this can be anything between 2 to 25 frames here is the example of the fire the next two I want to talk about is an actor and an animated actor because they are somewhat the same then again they are not really your player has to be an animated actor but an NPC can be both an animated and just a normal actor the difference between these two is that an animated actor can walk around where a actor just stands still but can still look in all directions well the animated actor can walk in all the direction and are not bound to the position that it's placed on that doesn't mean you can move any of the other axis around but an animated actor just works well for an NPC that needs to be walking around or anything like that you can see that our axis here is only looking down up and right but in the game when it's facing left it's simply just mirroring the right animation and same here with the walking animation it contains two frames walking down two frames walking up and two frames for walking right and if you were to or left it's simply just mirroring this right animation here so in all you only have six frames to work with for your sprite which is very limited but also very fun to try and pull off so I'm going to use my animal crossing dude here that I made but you can modify the sprite that the games come with or you can draw your own from scratch as long as you just think within the limits that TV studio tells you to stay within I'm gonna take this bright green color here which is the transparent turn continuous off and use my bucket tool to fill it up copy this control in four new file paste it in export it out and this one is not going to be saved within our background but it's rather going to be safe within our sprites so saved here and I'll call this one for male player export so in order to import an actor you would think you would go up here select actor and place him in and change it to the male player but this is now an NPC this is what you would do if you were to make a NPC walk around in your screen but I want to change the player into this sprite I can do that by click somewhere out here in the open space and you can see I have all the information from my project over here to the right right here it says play a spreadsheet I'll change that into my mail player now I don't want this NPC to be here so let's remove him and try and play all right and you can now see I am the little animal crossing guide dude that I made in a sprite now let's try and add a little NPC just to see the process of that I'm going to take Isobel here and do the same thing Kubby new file paste in export select here pull this one for in PC underscore is that export I'm going back in here going to take this piranha plant that I made copy paste export call this one for NPC plant and let's take the garo here as a less bright cubby new file paste in export NPC underscore gyro now when you head back into GB studio if I press the Add button here and take actor I should now be able to place down an actor and you can see I can change them here so let's change it to the NPC plant which is two frames place it here select animate by cycling frames and try and press play you can now see that is doing its animation here let's add another actor this one is going to be ISA which is Isabel you can see here it has a movement type it's currently static which means she's standing still but I can change this to walk randomly around or walk in different ways I'll take random walk for now you can see she's now walking around randomly like this nothing really happens if I go up and talk to any of these or press on them so let's try and make Isabel say something very prescient Isabel you can see down here on the right it says at an event I'm just going to add a talking event but this is basically where you add all the types of events that an actor can do once you interact with him you can see that is quiet a lot you can do I'm just going to take text and display dialogue see hello wait you can now see if I go up and interact with Isabel she says hello if you wanted her to do more things after saying hello you would just add a new event and you can add them all here now let's add our last NPC which was to gyro it also has an animation so I'm going to animate by cycle frames let's try and make this one really fast well actually slow - piranha plant down a little bit and we'll make him save the game once interacting so at event and we'll type up in the search field save game dancer now let's also add a little text box here just to make sure that the player knows that we've saved the game so we'll just write save game you can obviously make this way more complex and different if you want it to but I'm just going to keep it like this for now let's try and play it up now you can see he's wiggling his little arm up here like crazy and two piranha plant is moving a little slower but if it if I interact with him now my game is now saved now this is really cool and all and we can walk around in this house but I kind of want you to be able to walk out of the house and back into the house and that way we also get to play around with the triggers here in order to make us able to walk to a different map we first have to export the other map that we want to be able to walk into so I'm just going to select this map real quick copy you file paste export to the backgrounds layer call this one for town and export now I can simply just add in a new scene place it here and that is our town let's name it town real quick I'm just quickly going to fill it out with collisions all right now that we made the coalition here for the little town let's add a trigger and this one you have to drag when your place because the trigger can be any size really I'm just gonna fill it out right here for the door I'm gonna add another trigger and fill it out here as well now when we interact with this trigger here I'm going to add an event call switz screen and you can see it automatically placed this blue cylinder here I'm just gonna place it down here and same with this trigger here select it add event Swit screen don't take this sit under hair and drag over here and make sure that the direction is set to up let's try and play this see when I walked out here I entered the town and when I walk into the house again I into the house now it's kind of weird that Isabel and a djaro is in here so let's put Isabel up here and let's put the gyro out here next to the house it play you can now see the gyro is still going ham out here game and we can still go up here and talk to Isabel so sometime here I spent with the project you can now see I made a little demo here I'll make this available for you to download in the description as well to plan test out if you want to but before in the video I also want to mention that you should definitely check out the GP studio discord if you are in need of any help there's a bunch of people talking sharing tips and helping each other out in there and one last thing I want to show here before I go it's just showcase a few things that people have made with GB studio and last of all I want to ask the question why should you even use TV studio well one thing is school that you can export it out and play it on the real hardware and it's very easy to use another thing that I think is really cool about this is that I already made a video called learn with limits and in that video I pretty much talked about how you get a lot more creative by putting a lot of limits on yourself so if you really want to challenge and put yourself to the test I would highly suggest trying and work with this suffer you don't even have to make anything big just a small little demo like I've made it really gets the creativity flowing in you and again it's pretty cool that you can play this real game way yeah with that said thank you so much for watching everybody if you like what you saw make sure to give the video a like and if you want to see more content like this make sure to subscribe remember there is a two months three skills share link in the description and with that said I'll see you guys later take care bye [Music]

Channel: MortMort

Views: 274,278

Keywords: mort, mortmort, mnrart, gamedev, gamejam, pixel, pixelart, art, painting, bob ross, draw, drawing, artwoek, zch, jazza, waffle, retro, 8bit, 8-bit, 16bit, 16, beginner, tutorial, first time, newbie

Id: 0xO5jCqs3As

Length: 19min 48sec (1188 seconds)

Published: Tue May 28 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/petrorixels]

MortMort makes great pixel art tutorials. I recommend checking out the rest of his channel.

[u/Timmy-the-dark-lord]

Thanks, also that's a really good gameboy Isabelle.

[u/The_Vintage_Nerd]

SWEET!