OK. Decision made. But not without looking into it.
While mulling it over during the Easter break I had a google around to see what kind of challenge I’d be setting myself up for. Turns out that the Game Boy homebrew scene is alive and well, so there’s loads of information out there.
Probably the most impactful information I found was the existence (and popularity of) GameBoy Developers Kit (GBDK), enabling development of native Game Boy programs in C. This was the real moment where I felt that this challenge was within my grasp and worth pursuing, as trying to learn the concepts and limitations of the platform AND assembler at the same time would likely polish me off pretty quickly. Thanks, GBDK!
Fuelled by my own enthusiasm I dug in, got bookmarking and found a fair bit…
- A maze game, complete with C source
- Some GBDK Tutorials
- “Hello World” in Game Boy Assembly
- A Wiki index of tutorials and resources in varying languages
- An active forum (I imagine I’ll be on here a lot)
- Example C implementation of a music player
- A sprite tutorial
- The GBDK example set
The biggest find (apart from GBDK) was, without a doubt, this post-mortem write-up of someone who has taken this journey before me. “Doctor Ludos” and his experience developing the original game “Sheep It Up” *and* committing it to cartridge. Some really great insights in there and tremendous inspiration.
So what’s next? Well, I’d better decide on what kind of game I’m making. Actually, inspiration struck over the Easter weekend too, but I’ll have that for the next update.
Fun discovery: Wichita State University did a course on Game Boy development, still online here thanks to the Internet Archive.
Time Spent: Lots of bits and pieces, but altogether probably approximately 2.5 hours.
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