Wow, haven't seen a game that comes has a gameboy rom, that's super cool. I feel like that contributed a lot to making the overall experience immersive. Awesome!

I couldn't get it to work using the linked emulator, but I downloaded mGBA and it worked there.

It was fun and I really liked how casual it was - a nice break from the other more hardcore games. But at one point it just glitched out. After the level where you have to drop down from a high point the character just kept falling endlessly on a checkered screen.

Also, it's ratable in Audio but there is no audio..?

played via the linked browser-based emulator, worked well until a fair few levels in when I was stuck repeatedly falling into the Eldridge abyss that looked like a repeating tilemap of shrubbery and giant black squares.
Was cool to be able to play a gameboy game in a browser. Game was fun for what it was, that jump animation is _wild_ :laughing: , seemed like the focus here was on the tech used which is quite cool!!

@mihkelroomet thanks for pointing out the audio rating! I had the opt-out checkboxes invterted. x _ x

It looks quite nice I'll have to see if it works on a flashcart later.

@clyde quick reminder that I haven't tested on actual hardware! I don't think I've done anything dangerous to an actual system in the code for this game, but I can't make promises around things I haven't tested... .

@acdimalev I can confirm that it works on a physical Gameboy Color just as well as it did on the emulator!

@clyde hah, awesome! And I hadn't noticed while working on the game... not a fan of the default colors on the system, but they almost looks intentional on the game.

Thanks for sharing!

Nice game! I was not expecting to play an actual Gameboy rom this jam - that is very impressive! The game was quite simple but enjoyable. It was a bit annoying that you couldn't affect your movement at all mid-air, but it matched the old-school feeling. And I also had the buggy end screen, but other than that, good entry!

love me some custom retro games! super intuitive, runs great on the online emulator (other than the kill screen, I suppose!)

As a person that fixes gameboy colors as a hobby... I can only say... thank you

Gameboya! sending kudos for the idea to make a gameboy game

Oh, cool. Basically utilize the screen wrap and picking up of plants (are they radishes?) in order to make puzzle-y games. I approve! It kind of reminds me of Super Mario Brothers 2 for some reason with the picking up of plants. That is actually oddly satisfying. Good job!

We made a Game Boy game for this submission too by the way! Great minds... =P

Simple but a pretty neat game! Graphics are very nice and very much fit with other Gameboy game aesthetics. I love to see experimentation on jam games being done on their format rather than purely game design. A very cool entry!

This is a really really cool little puzzle platformer. It is really simple but it does get you thinking a bit. Definitely something I would like to play more of with harder level. Speaking of which, some levels did feel a bit too easy and too uninspired, but overall I am really glad I played this game.

So cool that you made a Game Boy game also. I really like this. Very simple but creative and fun. I hope you get the chance to try out our Game Boy game as well. Good Job!

Whee!


It seems others encountered this glitchy (?) end screen as well.

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This was a nice little entry. Always fun to try new homebrew for old hardware.

Picking up the plants reminded me of SMB2/Doki Doki Panic. Short and simple, and I think the level-design was consistent.

I really liked the vibe of this. I did get a killscreen like other people did, which I assume is a known problem.

I would have liked to see more challenging level design, the whole game kind of felt like a tutorial.

Very impressive to make a gameboy game for the compo!

@antoniothereis @terracottafrog with the present mechanics and (hardware) limits on stage size, the complexity ceiling turned out quite low. Pretty happy I managed to get this one across the finish line. I grossly underestimated how much time it would take me to ad-hoc graphics that read well-enough.

@stephenwhoskins @epicgamefan congrats on building your game during the jam! It looks and sounds nice. I personally have an extremely hard time reasoning about the limitations of tools like GB Studio, so I'm afraid I don't have much constructive criticism to offer.

@acdimalev Thanks, Its the first time I ever touched GBstudio. I learned it on the fly during the the Jam. Though I was very impressed with your rom. I'd love to learn more about how you approached it. Was it straight Z80 assembly?

@epicgamefan yeah. It's my third game jam building a Game Boy game. There's a learning curve, both with learning how the hardware works and how to get stuff done with the processor. But so far I'm finding it pretty easy to take something I've done once before and repeat it.

Quick caveats. I've been experimenting with writing Game Boy games for a couple years, and I do have a lot of experience writing C code to lean on.

For this game, I wrote one small program that slices up the sprite graphics to make them easier to draw on screen, and another small program that compiles a bunch of PNG files into level data. Both of these are included in my source code. Doing things this way gives me less assembly code to write, and less code that the Game Boy has to run. A couple years ago I was doing this by hand and I heavily recommend against it. Totally worth the trouble of making my computer do it for me.

I didn't leave myself with much time to work on the game code this time around, so I basically tried really hard not to do anything too unfamiliar. The game code is probably worse off for it. Doing anything with the Game Boy processor can be really difficult because it's 8-bit and doesn't have many registers. Unfortunately, I don't have any great suggestions for anyone wanting to learn because I've found it incredibly difficult and time consuming trying to write assembly code, load it up in an emulator, see what it's doing, and then go back and make a change. So much so that I wrote a simulator this past year to help me with that.

https://github.com/acdimalev/gb-sim

+10 for writing a GB game during a jam! Kudos to you.
Simple game, but cute graphics. Would have loved some music and/or sound effects to go along.

Regarding your write-run-fix loop, couldn't you grab the source code of a GB emu (say, SameBoy), and hack it to automatically re-run a given ROM file when it changes on disk? That way you should be able to setup a complete compile+relaunch chain in one command/hotkey. You could even just reload the ROM, and keep the RAM as-is, so the game would keep its current state while reloading the code. (Or tell the emu to reload a save-state after ROM load, which is maybe safer.) Anyway, just a thought :)

@fmdkdd MGBA does that out of the box. I was using it immediately prior to writing the simulator. It's pretty neat, but I found it extremely difficult to test my GB code with more GB code. Here's a screenshot to give you an idea of what kind of thing I set myself up to look at when I'm working on unfamiliar routines.


@acdimalev Oh okay, if you are going for cycle-counting and tracing small routines, I can see why you may want to write your own simulator. Nothing beats writing your own tools for your needs anyway. Thank you for sharing :)

Wow, not bad to write it for the GB! I encountered the same glich as Dis0rder.

For the game itself the jumping was a bit non-fluid (double jumping and jump direction). But other than that this is a solid and fun entry!

I really enjoyed your game!

The animations and graphics are really good and making a gameboy game is a wonderful idea for a game jam!

The levels are well structured as well.

Congratulations!


Ran perfectly fine on Game Boy Light. It was short and easy, but I liked the amount of visual polish on the character.

@samuli thanks for sharing the photo!