The doubts of homebrew development

I really love Gameboy development. It’s been the only game platform I’ve made things for since November 2015. But there’s that niggling part in me that reminds me occasionally that I could be working on finishing a more commercial game off when I’m coding up something very niche indeed.

There were different niggles going on with me when regarding indie development though. Mainly focusing around hopes that this game would appeal to people enough to purchase it or play a free version which could generate some revenue in another way. Kinda like a really long approach to purchasing a lottery ticket, particularly with the mobile market nowadays it would appear.

That’s not to say I’m not going to make another game with intentions of selling it though, but despite the differing niggles with Gameboy homebrew. I think I prefer them to the ones which seem more saturated than ever before.

Maybe that’s partly due to the different challenges involved between languages / IDEs. Unity is great fun to play around with and you can easily do a lot with it quickly. You’re a lot more limited with the Gameboy in every which way but those limitations, much like the time limitations in game jams, tend to make me produce something I wouldn’t otherwise.

I dunno. I kinda like it here in Gameboy Development land, just not to the exclusion of modern game dev. At least, not yet.

A couple more screens done and more bug fixes.

A bit more code tidied up tonight. Along with plans to get some more screens set-up for save/ continue functionality.

18 Courses should be enough, each course area will have it’s own theme and colour scheme for colour gameboy players. We’ll see how it goes from here but I’m hoping to fit this into 64kb total. Well, maybe 128kb, depending on any extras I add to it.

Grand Prix and Select CoursePasswords will just store your current course and total points. Maybe with different endings for different points totals at the end of the season…I dunno.

Could Undertale be made to run on a Nintendo Gameboy?

demake-largeSo I’ve just finished one of the most hectic weeks at work porting 10-13 year old code over to PHP7 and I decided to chill out with some Undertale pacifist mode playing about when my goddamned coders brain thinks to it’s self…

“Damn, I love Undertale and having a good time… but. I reckon this game could run on a Gameboy, which would be pretty cool, yeah, yeah?”

That’s not to slight the game, I love it, I doubt I’ll have the heart to do a genocide playthrough mind. But, looking at it objectively, could it be possible to port over to it? I mean, undoubtedly compromises would need to be made in terms of sprite sizes, and music downsampling but from the outset, you have a load / save system, background scrolling and fight sequences with conversation pop up boxes. Of course, there’s the over arching story with it’s many branches which would no-doubt push memory to it’s limits I’m sure and, whilst I doubt I’d attempt to port the game myself to GB, I think it could be done.

That and I had to see if the Undertale GUI would fit in the Gameboy’s tiny resolution, looks like it could. Apologies for my poor scaling of Napstablook btw 🙂

Right, back to finishing off Formula Racing ‘n’ stuff…