Distributing your Game Boy Game

Making a game is difficult. But, what’s also difficult is getting your game out there for other people to play. It can be nerve-wrecking, putting yourself out there. This step is not 100% required, but you should do it anyways.

Using Source Control during Game Development

Git is a free and open source distributed version control system. It’s an extremely valuable tool for game development. It allows you to keep track of your changes, collaborate with others, and even recover better from massive failures.

Setting up Visual Studio Code for making Game Boy Games

Visual Studio Code is a code editor redefined and optimized for building and debugging modern web and cloud applications. There is some slight configuration needed to get it working with GBDK-2020.

Adding Variable Width Fonts to your GBDK-2020 game.

This tutorial uses Toxa’s variable widt font library. Using this library will help you save space in VRAM, and on the background/window layer. Each character is dynamically drawn. The library is pretty easy to use, and requires minimal setup.

Drawing Advanced Dialogue Boxes

You’ll need a lot of text in your game boy game. Unique conversations and world texts will increase your games’ lore and depth. In previous tutorial, i discussed how to draw text in Game Boy games. Now, we’ll take it up a notch and look into a more advanced version.

Drawing Text in Game Boy games

Text us neccessary for every game. It explains, to the player, what is going on in your game. The Game Boy doesnt support modern fonts. In this tutorial, you’ll learn how to use the background or window to draw text.

Running your game on an Actual Gameboy

Emulators are the best option for testing your game boy games. They offer a suite of features to assist you. However, part of the true retro experience lies in the physical side of things. There’s no better feeling than playing your game on an actual game boy.

How to read Hexadecimal

Hexadecimal is a base 16 numeral system. This means that 16 alphanumeric characters are used in representing numbers. These characters are 0-9 and A-F. Each digit in a hexadecimal number represents 4 bits. These 4-bits can make 16 possible numbers. Specifically, any integer between 0 and 15.

How to read binary code

Binary code is the language of electronics. Essentially everything you see on your phone, game console, and computer boils down to binary. The word binary itself usually means that something can have one of two values.

Sprites and Background Format in GBDK 2020

Modern game engines let you develop using many different types of image file formats. The engines will handle storage, conversion, and such. However, for Gameboy games, all graphics must be manually converted to arrays of numbers.