A DREAM COME TRUE, I MADE A GAMEBOY GAME!

Every Nintendo fans dream is to create a GameBoy game, and today I have achieved this, even if it is lacklustre...

12:39 AM (AEST), January 17th, 2022

Remaking My Classic

Something I've always wanted to do ever since I was a kid was to create my own GameBoy game, but doing so was always so intimidating. Reading up on topics like assembly language, binary, and the hardware limitations had my mind stumped. Eventually, I found a piece of software that could make the whole process a lot simpler with no programming required! This software was called GB Studio and is extremely cool! Sadly to me personally, it felt like cheating to use GB Studio, as I wanted to program a game myself from scratch.

So after catching up on some old Modern Vintage Gamer videos a few days ago, I watched his video "Learn to code and write games on the Nintendo Game Boy", which obviously, motivated me to look into development once more. He talked about a C based tool kit called GBDK or the GameBoy Development Kit, which would eventually help me achieve my dream!

I present to you today a basic recreation/prequel of my classic, but boring practical joke game Digging Simulator for the original Nintendo GameBoy. I call it, very fittingly, Digging Simulator 1989.

Development

So on top of the help from the Modern Vintage Gamers video, I also discovered a series by a YouTuber named GamingMonsters. His videos were so helpful for wrapping my head around most of the basics in developing with GBDK and was a good balance of showing you how to do things but not doing it for you, which I really liked. So while watching, I coded along and quickly noticed that the GameBoy was indeed as difficult as most people described for development, but, GamingMonsters videos left me confident I could do it! And so after three days of learning, I was done. I created something!

If you also want to learn how to create GameBoy games for yourself, firstly, I would suggest the GB Studio. It is an amazing modern-day engine that can help pretty much help anyone create a basic game! But if you like me and want to go for a more traditional approach but not Assembly, I highly suggest GBDK and watching the GamingMonsters series!

Chris Maltby's GB Studio: https://www.gbstudio.dev/
GamingMonsters: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCMMhSfBStEti-Lqzs30HYWw
Modern Vintage Gamer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FzPTK91EJY8

Conclusion

To clarify, this isn't really a game, so trust me when I say this, it is not fun! The original game, I thought, was a good laugh. This version was more of a tech demo. I wanted to program my first GameBoy game and thought the recreation of Digging Simulator would be a good fit for a quick and easy project for learning. It was a good choice, but I couldn't capture the character of the original with the limitations of the system, as well as just running out of time. However, now that it's complete, I plan on starting development on an actual game.

Digging Sim is an actual GameBoy game, meaning it can run on a real system using either an Everdrive or other similar cartridge solutions, as well as other third-party systems and emulators.

For this post, I wanted to just focus on the fact I actually created something for the GameBoy and instead save posts about the nitty-gritty stuff for either the next game I create or just another post in general.

Thanks again for reading! You can find below a download of the ROM file, a link to my itch.io page, where you can play the game in the browser, as well as the source code, which is well commented, so I encourage you to pull it apart, play around and experiment with GBDK yourself!