
GB Studio – Retro adventure game creator for Game Boy - tosh
https://www.gbstudio.dev/
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chrismaltby
Oh hey, Hacker News! Just wanted to say I've been really pleased with how this
project has been received, wasn't expecting it to blow up this much! My Github
issues list is going crazy right now! :-D

It's been a side project of mine for quite a while as I was learning Electron
and C/GBDK at the same time so don't judge me too harshly on the code hehe.

It's early days for the project so not quite decided how I want to expand it
out just yet, maybe to more genres, maybe to allow more JRPG functionality.
What ever I end up doing though I want to make sure it's as simple as possible
for beginners to make something as easy as possible!

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Endy
Question about the download - I see you have it labeled "win32-x64", does that
mean it runs on both 32-bit and 64-bit Windows? Asking because my only machine
with a good copy of bgb is an x86 / 1Gb RAM unit.

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chrismaltby
Hi, sorry for the delay replying, weirdly Electron names the output win32-x64
even though it's only for 64-bit, I think the naming convention is platform
(win32) then architecture (x64). Either way I've just built a 32-bit version
which hopefully will work for you [https://github.com/chrismaltby/gb-
studio/releases/download/v...](https://github.com/chrismaltby/gb-
studio/releases/download/v1.0.0/GB.Studio-win32-ia32-1.0.0.zip) though I'm not
sure how it's going to manage with 1Gb RAM.

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CM30
Hmm, seems like game maker tools for retro consoles are growing in popularity
a bit recently. Remember seeing something similar to this for the NES getting
some traction on Kickstarter a while back.

Either way, kudos for the project. Nice to see the Game Boy get a bit more
attention with stuff like this.

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Wowfunhappy
I have a theory, of sorts, that popular retro game consoles are the most
cross-compatible and future-proof software platforms we have.

Gameboy emulators are relatively simple to make and basically always in-
demand. And the Gameboy "specification" can never change—a feature you relied
on will never be deprecated or removed.

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eru
You can also write your software in TeX, that will never change either.

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dleslie
Reminds me of NESMaker

[http://www.thenew8bitheroes.com/](http://www.thenew8bitheroes.com/)

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chrismaltby
I was definitely inspired by NESMaker, yeah!

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ArtWomb
This is incredible! And just in time for Ludum Dare 44 this weekend ;)

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scoopdewoop
Didn't realize that LD44 was this weekend! Thanks for the heads up, looking
forward to compo!

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raidicy
The ease and functionality of the environment is fantastic. I especially like
the easy visual cues used to denote what attaches to what/where! Really
looking forward to this maturing! I'd love to see a more full scripting
environment!

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bellerose
I'm impressed by the presentation and the project as a whole looks very well
put together. I don't even game anymore but when I was a kid this would've
been very appealing to get into.

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tanukijones
Agreed! The landing page/site you have for the project is very nicely
presented and I love the little video! It looks like a very fun and easy tool
to use

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tomupom
Been having a great amount of fun making a game using this, fantastic app!

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joshvm
Fantastic! What extra steps would be required to support the GBC? Do you have
to provide dual palettes? Or does the GB guess? (are there other differences
aside from colour? I guess for the transparent paks)

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chrismaltby
I believe I just need to assign a colour palette to each sprite and background
tile but it’s something I’ve not played around with just yet. I kind of like
the simplicity of the original greyscale myself but GBC is a highly requested
feature so I’m sure I’ll look into it!

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yowlingcat
Wow, this looks fantastic -- I've been wanting to work on a simple JRPG for a
while but without having to learn RPG maker. There's an obvious caveat here
being that RPG Maker, Game Maker and Unity all have a gigantic ecosystem of
3rd party packages and assets that may make them better for pure game making.
Perhaps my question is whether there's value in something like this which
seems far more minimal?

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mruts
It targets gameboys?

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chrismaltby
It makes ROM files for the original Game Boy and they can run on an emulator
or a real console [https://imgur.com/a/oR9aNdK](https://imgur.com/a/oR9aNdK)
but it also outputs a web build with touch controls using a fork I made of the
js emulator GameBoy Online [https://github.com/chrismaltby/GameBoy-
Online](https://github.com/chrismaltby/GameBoy-Online)

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krm01
This is wonderful! Im going to look for my old GB just to spend a few weekends
on this.

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tekno45
I thought Jeff Gertsman went insane and started a game studio.

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arayh
Looks awesome! I noticed that it doesn't yet support in-game progress save
functionality yet, but will definitely give it a try when it does!

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chrismaltby
Saving/loading is definitely on my todo list. The game I built this for
originally was only small and was intended to be finished in one sitting but
I’ll be adding support for saving soon.

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jgalt212
similar, but to tech about 10 years previous to this was Adventure
Construction Set. Very cool, but I lacked the imagination/art skills to make
anything compelling with it.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adventure_Construction_Set](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adventure_Construction_Set)

~~~
mysterydip
I bought this when it was in stores, but lacked a PC powerful enough to run
it! All my elementary school self could do was read the instructions over and
over and dream :)

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h1rschnas3
Oh, how cool is that?! Will give it try!

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hubblesticks
Wonderful, was looking for something like this to play around with making GB
games!

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ronsor
This looks awesome

