Sometime in April of 2019 I discovered a newly released tool that played right into my research interests. I’ve been fascinated with retro consoles, gaming history, and the intersections with the modding community, and was looking into homebrew game development (after having backed a couple homebrew games for obsolete systems on Kickstarter, namely Tobu-Tobu Girl DX). Somehow I found out about GB Studio, a visual game engine for creating Gameboy games and was hooked. At the time, it was pretty barebones and could only really handle one type of game (top-down, JRPG-style games with minimal combat), and I tinkered around with making a few small games. One of my genius ideas at the time was to design a game that showcased my CV/resume as in-game dialogue that I would then give out to hiring committees and what-not in the future (an idea I still might revisit, but likely not).
But after getting sucked back into academia and being frustrated by the limitations of the system (and my complete lack of game development skills), I stepped away from the tool and game engines for a while. Then just a few months ago the creator tweeted a trailer for an update to the tool: upgrades for creating GBC games, especially in new genres such as platformers and point-and-click games. I was once again interested in creating a new game and dived back into the community around GB Studio.
Now, after a month of development I think I’m finally to the point where I want to document some of my journey into indie game development. As a personal history, I am a creative individual, having taken AP Studio Art in high school, and tried to pursue a degree in animation as an undergrad. But, my artistic skills have mostly languished in the decade since. It’s only in the past year that I’ve also explored similar skills tangential to game design (I recently taught myself Blender and 3D modeling, as well as took an introductory VR design course). Coding has always terrified me, I’m not really a fan of terminals and lines of code. But as GB Studio is extremely beginner friendly (described as “a quick and easy to use drag and drop retro game creator” on the website), I decided to give it a go.
I’ve crafted a functional alpha build of the game, as hosted on my newly formed itch.io page. While the game itself is going to continue to change and evolve, I thought I would make it open and available for the public. I decided to tap into some of my interests at the time, mainly a spiritual successor to Metroid and Luigi’s Mansion. I wanted to capture that feeling of spelunking and exploring caves, that adventurous and suspenseful feeling of wanting to go deeper, but being terrified of what might happen. I’ve also tried to ground my platformer in reality (oddly enough, since it’s enemies are ghosts), eschewing standards of the genre for more basic environments and design. On one hand, I really want it to look and feel like a real cave, but also explore the exaggerated elements of that adventure.
But it’s been a great experience so far, and has distracted me from my PhD program and the overall terrible-ness of 2020. I’m excited to flesh out more mechanics (such as the flashlight-based combat system), the story, and bring on a couple freelancers to help out with aspects of the game. I might be able to do the pixel art, but I’m not going to attempt the box art illustration. And I definitely don’t want to teach myself how to make chiptunes for this game.
Hyrule University 