ITT: /vr/ Designs a Game Boy Game

>>4250218
I'm confident that you have absolutely no knowledge of game design or programming, and you must be new here if you think you're going to be able to organize anything here, let alone an entire game

>>4250226
That's fine if you want to FUD. I have about 3 years of experience developing for embedded devices, which is more or less what retro game development boils down to. I wrote a couple of simple programs for the GB before making this thread to get a feel for the hardware and it was pretty straight forward to do fundamental operations like enabling the LCD, initializing DMA transfers, working with the OAM, and handling user input.

I'll admit I'm not a z80 wizard, but it's a really basic architecture and assembly language so it's not really a problem.

As far as organizing things go, I'm not really expecting much in terms of code contributions. I was just hoping to get some /vr/ users on-board to make it more interesting, at least for the ideas and maybe some content. Can't really call it a /vr/ game if I just do everything myself, then it'd just be my game that I'm shilling on /vr/ or something.

This isn't exactly the first project like this on /vr/, either. At the very least, I remember a SNES project a couple years ago. Not sure what happened to it, though.

>>4250218
Just Demake SMT 3 Nocturne. Or do a port of cave story/ Undertale for the GBC, i mainly want to hear gameboy renditions of their tunes, and see them in the gbc color palette.

I have an interest in old consoles and read into and started on a GB emulator for fun. Never got far as i was working on my own game. I also thought about writing a game for the GB, I'm interested in this OP mostly from the programming side

>>4250314
As for ideas, how about a wario ware style game based on /vr/ classics as the mingames

>>4250260
Maybe you can try making your game over at >>>/r/eddit

>>4250318
A collection of minigames might work. More people would have a chance to contribute ideas and we'd even be able to add to the project as we go. If I plan it out well I could probably write a framework that abstracts a lot of the hardware details to create a friendlier interface for anyone who wanted to try writing a minigame.

Port crysis to it lol

You won't find what you're looking for here, OP.
Just call your friends and make something together, that's how you actually get something done.

>>4250218
I've tried to talk about z80 a few times here, and in my opinion / from my experience, it's rabbit hole you go down alone

I've only done a small amount of programming so I doubt I could help, but I would like to follow the project as a learning experience.

It also might help if you post some of those projects you made OP. More credibility means more people are likely to take this seriously.

Since I wouldn't have much to contribute I dont know if my vote is worth much, but I think a minigame collection sounds like a pretty good way to go.

Make an endless runner like everyone does on mobile.

>the /vr/ earthbound sprite replacement hack will never show an update/be completed
Why even live

Would a visual novel like Ace Attorney be easy to make?

What's the easiest genre of games to develop?

>>4251573
A visual novel isn't particularly difficult from a programming standpoint, but it's a lot of work in terms of graphical assets and dialogue. The MBC5 controller which is supported by most flash carts allows up to 8MB of ROM with bank switching, and there's freely available professional compression libraries for the Game Boy, so fitting even a large number of assets into a game isn't really an issue. Finding people to produce all that art and trying to maintain any consistency and quality control would be the problem.

The absolute easiest game to implement in terms of both programming and game assets would probably be some kind of puzzle game. Tetris implementations are relatively trivial, and there's nothing stopping you from going even simpler than that.

compatible with ez flash IV

>>4250218
Can the games story be about a wannabe know-it-all called "Babbages Gramps" and his tendie adventures through a Fijian padlock tuning webzine?

>>4251335
I actually saw a GB endless runner in one of these game jams.

Sweet idea. Can't really contribute much. Besides maybe recommending a musician.

>>4253113
Speaking of music, I'm currently working on updating the assembler directives on https://rv6502.ca/wiki/index.php?title=Game_Boy_Tracker to be compatible with the newer versions of RGBDS. It's a sound engine and tracker that was used in a few commercial games. The tracker has been publicly available forever, but the GB code was only released a few years ago.

Being bundled with its own tracker is really convenient since that saves a lot of effort. The other engine I was looking at here https://github.com/DevEd2/DevSound is being actively developed which is good, but you'd be writing music byte-by-byte in a text editor. That's not really as terrible as it sounds, but it's not very efficient either.

>>4251979
I will entertain writing dialogue for this title if you decide to go the visual novel route.

>>4251979
>A visual novel isn't particularly difficult from a programming standpoint, but it's a lot of work in terms of graphical assets and dialogue.
I'm a writefag, I wouldn't mind helping with a hefty script in my spare time

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I HAVE A SUGGESTION

>>4250218
There's no interest because there's no interest in talking about indie shit that never gets made. There have literally been >9000 other kiddos who have come here before you talking about thinking about making a game and nothing has ever happened. Ever. Anyone capable of doing this will have plenty of simple games they made during the learning process and would simply post links to a few to demonstrate they're not delusional fool looking for (You)s. He would get every creative type throwing themselves at him to be involved in a project that might actually have a chance of being made.

>>4250418
the hardship for that is that it means a lot of programming.

What if something simpler was attempted first, like just making a single platformer or puzzle game?

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Remembered me of this thread.

Fucking jej.

When I was 10, I thought of my own puzzle game where you drop various falling blocks. Some blocks fired a lazer, some reflected the lazer in different directions, and some items would stop the lazer entirely.
It was a little like Pac Attack and a little like Yoshi.

Thats all I remember about it, other than imagining being on that nickelodeon show "Figure it out" to share the game with people.
Might still be a fun game. Maybe I'll throw it together on PC when I'm not busy.

>>4251992
but that doesn't even fit in a game boy

>>4250218
there's an aborted port of elite if you want to make something that's already got a million ports and at least one decent open-source implementation to steal your game design from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hFEtHJYs3mo

(I really want elite on my dmg)

>>4253731
(I do not for a second believe that anything will come of this thread, but good on you OP if you at least try something)

>>4251556
lol it only needed like 3 sprites left before it was finished

>>4250318
>>4250418
You could have mini games based around other games. A zelda puzzle, a mario jump, hit 6 candles from castlevania. The sprites and art already exist so that would save work, unless you find someone who can draw

>>4253238
>https://github.com/DevEd2/DevSound
That is actually the guy I was thinking of. I like his music.
https://soundcloud.com/deved-music/beach
https://soundcloud.com/deved-music/bubbly-fields

>>4253393
>i never coded anything. not even a mini game
Clearly. Knocking out mini games is easy as fuck and anyone capable of writing a game already has written a bunch of mini games that at most need a bit of polishing to be decent.
A couple weeks ago I needed a better SNES function to convert screen x,y coordinates into a RAM offset so I made one and to test it I shat out a simple light cycles game. The whole thing took me a few hours. Anyone who is capable of writing a game for a console has dozens of these things.

>>4253917
i like the minigame idea but is programming the minigame engine so others can program minigames going to fun/easy?

I hope OP wasn't discouraged by the faggots ITT. He seemed like a nice reasonable guy, and this proposed protect is more grounded than most others I've seen.

My suggestion would be to make whatever game you want to, with placeholder sprites and music, and only make a thread once it's done and running to ask for these assets, as that's the most you would get in terms of contribution from Anonymous. You don't need Idea Guys for these things

>>4254061
what if it turned into some crazy (but good) combination like the smw JUMP romhack

How about super smash bros gameboy edition? Or maybe a mother/earthbound style game?

>>4254094
>Or maybe a mother/earthbound style game?
I think the Game Boy has enough uninspired Dragon Quest clones as is.

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>>4254098
Doesn't have that many, does it? Maybe if you count the GBC exclusives and GBA games, but there's hardly anything on the original GB. Hell, a significant fraction of the RPGs on the system are Wizardry games.

>>4254061
Nah, years of /biz/ have rendered me immune to FUD.

I didn't want to just make a game and thread for it because that'd basically just be me shilling, I wanted something that was a little more of a /vr/ project even if it's just discussion at this point. But, the minigame idea seemed to have gotten some support so I'm going to work on that and I'll make the next thread once there's a framework and a demo minigame or two to show.

Going to keep it really simple. The framework will handle booting the ROM and selecting the minigame, but after that full control will be handed over to the minigame's game loop. The only shared component I foresee right now is the sound engine, which the framework will also be responsible for initializing. It'll be the minigame author's responsibility to avoid address space collisions in WRAM and HRAM, so there'll have to be some guidelines. Each game would be assigned one or more ROM banks as needed, so no collision issues there. Beyond that, just a standard set of utility macros and subroutines that every game needs and a way to return back to the game selection screen.

>>4254043
No game, mini or otherwise, is going to result from this thread. But hypothetically speaking you wouldn't make a "minigame engine" you'd make libraries that would make it easier to build the games. For example a macro to print text to the screen, make noise, etc. Building a game is much easier when you have these. And anyone who can make a game already has lots of these, so it's just a matter of putting them together and documentation.

I'd love to help with this, but I've really only just started dipping my toes into GB/C ASM.

I guess I can still do spritework.

A story driven point and click style adventure would be nice. Something to reflect the spirit of /vr/. A mans desire to keep the past in the present, represented through other means. Maybe a quest to restore an old movie theater, trying to recapture the mans love for old cinema. Finding parts for old projectors, tracking down the people who can provide old movie reels, a narrative that captures the youthful look into childhood, etc. Static backgrounds, a handfull of objects, a basic inventory system, and so on.

I'm no coder though, so plot is all I have to offer.

>>4254970
what would a (mini)game engine be then?

>>4255001
you learn by doing

z80 is pretty easy to learn anyhow

>>4254970
I never said anything about a game engine. I mean, the term engine is sort of loaded, but people are usually referring to those general purpose engines like Unity and Unreal when they use the word. That level of abstraction probably isn't necessary or even practical.

The macros you mentioned aren't really as general purpose as you imply. There's not really a way to do a generic macro to print text to the screen that's not tied to a specific implementation. If it were just for debugging purposes it could be done with minimal constraints, but in a real game even if you're invoking it through a macro all the work would be done by its dependencies all throughout your code. And a macro that directly makes noise, probably not something you want to do unless that's the only way you do sound in your game. You don't want to just arbitrarily mess with the sound registers while you're playing music. Again, a simple "beep" might be fine for debugging, but even in a simple game there's a lot more things to consider.

Basically, those are just high level things that can't be accomplished usefully in a simple macro. Such macros have to be written specifically for the way your specific game handles graphics and sound. Generic macros and subroutines that can just be thrown into an include file and used in any game are more like, algorithms for performing fast multiplications/divisions/other math functions or convenient means of accessing hardware functionality that's always the same like reading joypad input, waiting for a vblank, initiating an OAM DMA, frame counters, etc...

>>4250361
You can have a community while retaining autonomousness.

>>4255223
Nothing, really. A game engine is largely a more modern concept that lets people like valve shit out endless shit with little effort. A mini game engine might be something that lets you shit out brick game style games by defining a few rules. Given the target is the GB maybe a brick game simulator would be more viable. At least it being shit would be the objective.

>>4255354
Have you ever actually coded anything? I thought you said you did. But clearly not if you find the concept of reusable code inconceivable. You aren't arbitrarily messing with the sound registers if all your sound is handled by the same code now are you sport? But I guess since the depth of your experience is the monumental task of not being able to build one persons code and not being able to write music data for anothers I shouldn't be surprised.

FYI, it takes one change to one line of code and the ability to actually understand how to assemble, link and fix to get GBT to build with the latest version of rgbds. Fucking kek.

>>4256209
You literally claimed that you'd have a single self-contained macro that you could just use in any program to print text to the screen. That's blatantly wrong. Now you're attempting to equate a single macro to an entire graphics module, those are two very different things. Your implication with sound is the same thing. You're not going to implement your entire sound engine as a macro, that just doesn't even make sense.

As for Game Boy Tracker, all I can figure is you're talking about building the project included in the download. That'll build just fine with no changes to the code at all, just a minor change to the batch file. It'll throw a million warnings about deprecated and obsolete directives, but it builds (unlike a lot of ROMs out there that relied on undocumented functionality in RGBDS which was later removed). Fixing those warnings was pretty trivial anyways, since most of them were just deprecated section names, but that's obviously far from your "one line" claim.

The time consuming part is that there's almost no encapsulation of the sound engine code in that project - it's specifically designed to build a ROM image that runs a music player on your Game Boy, not to be easily integrated into homebrew projects. The single bank version was actually pretty easy to untangle and almost is self contained, but the mutli-bank version has dependencies in files completely unrelated to the sound engine itself. So it's a matter of going through nearly all the project source and stripping out everything except for the bare minimum I need for soundsys.asm to assemble and link so I'm not including a bunch of garbage in my own programs.

>>4253917
I have coded before, but not games for consoles. I would assume designing more functions is the enemy of doing less functions, and that a variety of minigames would require more functions, and ergo be less likely to be finished. But okay, since you seem to know what you're talking about and since you also seem ready to badger people who disagree, I will defer.

Naysayers aside a few people seem to want to do this. I posted earlier in the thread that I'm interested, though I forgot to mention I've done a tiny bit of fiddling around with Pokemon ROMs on GBA. Nothing impressive but I did a bit of sprite and text swapping without relying on the tools others have made for that. I've never messed around with original Gameboy stuff so I don't know if that's relevant, but it gave me some experience with hex editing for whatever that might be worth.

The main thing to address right now is gonna be organization. Thats the number 1 reason chan projects fall apart. How are you gonna address that OP? Assuming you're gonna lead this project we're gonna need to know how to coordinate everything.

>>4257352
I literally never literally claimed that sport. If you can't understand basic English it's no wonder you can't understand code. I claimed I could make a library of functions any program could be designed to use to print to the screen.

You literally claimed that you are "currently working on updating the assembler directives on https://rv6502.ca/wiki/index.php?title=Game_Boy_Tracker to be compatible with the newer versions of RGBDS". That's blatantly wrong. You now admit it basically works out of the box. No amount of back peddling can turn that into it meaning cleaning out unused code.

Odd how GBT was easily integrated into "a few commercial games" but stumps a coding maven such as yourself. kek

>>4257425
I agree that if we get multiple developers on the project it wouldn't be practical to coordinate through a thread. I've been a minor contributor to a couple crypto projects recently and it seems like everyone uses Slack these days. I wouldn't want it to replace threads where we can get a lot of community discussion, but it's a great tool for developers to communicate. And, of course, documentation is going to be important, both for developers who have to work your code and so that the project can serve as a reference for anyone interested in homebrew, which is really the main goal at least for this first game.

>>4253267
paid mods?

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Homebrewing is a topic that interests me a lot and I love to do something for the gameboy but I'm too new to programming to contribute any code.
Still I could contribute pixel art, maybe music and design ideas tho seems this project fell apart already

>>4252010
It will also have a villain called "NESfag" that will monologue about Resident Evil chronology continuously

darkest dungeon would be a good game boy game

>>4257846
You'd have to really, really strip it down, but I can see this working.

You'd lose the narrator, but the mechanics might work out with some good clean spritework.

>>4250218
dude, take your talent somewhere else

there's nothing but children here

>>4257547
Why don't you just use an IRC channel for discussion and keep a thread up on here to show what you've done and attract new people to the project?
I don't have any interest in Gameboy stuff, and I've only ever written games in BASIC anyway, but this is how other projects of this nature are generally handled on this site.

>>4257547
>>4258376
Whatever we use I think we'll need it before we can really get anywhere. Threads like these are good for gauging interest and spitballing a basic idea, but the nature of anonymity makes things tough. Mainly regarding how many people are on board with the project and want to join - that's something we don't know until we're on slack or whatever.

The consensus seems to be pro minigame collection. I have an idea to expand upon that which may or may not be feasible, but honestly I don't think we should bother elaborating much on the ideas before we know if this is actually something that might happen. Doing that can lead to ideaguy abyss. We just need a place to know how many people are in on this, what these people can do, which person wants to do what, etc.

I'm all for keeping a thread here to talk about it, but we really do need something more official and organized.

Also OP if you have documentation that you think would be useful it'd probably be good to post it sooner rather than later.

>>4257547
>multiple developers
>doesn't even have one
>himself included
lol