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Castlevania Circle of the Moon - Gameboy Color (2022) Learning GBstudio but this time in colour!

A few months had passed since Jelly Bun was complete, feedback from that little project was great and I was happy that people enjoyed my work but at this point I wanted to learn more about what could be done on the gameboy, I started again with another idea I had rolling around my head for weeks and that was to recreate Circle of the Moon.

I felt it was possible at least as a basic level to feel similar to the GBA original so I went ahead and gave it a go.

COTM was a huge challenge mostly for making it feel correct, if Jelly Bun taught me about basic platforming then COTM taught me about how I should be handling attacking and taking damage while figuring out how the gameboy can do all that without slowing to a crawl.

This time around I also enabled GameBoy Color support in GBStudio, this allows both colour usage within the spec of the GBC but you gain some extra cpu power from the hardware improvements.

My goal was to remake the catacomb's beginning area as close I could.

The project grew a little larger over time with added rooms to explore so playing from start to end give you a few minutes of fun instead of a looping tech demo room, I also asked a good friend to remake the awake theme for the gameboy music chip to add to the authenic feeling of playing COTM downscaled to a GBC.

Shortly after the project was complete there was a GBStudio 3.1 update that added some new features and improvements whch sadly COTM does not use and is more of a show case for what the base 3.0 could do at the time.

Another reason for wanting to remake a game like COTM was due to interest in new game project I was approached to work on, you could say that this is the beginning of what's to come in 2023.

Castlevania Circle of the Moon GBC can be played over on itch.io in your browser or downloaded to play on real GameBoy Color hardware.

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Jelly Bun - Gameboy (2022) A project to learn GBStudio

I had heard about Gameboy Studio for a year at this point and had always wanted to try it out, around the end of 2021 GBStudio version 3.0 was released with some big changes so I felt it was the right time to take a break from my regular work and give myself a few weeks over winter to try it out.

Jelly Bun was my first little completed project!

I chose to use the platformer base inside GBStudio for my first attempt, it's a gameplay type i've had a lot of experiance with over my time as an indie developer so it felt right at home.

The first thing that stuck out to me was how EASY it was to get up to speed with making something playable! and it runs on a gameboy? that's awesome! once I had learned about changing the player sprite and adjusting some of the default values for gravity and movement speeds it felt like the game was already half complete.

GBStudio has event based coding, you drag and drop commands and it'll run them in order until it reaches the end and then repeats, while I am used to this approach from making fangames and my own platformer in software like Clickteam Fusion the gameboy has it's own challenges with limtied cpu power and many performance drops doing simple tasks, half the skill in building a GBStudio game is making things work while the other half is keeping performance under tight check.

It was a fun project and opened the floodgates to making more cool things with the software, it even found me paid work :)

Jelly Bun is free on itch.io to play either in your browser or downloaded to run on real hardware with a flash cart.

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A new development blog appears!

Hello and welcome to my game development tumblr! all news about games I have in development will be shared here.

I plan to post updates and screenshots periodically each week ahead so there will always be something new to look forward to!