GB Studio v1.0.0 lets you create homebrew Game Boy games with no coding experience
The original GameBoy has quite a few years on its back, having turned 30 years old just yesterday, however it's by no means forgotten by gamers and amateur programmers alike. We've seen all kinds of interesting releases published after the console's end of life, ranging all the way from homebrew games to music production programs, yet a very peculiar piece of software has managed to take the community behind Nintendo's elderly handheld by storm: we're talking about GB Studio!
GB Studio is an open source retro adventure game creation software which lets you make your own homebrew games for the Game Boy with ease. It combines a premade engine with a visual game builder that requires no previous programming experience, which means anyone can get started and make their own games with little effort! Once done, said games can be exported either as standalone ROMs or web apps (thanks to a web-based emulator) with the click of a button.
Here are its key features, as highlighted by its official website:
- Visual game builder with no programming knowledge required.
- Design your graphics in any editor that can output PNG files e.g. Photoshop, Tiled, Aseprite.
- Example project included to get started right away.
- Make top down 2D JRPG style adventure games.
- Build real GB Rom files which can be played in an emulator or on device using USB Carts.
- Build a HTML5 playable game that also works on mobile and can deployed to any webserver or uploaded to Itch.io.
- Built for macOS, Windows and Linux.
- Supports both macOS light and dark mode.
- Includes the full tools that were used to build Untitled GB Game, free to play on Itch.io.
The application is cross-platform and offers prebuilt binaries for both Windows (32 and 64 bits, including a Squirrel package), macOS and Linux (DEB and RPM packages) and has been developed by Chris Maltby.
You can find a link to its website as well as its GitHub repo in the sources below.
Source
GitHub repo