Making a Game Boy Game. Part 1: Getting Started

Game Boy development was interesting in that you were always coding with battery in mind. You couldn&#x27;t simply &quot;NOP&quot; your way through something, you had to &quot;HALT&quot;. So your game loop was always &quot;halt and wait for interrupt, do action, halt again&quot;.<p>Allegedly, if you didn&#x27;t do this, Nintendo would reject your game outright.

This is part one, but the author has also written 4 other parts. They are also pretty interesting, and some more focused on the visuals. The author also made the in-development game called Aqua and Ashes open-source on GitHub (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;InvisibleUp&#x2F;AquaAndAshes" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;InvisibleUp&#x2F;AquaAndAshes</a>)<p>* Part 1 - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;invisibleup.neocities.org&#x2F;articles&#x2F;18&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;invisibleup.neocities.org&#x2F;articles&#x2F;18&#x2F;</a><p>* Part 2 - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;invisibleup.neocities.org&#x2F;articles&#x2F;19&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;invisibleup.neocities.org&#x2F;articles&#x2F;19&#x2F;</a><p>* Part 3 - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;invisibleup.neocities.org&#x2F;articles&#x2F;20&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;invisibleup.neocities.org&#x2F;articles&#x2F;20&#x2F;</a><p>* Part 4 - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;invisibleup.neocities.org&#x2F;articles&#x2F;21&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;invisibleup.neocities.org&#x2F;articles&#x2F;21&#x2F;</a><p>* Part 5 - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;invisibleup.neocities.org&#x2F;articles&#x2F;23&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;invisibleup.neocities.org&#x2F;articles&#x2F;23&#x2F;</a>

The intro to low level computing class at Georgia Tech used Game Boy Advanced as the platform that the projects were built on.<p>It was cool at first, but I ended up too deep in the weeds with platform idiosyncrasies to really get much actual C knowledge.

See also <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;catskull.net&#x2F;gameboy-boot-screen-logo.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;catskull.net&#x2F;gameboy-boot-screen-logo.html</a>

Just a note that she has four other articles in this series at the moment! You can easily find them by clicking the <i>Articles</i> link at the top of her site.

Off-topic: this is the first I&#x27;ve heard of neocities.org but I went there with high expectations and I&#x27;m positively impressed. I guess having been online for 20+ years makes me relatively &quot;old&quot; (many of those much older than my generation were not so keen to get online way back when) and by God do I miss the &quot;old internet&quot;.<p>Neocities&#x27; description truly resonates with me:<p><pre><code> &gt; Neocities is a social network of 216,300 web sites that are &gt; bringing back the lost individual creativity of the web. We &gt; offer free static web hosting and tools that allow you to &gt; create your own web site. Join us!</code></pre>

For me I do it this way: 1. Get a sprite system, audio, sfx, save state, game loop solution going for the platform (GBC). Usually something is available like Cocos.<p>2. Create the game! Sprites, animations, sounds, game code for all parts.<p>Then I test play, and iterate until it’s ready to share.<p>Starting from scratch like this website is like starting from step zero, not step one.