<story><title>GB Studio: A game maker for the Game Boy</title><url>https://www.gbstudio.dev/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>t8y</author><text>I worry about things like this trivialising the difficulty of the past. Something like this is more like modding a game than making a new game in terms of tech. It makes it seem like it&amp;#x27;s really easy to make a Game Boy game, when the creators of this put in heaps of work (more than just making a game) into making a tool that gives people the ability to reskin their base game.&lt;p&gt;Homebrew that&amp;#x27;s designed to run in an emulator isn&amp;#x27;t the same as running on actual hardware either. In the past people had to think about things like how to fit a 20hr RPG into less than 1MB. Now you could make tile sheets for each room because the game can be much shorter. Other things like how art assets can look good on a modern LCD monitor when on an actual Game Boy they would be a blurry mess also contribute to a misunderstanding of retro games.&lt;p&gt;People already have an unrealistic view of &amp;quot;retro&amp;quot; games because in GameMaker or Unity it&amp;#x27;s easy to have 1000s of sprites, shaders and 32bit colour(You can even have HDR sprites if you want) when that isn&amp;#x27;t possible on the actual hardware.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m not trying to hate on GB Studio it looks great, just some thoughts.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>numlock86</author><text>Despite your gatekeeping thoughts I think things like this are great. You make it sound like it&amp;#x27;s a bad thing that you abstract the difficulty from past times away, but what actually will happen is that it makes this stuff much more accessible to get started with it at all. There will be a few people among those falling down the rabbit hole and end up at reading and writing raw code for the Game Boy because stuff like this will always limit you in some way.</text></comment>
<story><title>GB Studio: A game maker for the Game Boy</title><url>https://www.gbstudio.dev/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>t8y</author><text>I worry about things like this trivialising the difficulty of the past. Something like this is more like modding a game than making a new game in terms of tech. It makes it seem like it&amp;#x27;s really easy to make a Game Boy game, when the creators of this put in heaps of work (more than just making a game) into making a tool that gives people the ability to reskin their base game.&lt;p&gt;Homebrew that&amp;#x27;s designed to run in an emulator isn&amp;#x27;t the same as running on actual hardware either. In the past people had to think about things like how to fit a 20hr RPG into less than 1MB. Now you could make tile sheets for each room because the game can be much shorter. Other things like how art assets can look good on a modern LCD monitor when on an actual Game Boy they would be a blurry mess also contribute to a misunderstanding of retro games.&lt;p&gt;People already have an unrealistic view of &amp;quot;retro&amp;quot; games because in GameMaker or Unity it&amp;#x27;s easy to have 1000s of sprites, shaders and 32bit colour(You can even have HDR sprites if you want) when that isn&amp;#x27;t possible on the actual hardware.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m not trying to hate on GB Studio it looks great, just some thoughts.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>parski</author><text>You&amp;#x27;re absolutely on the money. If you scrape the surface of Game Boy development you&amp;#x27;ll find that it&amp;#x27;s even inadvisable to use C since the hardware is so weak (compared to today&amp;#x27;s standards) that you really need to squeeze out performance at the instruction level.&lt;p&gt;If GB Studio and GBDK spurs someone&amp;#x27;s interest to get into Game Boy development, great, but getting the most out of the hardware requires a lot more effort.</text></comment>