Welcome back everyone, it has been a bit of time since we last saw each other here! I was busy with showcasing cool games and hunting achievements on Twitch, but now we are fully back! I promised a possible GBJam 14 game, and here we are actually doing it! So lets get started!

Also if you would be interested in a video format of this, feel free to check the actual brainstorm VOD over at YouTube!

The Jam

GBJAM is about making games inspired by the gameboy. The primary theme is the restrictions of the old system, but not in the meaning of needing to build an actual gameboy game. You can use any engine if you follow these 5 rules:

• 160x144px screen resolution
• Maximum 4 colors on the screen at the same time
• Controls include: 4 directions, 2 buttons, start and select
• Except font everything must be done during the jam
• No generative AI usage is allowed

Pretty small and straight forward list, so I was very interested in the idea of joining a jam. I never owned a GB game and haven’t played a lot of them so the idea was double interesting. So I was eagerly waiting the theme announcement which turned out to be:

OLD GOLD

Not the best, but I sat a day on it (as it started on Friday), and on Saturday we held our usual gamejam starting brainstorm session!

The IDEA

A small side tangent here, if you have followed my writings/jams before you know that I usually create cool little mind maps for the brainstorming session, see the previous one from the ascii jam:

This was made in drawio and I wanted to look for a purely FOSS solution that ran locally instead in the browser and had a more minimal capability as drawio was a bit more complicated than what I’d actually need. An infinite whiteboard, shapes, arrows, text boxes and images is all that I need for this. Took a few days, but in the end I found KDE Drawy, which turned out to be a super cool surprise as it worked like a charm:

Feel free to open the image in a new tab, should be high enough definition to be explored and I’ll be skipping a few of the ideas, since there was a LOT of them.

Interpretation 1 - Mythology

Sprinkled over myths and legends gold is a frequent motif. King Midas, the lost city of El-dorado, the Golden Fleece could be all interesting ideas to explore, but I was never good with lore based games, so this was quickly dismissed.

Interpretation 2 - The Pirates

The theme was revealed with a lovely animated pixelart of a pirate treasure being contested, so of course the theme quickly got brought up. I had to ideas here that sounded interesting, but both had a major complicating in their implementations. When I do these maps I always try to do a quick pro and con part which usually highlights the coding issues I see immediately. In short a little wario-like mini game and an island exploration games were brought up here.

Interpretation 3 - The Gold Rush Era

The American gold rush would be a perfect idea here, but I quickly threw the idea out as I felt this is gonna be an over saturated idea place.

Interpretation 4 - Treasure

Old and Gold lead me to the idea of old treasuries, ruins with precious stuff inside them, so two ideas formed here:

Dig Dig Dino like. If you haven’t seen this playdate game you gotta check it out!

• Archaeology dig simulator with a grid of dirt, dig and mop dirt away to reveal potential treasure.
• Dig up stuff from dirt
• Pros:
  • Most unlikely theme maybe
  • Implementation should be easy
• Cons:
  • How to make it fun and unique
  • Basically how not to remake dig-dig dino

Indiana Jones meets Zelda, top down ruin exploration game, where you push as deep as you can and try to get out with as much loot as you can. Kinda like zelda room by room, puzzles or enemies in each, with cool examples as board games (clank) or any other “dungeon crawler” game I made.

• Pros:
  • Random dungeons fun (?)
  • The idea is somewhat “unique” probably not over saturated for the jam (idk)
• Cons:
  • Figuring out room generation
  • Enemy AI variety
  • puzzles? me no smart

The actual idea

I had to jump out to a nearby corner shop in the morning and on the way a treasure sorter game popped into my head, but I quickly brushed it aside because the dig dig dino like game was really stuck in my head. But during the brainstorm session I realized that I didn’t really have a solution that would be not a demake and the zeldalike felt more pain to implement due to the complexity of interesting multi room puzzles.

For this second one, there is an amazing “research” and implementation area around cyclic dungeon generation which is highlighted on the following link: https://sersavictory.itch.io/cyclic-dungeon-generation

But then the treasure sorter idea came back.

So we started laying out the lore. You a little kobold (a lizardlike bipedal creature) who servers the big dragon. Today’s chore is sorting out all the treasure as the hoard is getting too big to handle. This idea was split into two general possible game routes:

• A sokoban like shape pusher, where loot comes in different tetronimo shapes and you have to arrange them in the cave.
• The dragon gives you rules and you have to keep or throw out stuff based on said rules.

The first idea ran into the problem of not having a clear end goal (you cannot clear lines, do you stack or not etc…) while the second one seemed straight forward, so we decided on going with that one for the jam!

Mockup

We looked into a palette that would hold a few colors (which I changed later), and jumped straight into a small mockup to see if the idea has some footing. I wanted to capture the whimsy silly little vibe of my recent games so I knew that I wanted something goofy. And oh did we get goofy.

The big and chonky head of the dragon just peeking over the corner, the big eyes that eventually will follow you and a small little kobold gave the perfect ground for the idea. While not every single detail is worked out in the game yet, one pile to put good stuff into and a hole to throw old should serve as a good starting point. Miss something and the dragon will roast you, lose all your chances and the game is over.

Rules will get complicated over time so you will have a harder and harder time to sort things. There might be a need for a timer to hasten your steps but for now the implementation can begin.

Some work I did offline

I’m using the Usagi Engine again, so I quickly moved to Aseprite and a big spritesheet to move what I needed. Played around a bit with tiled, but honestly I feel like that is a bit more than what we need. A simple room should suffice just enough and for that I can just burn the design into the spritesheet. The dragon gets the same treatment, for now one big sprite should be enough. Eventually I do want the head to rotate around, but I’d have to pre-render those as the gameboy technically didn’t have access to rotation.

A super simple player control code later:

function _init()
    State = {}
    PLAYER = {
        x = 16,
        y = 16,
        moving = false,
        flipped = false
  }
  TICKS = 0
end

function _update(dt)
    TICKS += 1
    if TICKS > 59 then
       TICKS = 0 
    end
    PLAYER.moving = false
    if input.held(input.UP) then
       PLAYER.y -= 1
       PLAYER.moving = true
    end
    if input.held(input.DOWN) then
       PLAYER.y += 1
       PLAYER.moving = true
    end
    if input.held(input.LEFT) then
       PLAYER.x -= 1
       PLAYER.moving = true
       PLAYER.flipped = true
    end
    if input.held(input.RIGHT) then
       PLAYER.x += 1
       PLAYER.moving = true
       PLAYER.flipped = false
    end
end

function _draw(dt)
    -- bg clear
    gfx.clear(gfx.COLOR_BLACK)
    gfx.text("Hello, Usagi!", 10, 10, gfx.COLOR_WHITE)
    -- map sprite
    gfx.sspr(0, 144, 160, 144, 0, 0)
    -- player walking offset for the 2 frame animations
    local spriteoffset = PLAYER.moving and 2 or 0
    spriteoffset += TICKS%20 > 10 and 1 or 0
    -- drawing the player
    gfx.spr_ex(14+spriteoffset, PLAYER.x, PLAYER.y, PLAYER.flipped, false, 0, gfx.COLOR_TRUE_WHITE, 1)
    
    -- drawing the dragon
    gfx.sspr(0, 48, 160, 96, 0, 0)
end

And we have a cute little scene I can spam over social media and start to add stuff so we can test the core gameplay loop. Now of course this code needs a little refactor so the player has its own update() and draw() methods but I wanted to quickly put together something to help the vision.

You might have noticed that there is no red anymore on the screen. I tried to create the game with it, but the maroon was just too strong as the ground and if I swapped colors around nothing looked really great. So I played a bit around with the palette and eventually landed on this very dark navy blue adjecent color.

I’ll also have to figure out a font, but usagi can bake any .ttf into its engine so we are more than fine there. What might be problematic is how I’ll showcase the player the current rules. Originally I wanted a big scroll on the screen, but I’m not sure if that can fit. We can of course transition it in an out of screen when needed but that feels more of a bandaid than an actual solution. So questions are still there, but all those can be answere during the jam. Speaking of the jam I’ll be live today, 19:00 CEST, 7PM on Twitch doing this exact jam!

And with that this is all I have for you for now! Started a bit late but here is hoping that we will have time and work won’t be stinky poopoo to leave me with no energy to work on this. Till the next one, check out other posts here or on my Ko-fi (where my old stuff lives) and I’ll see you next time!

HUGE thank you for my current supporters, Csöndi, Nerdy Teachers and Fletch! Thank you from the bottom of my heart!

If you want to support my work you can do so with a price of a coffee! It really helps me find more time to do all this, and keep my hobby afloat.

Until the next article, take care, have a nice day!