Game Boy Game Development

The reason I’ve been trying to learn C programming is that I wanted to try making my own homebrew Game Boy game. At first I tried GB Studio since it’s the most basic way of doing it without needing a lot of programming knowledge. Unfortunately the platform game engine and the shmup engine in it are a bit too simple and lacking for what I was envisioning to create. After researching a bit more I found out the base for GB Studio is GBDK-2020, an updated software development kit for the Game Boy and some other Z80 based consoles. I had to go through the GBDK-2020 documentation and then I decided to look through the Pan Docs that explains all the inner workings of the hardware just to see if I could acquire a better understanding of how it works.

For somebody like myself, who has never really coded a game at a low level like this, it’s been confusing yet fun. A software developer friend of mine told me I’ve learned a lot of the concepts surprisingly quickly, so I’m confident I should be able to grasp the logic behind programming a simple game on basic hardware like this in time.