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GB Studio

Published by Chris Maltby

A quick and easy to use drag and drop retro game creator for Game Boy

Open sourceMIT

Highlights

  • Builds Game Boy games through visual scene and actor editing rather than hand-written code.
  • Behaviour is assigned by drag and drop instead of a text-based scripting workflow.
  • Projects are compiled into a form meant for Game Boy hardware or emulators.
  • Design is bounded by the original console's screen, colour and memory limits.
  • Distributed here for Linux under the MIT licence.

About this application

GB Studio is a game construction tool aimed at the Game Boy. Instead of writing assembly or C by hand, the author assembles a project visually: scenes are laid out, actors placed in them, and behaviour attached through drag and drop editing. The result is then built into a form intended for Game Boy hardware or emulators, which makes the tool a fit for people who want to produce small retro games without first learning the platform's low-level programming model.

Because the target is late-1980s hardware, the limits of that machine shape the work: a small screen, few colours, modest sprite and memory budgets. The editor is organised around those constraints rather than around the abstractions of a general-purpose engine, so projects that need modern 3D, high-resolution art or large asset sets are outside its scope.

This entry covers the Linux build. The project is published by Chris Maltby under the MIT licence, so the source may be read, modified and redistributed under those terms.

Linux

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