Hello! I'm Merlin, and this is the first entry of my Gameboy rom project dev log.
I'm working with my partner Rowan to create a little GB rom as a personal project. I'm writing the code in assembly, and this is my first experience writing game code for a real console, let alone assembly, so it has been and will continue to be a learning process! We're aiming to make a simple tamagotchi-esque game with Mono, one of my sonas (designed by Rowan), as the subject.
I've already done quite a bit of groundwork with it, at least from the perspective of someone who hasn't written anything quite like this before. Rowan made the starting sprites for Mono before I got started on any code. After following the gbdev.io gameboy assembly tutorial, I grabbed the gb-starter-kit template and started building!
I'd love to go into detail about the build process so far, but there'd be a lot to cover, so I'll keep it brief for the sake of actually finishing this first post. At this point, metasprites (large sprites made out of smaller sprites drawn together, used for Mono), animation, movement controls, text rendering, and sound effects are all implemented and working!
The "game" right now is simple, and more or less a tech demo of all the features I've built so far. You can move Mono around with directional controls, change his expression by pressing A, and make him squawk by pressing B. The specific control mappings can be configured in the embedded emulator. That's pretty much it!
Next up, I hope to implement some simple stats and changing them with user input. I might tackle some simple menu UI at the same time, but we'll see!
The current build of the game can be found below. Feel free to mess around with it!
-Merlin