Generated Games for the Game Boy
One project that I’ve been working on lately is generating games for the Game Boy.
The generator builds games using GB Studio.
Why the Game Boy? There were a number of reasons, including it being a fixed target platform with a really good emulator ecosystem. Since this is part of a larger project to research new ways of building generators, it made sense to target a platform that didn’t require a lot of scaffolding just to display something on screen. Plus, it lets us build games for genres that haven’t had as much game generation attention. A generator targeting Pico8 or Bitsy might be similar, though the other advantage of GB Studio is that it has a lot of useful data structures already implemented (like scenes and triggers) and so we can concentrate on teaching the generator how to use them.
I’m not the only one working on the project, so I certainly can’t take all of the credit. And it is definitely a work in progress - the next version of the generator is using a different approach that makes the process of building the generator much more flexible.