Making a Game Boy game in 2017

Re:Making a Game Boy game in 2017 by aaavl2821 on Saturday December 09, 2017 @12:36AM (#15884490)

My parents never let me have video games growing up because they thought it would be a waste of time. They let me get a gameboy for some reason though, I guess cause they couldn't imagine someone wanting to stare at a 2x2 black and white screen for any length of time. Even when my friends got n64s, we spent most time playing Pokémon or Zelda on game boy, because the games were just so good

I recently downloaded roller coaster tycoon for my gf, as we both used to play it when we were younger. She doesn't really play games, but during our 4th date at an amusement park we found out we both played it as children. That game was written in assembly by one person

Not really a point here, other than that nostalgia and craftsmanship can be far more powerful than the latest hardware or software

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Making a Game Boy game in 2017 by wallace_f on Saturday December 09, 2017 @11:57PM (#15890007)

>craftsmanship can be far more powerful than the latest hardware or software

I was just listening to the original Warcraft soundtrack for nostalgia's sake and the Youtube video had scrolled through some of the old artwork. It brought back memories of playing at my friend's house when we were kids. The game also had such nice craftsmanship--the artwork, character and themes. It reminded me of what those old games on small budgets were able to do. Something about that seems missing in today's big gaming titles.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Making a Game Boy game in 2017 by digi_owl on Sunday December 10, 2017 @12:16AM (#15890071)

While reading the articles over at Filfre, i ran into a quote from an early Lucasarts adventure games guy lamenting that the computer games industry had a bad habit of rebooting itself each time some new hardware was released.

Meaning that if you went from say grayscale only graphics to color graphics, for years afterwards the industry would produce glossy but shallow games. This because the game devs were more focused on showing off how far they could push their new toys than making engaging games.

And with Nvidia pushing out a new GPU seemingly every quarter, i wonder if this has lead us into a kind of "eternal september" type scenario regarding games development.

That said, there are a number of good indie games bouncing around Steam these days. Many of them taking design cues from the NES era of gaming.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Making a Game Boy game in 2017 by norswap on Sunday December 10, 2017 @09:13AM (#15891432)

Might be early Xmas for you: http://www.pcgamer.com/this-is-how-blizzard-plans-to-finally...

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Making a Game Boy game in 2017 by kleiba on Sunday December 10, 2017 @09:44AM (#15891569)

I believe s/he was talking about the original Warcraft, not World of Warcraft.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Making a Game Boy game in 2017 by Improvotter on Saturday December 09, 2017 @07:42AM (#15885552)

OpenRCT2 (https://openrct2.org/) allows you to play RCT2 together on a multiplayer server. It's awesome.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Making a Game Boy game in 2017 by kevin2r on Saturday December 09, 2017 @06:25PM (#15888777)

is it hard to port this kind of games to the web, now that we have wasm?

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Making a Game Boy game in 2017 by Hydraulix989 on Sunday December 10, 2017 @03:58AM (#15890592)

It's actually not so difficult using emscripten, especially if the game already uses SDL/OpenGL.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Making a Game Boy game in 2017 by pls2halp on Saturday December 09, 2017 @01:36AM (#15884621)

An iOS version was released earlier this year.

https://itunes.apple.com/au/app/rollercoaster-tycoon-classic...

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Making a Game Boy game in 2017 by havermeyer on Saturday December 09, 2017 @02:51AM (#15884776)

Android too :) It holds up really well considering its age.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.atari.mobi...

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Making a Game Boy game in 2017 by pjmlp on Saturday December 09, 2017 @09:53AM (#15886035)

I had a friend, back in the early 80's, whose parents gave him a ZX Spectrum, but did not allow him to buy games.

Instead he got BASIC and Z80 game programming books, like these http://www.computinghistory.org.uk/cgi/archive.pl?type=Books...

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Making a Game Boy game in 2017 by Ntrails on Monday December 11, 2017 @06:01AM (#15896302)

> Not really a point here, other than that nostalgia and craftsmanship can be far more powerful than the latest hardware or software

A friend just bought me an xbox controller (to use with my PC) as an early christmas present. I've been replaying Final Fantasy 7 which I briefly tried with mouse/kb but was miserable.

I'm literally blown away by how much there is in this game. I've been playing for 30 hours, am nominally on disc 2. The storyline is cool, the characters are a bit one dimensional in places but I still care about them. The cleverness in what they achieved with what they had (interspersed FMV and game, clever environments, all backed by pretty drawings and really good music) is just kinda magical.

I'm loving it as much this time as I vaguely remember loving it the first time - UI warts and all.

[ Parent | on HN ]