48 Hours with GB Studio: From Downloading To Finish The Work

By 平成废物少女

This article is from Gcores.com

https://www.gcores.com/articles/114920

When I was signing in for the BOOOM! campaign, I never thought that I would have to finish my work in the last 48 hours. After set the direction of game dev online and offline, a few team mates left for different reasons. Because of that, I have to finishi Agent Of Shinigami, my work for this event, in 48 hours from ash.

To make a complete game in this short hours, I chose GB Studio to be the dev tool. It was prooved to be a right choice: no code writing is required, this is friendly for beginners of game dev. Developers only need to work on the script, scenes, screenplay and logics to get the game done quickly.

FYI, you need these softwares to coordinate with GB Studio when you are making games:

• Tiled: to match 8*8-pixel Gameboy map, Tiled can dramatically lower your workload on map drawing.

• Aseprite: concise and light tool for pixelate drawing which is suited for drawing map blocks and elfs.

• OpenMPT: MIDI music dev tool, GB Studio appoints it to make the music. Knowledge about music channels of Gameboy and instruments are required.

When you are familiar with these tools, you are ready to make games by using GB Studio.

To match the theme SHIFT, I chose "Set player character image" in GB Studio as the basis, and used "player shift to other characters" as basic gameplay, to start game dev.

The Skill of shift has two main uses in game:

• Player shift to other game characters to fake NPCs out, to solve conundrums.

• Player shift to objects in the game, use their properties to solve conundrums.

This two uses were both realized in GB Studio by changing player character image and identity variation at same time. They can provide uses such as:

• Shift to a company employee to get inside the company

• Shift to the boss of the company to get the key

• Shift to a rock to slide through some surfaces that are unwalkable

By combining conundrums above, you will get a more complicated conundrum on one single map. However, due to the limit of GB Studio, you can only place 8 elfs on one map, so the conundrum can't be more complicated than that. This is one shortage of GB Studio.

After confirmed gameplay, I started to write the game story and to combine them organically, to provide a smooth experience for the players. This part is hard to summarize. I'm sure this part is for makers to put their heart into.

Finally, from downloading tools to finish the whole work and upload it, I used less than 48 hours. I think those who have a dream of making games but have no experience of coding, GB Studio is a good way to bring their creativities and ideas to life.

Story of Agent Of Shinigami is:

Player's character is hit down by a fast car. But Shinigami, the Japanese god of death, tells player that this is not the time! So, Shinigami gives player a special skill which is shifing, and a request, for the exchange of player's life. Therefore player goes on misson of using the skill to solve problems and beat the boss.

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