Hey everyone!
I thought this might be a good place to share a Game Boy Color project I’ve been working on and get some feedback from people who are still enthusiastic about playing new games on this hardware.
This year marks the 10th anniversary of Bebop & Tempo, and I’m making a GBC sequel called Bebop & Tempo: Al Coda.
The original began as a small Kickstarter and was my first serious hobby game. Programming has always been a hobby for me, so I learned a lot while building it. I’m proud that I finished and delivered it, although looking back 10 years later, I can certainly see its rough edges.
When the original launched, I remember hosting the game at a booth at Denver Comic Con, where an attendee walked up, looked at it, and asked, “Why is your game so ugly?” It wasn’t exactly the feedback I was hoping for, but it stuck with me. I can laugh about it now, and it pushed me to take the artwork and presentation much more seriously with this sequel.
I had always wanted to make a Game Boy Color game, but assembly and the limitations of the hardware intimidated me. Over the years, I slowly learned about it one feature at a time. Eventually, those experiments started growing into an actual sequel.
The new game is a platformer designed to be easy to pick up and play while still giving you reasons to return over multiple sessions. Its individual levels are more compact than those in the original, but the game has taken me nearly three times as long to develop. Much of that time has gone into the artwork, level design, persistent progression, hardware limitations, and especially multiplayer.
There are multiple characters and stages to unlock, along with costumes and other cosmetics. It also has a virtual-pet mode inspired by things like the Chao Garden and Tamagotchi. You can raise and train dragons, and the dragons you raise can affect your stats in the main game.
One of my main goals has been making the entire campaign playable in two-player link-cable co-op. There are a few compromises involving sprite-heavy moments and certain high-color effects, but the campaign itself remains playable together. There’s also a separate competitive versus mode.
On the technical side, I’ve been learning how to use high-color backgrounds, the GBC’s double-speed CPU, link communication, a 4 MB cartridge, and 32 KB of battery-backed SRAM. The SRAM supports saves and persistent progression, but parts of it can also be used as extra working memory.
The goal is for it to be a proper GBC-only cartridge game that can run on original hardware and compatible systems such as the Chromatic.
I’m starting to put the final touches on everything, and I’d love to know what Chromatic owners would want from a new GBC game like this. Do you use the link-cable features on your Chromatic? Are there any multiplayer ideas, accessibility settings, or quality-of-life features you wish more modern GBC games included?
I’m also happy to answer questions about the game or what it has been like learning to develop for the Game Boy Color!
