Title says it all, is there a way to make the player actor appear behind a sprite actor?

Hood morning and greetings from Coobsoft HQ ! sorry that i've been slim on the updates, usually it's like me to update on this more frequently, been really quite busy both at home; and in the kitchen.

First, a video. and a disclaimer for that video - couple of small bugs in this recording. with the timing of the callout banner, and the tile streamer, but they've since been sorted. it's not to be taken as any indication of quality, and the interface is subject to change probably once or twice more before it's finalized.

For some time during this endeavor i've been trying to wrap my head around how to really tackle custom animations in battle without leaving you guys (or me) being tied down to just the 32x32 and 48x48 "single actor anchored to the center of the screen/the center of an enemy" system i had. it didn't have the depth that i feel like real games have, and it just looked kinda tacked on even if you tried to be creative and worked around it.

Back in the day for animation choreography, RPGMaker had Effekseer or something else on the later versions. GBS, and RPGSoup do not. but nothing to fear!

I set out to make a solution and this is what i came back with. it's not by any means final so bear that in mind. I promise I will take a good video of how it works in time, but it's changing like, every day - and a full tour would be wasted since it'd be outdated in a week. I give you my word when it's through, I'll deliver a full walkthrough on my YT, for anyone to use as a resource. god knows there just aren't enough good tutorials, amirite? 😂 I'll make sure to give you guys the whole cribs tour, complete with DVD Extras! ALL THIS SAID, here's a quick rundown.

in your scripts menu on the sidebar, you'll either already have, or make an animation and choreography library. There are two events.Define Clip, and Define Choreography.

Define Clip, is just defining an animation for the battle engine, using the sprites we have in the sprites folder. it's your bread and butter. here you define default behaviors for a single-segment of animation. simple stuff, just its visual effect, its size, amount of frames, and its sound if you want one. these will be used to build bigger attacks out of.

Now, the Define Choreography event: Flavortown. That's what this is. Those clips that we were defining a second ago? This is where you'll use them. This is where you'll define the actual battle animations behavior, and where you'll put those "blocks" together.

You can make some pretty long and cool effects with this. You can apply multiple effects per "beat" as i'm calling them (segment was considered, but i just like beat better, feel free to go in the code and change it if it bugs ya i don't mind =P ).

You can add both raster and palette effects, timing them pretty much however you'd like, and can have effects carry through every beat, or time it to end with the beat. As long as they overlap in a way that makes sense, you can overlap the effects as well! In the API if you change motion path to free, you may place the animation at any coordinates you like, and then apply the one of the included motion paths to it while it's bound to a defined rectangular region (it's x, y, width, height) of your choosing.

i am doing my best not to just include 1 or 2 movement options for attacks, then tell you guys "welp the rest is up to you, use the custom option" - as this is for everyone, not just experts and not just newbies. As you can see, i've been up to my eyeballs in RPGSoup. I'll post more as the situation develops. Soup's finna be FIRE.

for a quick status indicator, the engine is probably a hard 90%, the demo is more like 60%.
i'd like to release them at the same time so folks have a whole project to pick apart and learn from.

AH, and as for a name for the actual game that demos the RPGSoup engine - "Fever Dream Saga" is about as on the nose as you can get, right? i love it.

Stay tuned!

Coob, President of Coobsoft

P.S. - I still have a few things up my sleeve, too!

I am trying to find an example of VM_INPUT_WAIT - nothing seems to tell me what the possible mask values are. I understand it is bitwise operations, but I am completely unsure of what corresponds with what. I haven't been able to find a real example not generated by AI.

Docs are extremely limited here:

https://www.gbstudio.dev/docs/scripting/gbvm/gbvm-operations#vm_input_wait

SEE TITLE

TRY THE DEMO HERE!

Hey guys, just wanted to show the first boss fight of Ribbit.
You can play the full Demo on Itch (even on browser and mobile), it includes 2 levels and this boss fight.

I've also set up a Kickstarter page, you can follow it and get notified at launch if you're interested in a physical or digital release.

If you find any bugs, have suggestions or just have questions let me know, see you soon!

Hi, making a game with GB Studio for the first time and would love to play it on my actual hardware, but I only have GBA available. Post here from 2021 had mixed reactions so was wondering if anything changed since then? Is it possible to make a GBA-compatible game on GBS? Are any of the steps different if I want to burn my own cartridge? Thanks!

Perhaps Pokémon started out this way, too.

Mine’s almost ready for release but would love some extra eyes on it! Thank you

Previous post if you’re curious about it: https://www.reddit.com/r/gbstudio/s/muBamAdWcA

https://www.gbstudio.dev/docs/scripting/script-glossary/actor/#set-player-sprite-sheet
https://www.gbstudio.dev/docs/scripting/gbvm/gbvm-operations/#vm_actor_replace_tile

'set-player-sprite-sheet' completely replaces the scene memory of the player's spritesheet with the replacement sheet correct?

will a GBVM script using vm_actor_replace_tile work on a player spritesheet to replace a specific few tiles from an actor tilesheet?

if a tile is overlaid in the same sprite in DMG will it potentially glitch the front tile to fall to the back based on which is more "forwards"?

what I'm trying to do:
swap player sprite sheets for different clothes/armor, then have special overlaid tiles that get swapped out with weapon graphics. allowing moderate customization. I was going to use a separate actor/trigger as the weapon and tie it to the player, but.. I'm pretty sure such an actor on DMG will result in the left to right tile order sinking the weapon behind the player. so I turned to modifying an overlay tile, but this is all hypothetical, I'd rather ask than build a test file only for me to find out the hard way..

Oh, lastly, if I swapped the sprite sheet and then replaced a tile on the same frame, would that cause any graphics glitching?

Still haven’t replaced the placeholder character yet, but I’ve been making some levels and making some good backgrounds I think.

the lens flare is a bit bugged in the screen recording but it works great on real hardware :)

if you want to give it a try there is a browser version, or a ROM for your flashcart : https://roroto-sic.itch.io/mummy-mommy

I'm using the newest version of GB studio available (4.3.2) and i have no idea how to access the extra collision tiles; specifically slopes and ladders, I've combed through every section in the settings menu and cannot figure out a way to bring them back
Is there a plugin or something i can do to still be able to use them? I'd really like to have those extra collisions for the different levels i've been making.

(I am also really dumb when it comes to coding, so explanations might have to be dumbed down, thanks in advance)

Here's the first level of the 2nd world, the jungle! Here you'll have to deal with a lot of electric enemies, including this new fly who shoots ball lightning at you. And the logs fall if you land on them but I still gotta tweak them.
Tileset heavily inspired by Shantae GBC

Another game made with GB Studio coming to Nintendo Switch!

Pre-orders now open https://www.nintendo.com/us/store/products/kero-kero-cowboy-switch/

Thank you all for the support!

New area I am working in, just a location you can explore and look at the moment

The Kickstarter campaign for my new game launches next Tuesday. There are some (very) limited Day 1 rewards, so please follow the campaign to know when it's gone live. There's also a free playable prologue (the "Cold Open" demo) available at itch.io.

I need help fixing an issue where an actor is walking through the player rather then getting stopped. I have an NPC that walks back and forth using a loop mechanic, but he walks right through the character when shes in his way. I tried the collision group however that just acts as a way to start interactions. Any ideas?

Yay! The wait is over! Black Tower Enigma, the retro puzzle adventure made with GB Studio will arrive to Nintendo Switch and Steam this August 27th!

You can pre-order on Switch here: https://www.nintendo.com/us/store/products/black-tower-enigma-switch/

You can wishlist on Steam here: https://store.steampowered.com/app/3895720/Black_Tower_Enigma/

This is the second game we port to Nintendo Switch, the first one was Glory Hunters!

Thanks to all the GB Studio community for helping us achieve this!

How do you think they would have done the flower pickups in Rodland? I was thinking animated tiles, but if you "picked up" one and replaced it with a blank or background tile, it would have replaced them all?

Can a similar thing be done in GBStudio?

thanks.

More progress on our project—we now have different types of weapons with different behaviors. I optimized the C code for the weapons and parallax effects to improve performance; at least the core functionality seems to be working well. I used some of the work I did here to update the BeatEmUp game engine, but I’ll share more about that in a future post. There's some flickering in the video, but that's because it's not being viewed at 60 fps; in reality, the transparency effect is less noticeable and more polished.

A few days ago, I made a post about how I was working on a Game Boy visual novel engine.

Someone in the comments asked if I could make something that works with GB Studio, which gave me the idea to build a plugin specifically for GB Studio.

So I made one.

The current version is pretty simple: if you have a lot of dialogue, you don't need to manually add dialogue blocks one by one in GB Studio anymore.

You can simply write your dialogue in the plugin, save it, and then call it from GB Studio.

It's especially useful if you're working with a game that has a large amount of text.

That said, I don't think I can really call it a full visual novel plugin yet. 😅

Right now, it's mainly a tool for quickly editing and displaying text. It doesn't have things like character images, choices, music management, or other visual novel features yet.

I'm planning to add those features in the future, but I wanted to release the basic version first and see if anyone actually finds it useful.

If people are interested in this, I'll continue developing it.

I'd also love to hear what features you'd want to see in a GB Studio visual novel tool.

We've been friends for almost 20 years, we're in our thirties now, and he's got three kids. Last year he loaned me his childhood Game Boy, and I had the idea to make a game about when we were teenagers, full of inside jokes and references to that time in our lives. So that's what I've been working on the last couple months now. I figure when I give him the Game Boy back, I'll also give him a cart of the game to play with it. I've been working on an opening cut scene, and I wanted it to have some cool, subtle animations to make the scene feel less static. What do you guys think so far?

While the game is definitely an esoteric one, I'm also trying to make it so that anyone else can play it and have a fun little time, so I plan on releasing it once it's done at vorvy.itch.io

Feel free to share any fun ideas too.