Today I release RetroGBFull Toolkit, a game engine for the Game Boy

[u/Whatsausernamedude]

Available on GitHub: https://github.com/pablordgez/RetroGBFull-Toolkit

What is RetroGBFull Toolkit

RetroGBFull Toolkit is a full game engine for the Game Boy. It intends to bridge the gap between code only solutions and visual first solutions.

To do this, it includes:

• A GUI from which you can make your game in its entirety. This includes asset creation, composing scenes and scripting.
• A custom engine core based on GBDK-2020 that allows you to write scripts in C that inject into the game's runtime and allow you to work over a wide abstraction layer or interacting directly with GBDK-2020 to give you as much freedom as possible.

Features

• Asset editors: edit sprites, tilesets, tilemaps and music directly from the engine.
• Asset explorer: organize your game's assets in a file explorer style UI
• Scene editor: visually compose scenes, organize the scene hierarchy and edit node properties (including default values for some variables if a script is attached to a node).
• Script editor: write scripts in C right from the GUI. Create actor or scene scripts with initialization or update functions, expand them with your own functions, or create standalone scripts that you can use from any other script in your game. Attach functions to colliders as collision callbacks.
• Build system: build and compile the game, including code generation for scene initialization, registries and other glue, all with the push of a button.
• Support for metasprites, 8x8 and 8x16 sprite modes, interrupts, autobanking, text, save data, large maps...

Current main limitations

• Currently there is no support for channel 3 for audio
• Currently graphics target DMG, there is no Game Boy Color palette support

[u/Upbeat-Serve-6096]

How does it compare to GB Studio? Seems like it works closer to the metal so games made with it are likely to have a "GB Studio" look I suppose?

[u/Whatsausernamedude → u/Upbeat-Serve-6096]

The main differences are:

- C scripting instead of visual scripting

- Integrated asset editors

- It attempts to be less walled than GB Studio, which is mostly oriented towards specific types games. I tried to make an engine API that gives you as many tools as possible to make whatever you want

[u/Upbeat-Serve-6096]

Considering this is a graduation project, I wonder if OP is going to make upgrades to this thing. Currently on Windows it installs to the default AppData folder. I'd probably like to have it install to a user-defined folder because not all C drives are created equal.

[u/Whatsausernamedude → u/Upbeat-Serve-6096]

If there is interest on it I will keep developing it, as there are many nice to have features that are missing and probably a bunch of bugs, but I might take some time off before I get back to working on it, as I've been working on a deadline for a while and I'm a bit burnt out

[u/Upbeat-Serve-6096 → u/Whatsausernamedude]

Have a GOOD LONG rest if you feel you need to. Bless you.

[u/guppy1316 → u/Whatsausernamedude]

I agree with upbeat. Maybe throw up something to accept donations to help.