I recently developed a custom Game Boy game, flashed it onto physical cartridges, and sold them at a local makers festival. The whole process was surprisingly straight-forward, and I think more professional developers should give it a try. As a career-long software guy, it felt rewarding to exchange real money for a tangible good.
My game, Hot Dog Race, is based on the 4th-inning show at Baltimore Oriole’s home games. Many baseball stadiums have something similar: the crowd cheers for their favorite character as they do a quick and silly sideline race. The Game Boy game is just as simple. The player picks a condiment, and then runs around the bases trying to be the first hot dog to reach home plate.
I developed the game in GB Studio which is the simplest option for a first time game designer. In the future, it’d be fun to try the C-based GBDK, but I ignored my inner tinkerer here for the sake of finishing the project. The built-in GB Studio engines are solid and include the batteries needed to make a professional game. All in all, I spent more time on the art design than I did the game logic, which is a testament to how comprehensive GB Studio is.
I used Piskel to hand-draw all of my sprites. Sometimes I could start with a scaled down PNG, like on the character select screen which uses designs by my friend at Makemore. However, I ended up needing to manually paint pixels in every graphic at some point. The game’s music is from TipTopTomCat’s 8-bit collection.
Getting the game onto physical media was also pretty easy.
I used 512KB Ferrante Crafts cartridges, which turned out to be larger than I needed.
Apparently, it’s cheapest to buy game reproductions (like Pokemon Crystal) from AliExpress and overwrite them, but this felt another time to ignore the tinkerer.
GB Studio exports .gbc ROMs, which I loaded onto the empty cartridges using a GBxCart RW, which works with the open-source FlashGBX program.
You can play Hot Dog Race online and even buy a cartridge while supply lasts! My GB Studio project is available on GitHub should you want to give Game Boy dev a try yourself.