Write Your Own Game Boy Games: A Beginner's Journey in Two Series

Learn to build your own simple game

The Game Boy is not only a treasure to keep behind glass. Decades after it launched, it is still a living platform that anyone can create for, and you do not need to be a professional programmer to begin. On this site we have written two hands-on series that, together, take you all the way from an empty folder to a polished game of your own, running on a real 1989 console. Both are written for complete beginners, with every single line of code explained in plain English. This page is the map that ties them together.

Series One: Build Your Own Game Boy Game

The first series is where everyone should start. Over six short parts you install the free tools, learn how the Game Boy actually draws (it thinks in little tiles, not pixels), and then build a complete, playable Snake in the C language, step by step.

Create your first Game Boy game - the basics

You give it a playfield and walls, make the snake move to your button presses, add food, growth and a way to lose, and finally run your finished ROM in an emulator or on a genuine Game Boy. By the end you have written a real game from nothing.

TOPICS:

• Part 1: Setting Up Your Workshop

• Part 2: How the Game Boy Thinks

• Part 3: Drawing Your World

• Part 4: Taking Control

• Part 5: Food, Growth and Game Over · Part 6: From Emulator to Cartridge

  
  

Series Two: Level Up Your Snake

The second series picks up exactly where the first leaves off and turns that bare Snake into a rounded little game with its own character.

Let's add some flavour to the game in part II

You learn how graphics were really made for the Game Boy and design your own font and start screen, then add an interactive title screen, a live score, three lives, a proper game-over screen, and finally sound effects and a pause button. Along the way you meet the ideas behind every real game: reusable functions, loops, keeping track of numbers, and talking to the sound hardware, all at a gentle pace.

TOPICS

• Part 1: Drawing Graphics the Game Boy Way

• Part 2: A Title Screen for Your Snake

• Part 3: Keeping Score

• Part 4: Three Lives

• Part 5: A Proper Game Over

• Part 6: Sound and Pause

Who It Is For, and What You Need

Both series are aimed squarely at people with little or no coding experience. There is no jargon left unexplained, and every code block is followed by a plain-language walk-through. The tools are all free and run on Windows, macOS and Linux: the GBDK-2020 development kit, any text editor, and an emulator such as Emulicious, BGB or SameBoy to test your game. That is genuinely all you need to follow along. If you later want to play your creation on real hardware, a flash cartridge like an EverDrive lets you run it on an original DMG-01, which is a magical moment worth chasing.

Where to Start

If you are new, begin with Series One, Part 1 and work through in order; by the end you will have a working Snake. Then move on to Series Two to give it a title screen, a score, lives, an ending, sound and pause. If you have already built the Snake and just want to make it feel finished, you can jump straight into Series Two. Either way, take it one part at a time, type the code in yourself rather than only reading it, and enjoy the moment your own game lights up that green screen.

And whenever you want inspiration, the games that built this machine are all here to study and admire in the collection.