Dashosaurus and the gamedev afterwork

It's a small game, where you drive a triceratops-like dinosaur, collecting eggs and completing levels while avoiding falling lava bombs. But that was the game Antoine from Sleeping Panda presented last wednesday at the local gamedev afterwork event.

He made the game with Gameboy Studio, one of these recent desktop applications that bring together all the things you need to create software on 8-bit machines -- although here you're largely able to draw stuff in Gimp and lay out maps with Tiled. And you're also able to export your work as HTML5 game in addition to GB and GBC roms, which is clearly a plus to distribute your creations.

Antoine did talk a bit about GB Studio itself, and how that tool let him do things he wouldn't have done otherwise as well as how it would frequently make impossible some things that I'd have thought trivial, like the ability to destroy some of the ground with the lava bombs.

While he was talking, I couldn't help noting that graphics would have easily allowed to make parallax scrolling, but I doubt the events scripting system would have supported such low-level techniques, although -- according to Antoine -- the tool allow to "eject the engine", rewriting some parts to compensate e.g. the lack of Dash support in the platformer character while his game was all centered about dashing.

But the most interesting part of the talk for me was about the reception of the game by gamers. How it caught speedrunners interest while the author of the game did not know of speedrun beforehand. How people started to send him their best time. How people started to make him cover art, contact him to see whether he'd approve patches for retro achievement. And honestly, when I see how many people hype about gameboy and gb studio in general over the networks, I'm not so surprised about it. It was more complicated to explain how NDS is different. Because the nostalgy around the device is still very young. Because technically and legally, producing DS cartridges for homebrew is much more complicated. There are 8-bit catridge manufacturing online now, likely some 16-bit as well. But for DS cartridges I don't expect any such things before again some years.

But nonetheless ... Maybe I should take the extra step that I've never made so far: writing an itch.io page for School Rush because this is where gamers will look for games, not on github or sourceforge.