It's been a while since I've worked on this, about a year and a half ago, but I actually developed a game for GB Jam using software which creates a Gameboy ROM which should be able to run on real hardware!
The themes for the jam was "Plant", which the people running the jam said was up to interpretation, so I decided that my game was going to have a Plant enter a Plant to steal Plants. Or to be more precise, a spy was going to enter a corrupt farming corporation's farm in order to steal seeds and plant them for themself. Thus, the game Spy Farmer was born.
The first thing to know was the engine I used, it was something a bit out of my comfort zone (I had mostly used unity up until that point, and still do), but because the jam's requirements were based off of the specifications of the original Gameboy, they recommended the use of an engine which is able to build Gameboy ROMS. The software is called GB Studio if you want to check it out for yourself. Programming in GB Studio is a pretty simple affair, as it comes with templates and a visual scripting language. However, I tend to find these visual scripting languages tedious to work with, especially if there's a change that needs to be made across multiple objects. It's much harder to search for a block of code instead of just typing it in.
The Jam took place over the course of a week, so I had to be very quick in what I wanted to accomplish, I spent the first day setting up a Game Design Document, to show what I wanted to get out the game, the features I'd like, and such. Then I spent the next two days creating sprite art for the game, as I had set my expectations well, I had everything I needed, and could move on to actually putting the game together.
Despite not coding the top-down engine (that came out of the box), I had to write a working farming simulator, each plot of land had to occupy multiple switches in the code in order to be able to determine if there is a plant in the proper plot, if so, what kind of plant was it (there were three crops available), and how much time did it have left to grow (different crops grew at different speeds). The plants grew to their next stage whenever the player visited their bed.
The other half of the game is how the player got their seeds: Espionage, I had guards patrol the various areas where seeds could be found in very rhythmic and predictable patterns. The player could collect seeds as they explored. When they were done, they could store their collected seeds under their bed, and be able to use them for planting, if they were caught, then they lost all of the seeds they haven't stored.
Looking back on this project. I'm impressed with the complexity I was able to achieve in seven days, not only were there farm expansions one could buy, but there's a secret storehouse somewhere in the world that you need a key to open, which you have to buy from someone.
There are also a lot of workarounds regarding the Gameboy Hardware, for example, there's a hard limit to the ammount of moving sprites that can be shown on a Gameboy, so in my pause menu, the zero and tens place in the player's money count are actaully a part of the background, as money is awarded in increments of 100. In fact, the game's money isn't counted all together, the various digits are all counted seperately and had to be programmed by me to work together properly.
Overall, this was a super fun experience for me, and I hope you all learned something from it. You can play Spy Farmer here!
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