GB Studio

About

GB Studio is a desktop app for making games for the Nintendo Game Boy, with no programming knowledge required. You design scenes, place characters and wire up behavior with visual scripting, then export a real ROM that runs in emulators, in a web browser or on original Game Boy hardware. It suits hobbyists, artists, game-jam regulars, parents teaching kids to code, and indie studios planning physical cartridge releases. The magic is how approachable it makes a famously constrained platform. Beginners can build a top-down RPG or a platformer in an afternoon, while advanced users can reach down into the GBVM virtual machine, write plugins, or modify the engine's C and assembly code. GB Studio was created by Chris Maltby and is developed in the open on GitHub. More than a thousand games have been made with it, and its community runs a Discord, a subreddit, the GB Studio Central site and even a magazine; brands such as McDonald's and Nike have used it too. Highlights: • Visual, event-based scripting with a built-in debugger • Top-down, platformer and shooter game types, mixable in one game or extended with your own • Built-in music editor with piano roll and tracker modes, plus MIDI input • Exports real .gb ROMs that run on emulators and actual hardware • Web export with mobile touch controls, ready to upload to itch.io • Plugins and web templates for customizing the engine and web export • Super Game Boy support • Command-line tool for automated builds GB Studio is free and open source under the MIT license. The itch.io download is name-your-own-price, so you can pay what you want or nothing, and development is also funded through Patreon. It runs on Windows, macOS and Linux; version 4.3.2 is probably the last release to support Windows 7 and 8.

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