Games have come a long way in the past 24 years, yet many of us look back at the "glory days" of the gameboy and are still amazed at how such a simple (by today's standards) device was capable of such amazing feats of gaming. Even with great strides in graphical power, game design as a whole is really just a question is "what is fun?".
Many people have fallen to the big market mentality of "graphics make the game", when in truth, it's the gameplay. As a community, let us recognize this.
The event is pretty much slated to run from July 31st (the 24th anniversary of the Gameboy in North America) until September 28th (the 23rd anniversary of the Gameboy in Europe), and will expand as we see fit.
Many will ask though, what do we do for this event?
Well, I've had a couple ideas:
First and foremost, we're a community of game designers of varying expertise, so why not a little game design fun?
The challenge is this, create a game that falls under the following criteria:
-Limited to the Gameboy Palette: (http://i127.photobucket.com/albums/p140/thepreserver/Other/gbtest.png)
-Limited to a "Relative resolution" equal to that of the gameboy. This means that while the original gameboy's resolution was 160x144, we're gonna stretch that a bit so that people wont be stuck with playing games on a tiny little square of their monitor. An example would be a screen resolution of 320x288 with 2x2px "pixels".
-Bonus points for using Gameboy chiptunes.
Gather up as teams or work solo, and there's no limitation to your engine of choice so really just have fun with this (if I throw my hat in solo, expect a nice little XP Ace project).
But we're also a community of Artists as well...
Sprite/Pixel Art:
No limits on the resolution or anything, just stick to the original Gameboy's palette. If anyone wants to make an argument that the palette is too restrictive...go play Legend of Zelda - Link's Awakening and say that again!
Music:
Whether it's a new arrangement of a classic Gameboy tune or your own little chiptune mix, go ahead and post it for all the fandom to see!
Prose:
Got that little gem of a game that is near and dear to your heart that fits the tone of the challenge? Go ahead and let your heart out about it and maybe turn some people on to something new!
I wanted to originally post all of this as "contests", but I lack the prizes or judges needed for it. If anyone wants to help turn these challenges into contests however, please feel free to post it here OR in the Skype Group and we can get this party running full blast!
More to come, and for the love of god if anyone can help me rewrite this post I'd be eternally grateful!
I wonder why everyone ignored this D:
Now that I'm seeing this.... I actually want to do it. There's still some time left it looks like, and I do need a break from my current project (writer's block can screw itself =p ) so this might work for me.
I like pixel stuff. I'll help out if anybody will take me.