This game has kinks besides the fun kind...

GRC presents... another ambitious GB Studio project with a focus on animation and fairly large sprites, and a fingers-crossed approach to everything else... 😅

Cards on the table, much like R.A.i.a.O.C.f.T.S.S.a.W.S.T.'s predecessor Literally a Collectathon full of Sex Toys, this game is very messy under the hood. Also like L.a.C.f.o.S.T., I fully intend to clean it all up at some point and put out some kind of DX Edition...

There's a heck of a lot more I'm going to need to learn about GB Studio before then, though...!

So what even possessed me to try and make a twin-stick for the Game Boy in the first place? Because it's there, basically, that "it" being GB Studio itself , plus the logistics of the Game Boy having a directional control plus four buttons which could in turn be used as a second directional control - an absolutely unintuitive pain in the arse on original hardware given the button layout, however modern solutions provide a heck of a lot of wiggle room: I haven't played an actual Game Boy, Game Boy Pocket, Color or Advance machine in years, but I'll pull up VisualBoy Advance on the regular, all buttons mapped to the face buttons of a USB joypad.

TL;DR? I can make Game Boy games; I play Game Boy games with an XBox controller...

A word about Riding's game feel: if you've played it already, you may have noticed that sometimes you try to change your firing direction, and find that you're not firing at all. The workaround is to let go of all fire buttons for just a moment before pressing the new input. I'm not a fan myself; ideally I would want the new input to override the last one, and this is very much something I'll be trying to address in any future iteration of the game.

The reason it behaves like this in the first place is because I wanted to make sure that hitting more than one button wouldn't fire shots in more than one direction at a time, so I implemented kind of a failsafe in the code. And by "code", anyone who knows anything about GB Studio knows I mean "Events". The way I ended up setting it up is as follows: every time you press a button, the game checks if another button is already being held down, and if one is, the new button's script gets stopped: nothing new happens. Hence needing to release buttons in order to allow new stuff to work. It's functional, but it's not ideal.

Without knowing anything about GBVM Scripts, I'm just going to assume there's a better way in there somewhere...

That'll be that "heck of a lot more I'm going to need to learn about GB Studio", then...!

Another criticism I'd levy against the game is the sparse population of levels, which is directly tied to the amount of detail per sprite. Morag alone takes up almost half of a scene's sprite tile allowance. I'm sure there are workarounds there too; again, further learning... 👍

On the whole, though, I'm pretty pleased with the results. I mean, I absolutely know more about GB Studio now than when I started this project, which in turn was built from what I'd learned making L.a.C.f.o.S.T.

Also, if I say so myself, the soundtrack absolutely slaps...!

One last thing: you haven't seen the last of Morag. She may even show up in a new engine next time...