Gameboy 2048

After an incredibly irresponsible purchase at a local retro gaming store, I promised myself that I would finally get around to developing something that ran on a Gameboy.

Today was that day. Here is my first attempt, a 2048 clone that I'm sure somebody has done before but I'm not going to look into it.

With any luck, this project will support the base Gameboy hardware and have bonus color display options for Gameboy Color models.

I am not the creator of 2048, I am simple using it as a starting point to learn how to develop Gameboy games.

Build instructions

To build the project and use all make directives, ensure that the following environment variables are set. These specify the paths to the make directive dependencies.

Environment Variables

• SDCCDIR: Path to the SDCC project directory (ends in /sdcc)
• GBDK2020: Path to the GBDK-2020 project directory (ends in /build/gbdk)
• EMULICIOUS: Path to Emulicious project directory (ends in /Emulicious)
• GBSDDIR: Path to an SD card mount point to copy .gb files to.
  • I am currently using an Everdrive GB x7

make Directives

• make: Builds the project into bin/gb2048.gb
• make run: Builds the product and launches it in Emulicious
• make deploy: Builds the product and copies the .gb file to an SD Card
• make clean: Removes build files in bin/

Toolchain

This project is utilizing the GBDK-2020 cross-platform toolkit as its base, on Linux.

The compiler is identified by the environment variable GBDK2020, that points to the install location to gbd-2020. In other words, this is the path that contains bin/llc.

I was a madman and decided to build the project myself, so my path ends in gdk-2020/build/gbdk.

Emulation

I used Emulicious as the primary development emulator, accompanied with the Emulicious VS Code extension.

make run will build the project and then start Emulicious, so long as the environment variable, EMULICIOUS is set and points to the directory containing Emulicious.jar.

Tile/Sprite Tooling

I used the new GBDK-2020 releases of the Gameboy Tile Designer & Gameboy Map Builder and ran them using wine.

How to play

Press Start to start a new game. Use the D-Pad to scroll tiles.

When the game is over, pressing Start will allow you to start a new game.