I've been working on a top-down maze game for Game Boy Color involving my character Maffi going into randomly generated mazes in cyberspace and guiding lost critters to the exit while defending herself from enemies. You can find some screenshots and a build of it on NesDev. It's been really interesting getting to work on something top-down, given that a lot of my games have been platformers, because that brings up new game design and programming challenges. It's also nice to have the gameplay objective be something more than just moving right (though I know that's a massive simplification)? Let me know what you think!

Yeah I think maybe setting the maximum number of active enemies to 12 was a mistake, at least for early levels. I'll definitely be adjusting that.

Posted by Snowshoe

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I really like what you did with the SGB colors, and Maffi is very cute. Also I wish I had a flashcart so I could try it on my real GBC.

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Thanks! And I'm glad you think Maffi is cute, hehe. I want to really take advantage of having as much space as I need for the game (as opposed to when it was originally going to be a 32K game) and have some larger illustrations in there.

I feel like a lot of Super Game Boy games are pretty much just shades of a single color and that feels like a waste. I guess my somewhat cartoon-y art style is a good fit for doing something like this, since I have a lot of flat areas of the same colors, and that leads to having a areas that "read" as red, or blue, or white, even if there's others stuff going on.

For people who do try it on a real console I'm definitely interested in hearing about how people think it looks on different screens, since I know GBC screens actually have a good amount of variation? I'm also not doing the super saturated colors a lot of games do so it might be a little dark potentially, though I am planning on having it be an option. It does look OK on mine with reasonable lighting.

I did see one project play with going really far with running custom code on the SNES: https://mastodon.social/@eggboycolor/110626022523335370

For me personally I've thought about playing with my own custom enhancements, but I wouldn't want to rob myself of the opportunity to play with the very unique aesthetic you get from the way Super Game Boy normally works. I can just make a regular SNES game alongside it.

Color-wise, I suppose on SGB you can just use any arbitrary colors you want, since a TV will do a better job at a wide range of colors than a non-backlit GBC screen. But there's a really unique aesthetic detail in the form of only being able to color screen regions, not on-screen elements like sprites, so you'll end up with setups where the game area itself is all one palette and then the status bar (or other static screen elements) looks a lot more colorful. Having a high-color border that's meant to fit alongside a low-color game area in the middle is also very distinct.