The Squirrel Falls Gameboy Game has Arrived

It's launch week! After more than two years of development my Gameboy game, Squirrel Falls is finally here! I think the physical release looks incredible. Massive thanks to my publisher Bitmap Soft for all their help with getting this to market and for such a great job on the beautiful box art and the charming instruction booklet.

What I loved most about developing this game was working within the limitations of the Game Boy hardware. Trying to squeeze as much as possible into the cartridge was both frustrating and rewarding. The game is packed with so much code and tiled artwork, the cart feels like it’s taught like a drum.

It's an awesome but also scary thought knowing that people are actually playing it now. I think I'm mostly worried by the fact that everyone plays games differently and so edge case scenarios might result in a undiscovered bug surfacing as some point.

If people are interested in how this all came about, I first started learning how to use GB Studio, which is a simple drag and drop retro game maker specifically for the Gameboy. What I found really helpful was the community behind this piece of software. If you are wanting to start out with developing your own Gameboy games, YouTube is your friend as there are a number of really helpful channels to handhold you through the learning process. Speaking of Youtube, I have previously put together a couple of videos charting the game's ongoing development.

For the graphics I used a sprite pack to get something working and once I understood the concept of tiles the in GB environment, I started making my own with the help of Tiled.

The one thing I couldn't get me head around was the music side of things, I still can grasp how to compose tracks within the GB studio engine, so I purchased and imported a couple of tracks to move things along.

How did I get spotted by the publisher? Well, it was all down to game jams. Once I had learnt the basics of development, I wanted to focus on a project and a Gameboy gamejam was a perfect means to do this. I found a three month long competition whereby I developed a village exploring game. Bitmap Soft then dropped me a line after the game jam had finished to see if I wanted to work with them in developing my game further. I was a little hestitant at this point because I was worried that the focus would shift when contracts were signed, resulting in the game desing process no longer becoming as enjoyable. The guys at Bitmap Soft were so firendly and they made it clear from the beginning that they wouldn't put any pressure on me at all. The game would evolve at its own pace. It was then tested by others in the Bitmap Soft community and bug fixes made before attention was paid to the box and instruction booklt artwork. I approached a number of local colleges and artists but none wanted to collaborate (or in most cases, especially with the colleges, didn't even bother replying - thanks Salisbury College), so I had to produce the images myself using Midhourney. I also had to write content for the instructions too and normally I'm not a fan of writing documentation but this was somewhat different. It was nice to add a few family and friends as characters in the game and write their back story for the instuctions too.

The rest, as they say, is history. The game was available to preorder a couple of months ago and the game has been shipped out to them. As I mentioned earlier, the most scary part is wondering what people will make of it and my style of humour. You can buy the game on cartridge or digital ROM for the Bitmap Soft store here.