--- title: "Mara: Sh0rk of Justice: Version 1.0.0 Released" date: 2020-12-28 tags: - gameboy - gbstudio - indiedev --- Over the long weekend I found out about a program called [GB Studio](https://www.gbstudio.dev). It's a simple drag-and-drop interface that you can use to make homebrew games for the [Nintendo Game Boy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_Boy). I was intrigued and I had some time, so I set out to make a little top-down adventure game. After a few days of tinkering I came up with an idea and created Mara: Sh0rk of Justice. [You made a game about me? :D](conversation://Mara/hacker) > Guide Mara through the spooky dungeon in order to find all of its secrets. Seek out > the secrets of the spooks! Defeat the evil mage! Solve the puzzles! Find the items > of power! It's up you to save us all, Mara! You can play it in an ` ## Things I Learned Game development is hard. Even with tools that help you do it, there's a limit to how much you can get done at once. Everything links together. You really need to test things both in isolation and as a cohesive whole. I cannot compose music to save my life. I used free-to-use music assets from the [GB Studio Community Assets](https://github.com/DeerTears/GB-Studio-Community-Assets) pack to make this game. I think I managed to get everything acceptable. GB Studio is rather inflexible. It feels like it's there to really help you get started from a template. Even though you can make the whole game from inside GB Studio, I probably should have ejected the engine to source code so I could customize some things like the jump button being weird in platforming sections. Pixel art is an art of its own. I used a lot of free to use assets from itch.io for the tileset and a few NPC's. The rest was created myself using [Aseprite](https://www.aseprite.org). Getting Mara's walking animation to a point that I thought was acceptable was a chore. I found a nice compromise though. --- Overall I'm happy with the result as a whole. Try it out, see how you like it and please do let me know what I can improve on for the future.