Font Issues and 3.0 [REUPLOAD]

Hi everyone, it has definitely been some time since I’ve posted. Recently, I have been experimenting with interesting text display and character sprite options that are available in GB Studio 3.0. Some of the biggest benefits of these changes are things like variable width and the new music editor. I have been having some small troubles with trying to understand GB Studio’s custom plugins using GBVM script, and to implement easy variable—width text input without having a lot of duplicate code in each code block. There is also the additional complication of the fact that the current structure I have implemented has inverted color text and text boxes. I have been getting lots of silly errors like the ones shown below, but there has been significant progress!

The actual editing of my font to change it from single-width to variable width was actually quite easily completed. There was some very useful documentation listed in the GB Studio docs on how to do this, and editing in any drawing program was simple with a pixel brush. 

I got some assistance from the GBStudio Discord (go over there and say hi!) folks on a few smaller issues. Everyone there is super friendly and *much* more skilled in programming than I am, so the few times I did really get stuck, it was pretty easy to find someone who was willing to help debug my issue with me. 

I’m going to be taking a few more weeks into September to iron out the final kinks so that the rest of my dialogue importing is a little smoother, and that there is some modular tools available if I decide to change things like color/font/layout in the future.

Another aspect that I am trying to create plugin assistance for is the character expression sprites. I am hoping to eventually get something that looks like character portraits from games like Pokemon Mystery Dungeon and the GBA version of Dogz. This will probably get pushed into October as my schedule is getting hectic again.

Alright, that’s the majority of the content related updates I’ve got since the last post. As usual, Here's a link to the current dev video playlist on YouTube

The subreddit is r/darkforestgb. Current Population: Me.

Currently the team still just includes:

-Myself

-A Writer

-A Composer

Gameplay / Progression Update

No work is being done on the dungeon generation right now I have thought about how I want to set up the logic for more complex dungeon layouts but no scripts have been started in GBStudio on that as of yet. I also keep saying I want to work on enemy design and combat, but I STILL haven’t really had that spark of inspiration to move on to another complex gameplay system from dungeon generation. Oh well, we’re taking our time, and we’ll get there eventually.

Closing Notes

Looks like we might get another audio update on the next devlog (or maybe the one after) since the composer is about to get a little extra free time to work on the project again! I really want to see what he can do within the limitations of the GameBoy hardware. My placeholder BGM that I composed is very rudimentary and I know that much more innovative work can come out of the current GBStudio tools available.