COMPLETED Yet Another Mario Land

[littlelum]

Wow, that's really neat.

How tough was it to make this? How user-friendly is the engine?

The engine is designed towards people without programming experience, so it's similar to GameMaker's Drag and Drop stuff. The main difficulty is working around the GB/SGB/GBC quirks, such as sprite/tile/palette limits.

Sounds use a tracker, but it is possible to use one or two heavily compressed WAVs if you know what you're doing. Otherwise SFXs work the same as music, but there are some asset packs floating around. All sounds share 4 channels (each is slightly different), so when making music you have to keep in mind that some channels get cut off while some SFX plays.

For graphics, tiles can have 4 colors and sprite tiles 3 + transparency. You can use 8 tile palettes at a time, and 8 sprite palettes at a time. There is a limit to how many tiles/sprite tiles can be loaded at a time. There is also a limit to how many sprite tiles can be rendered on screen at a time. Background tiles are 8x8, and sprite tiles are 8 wide and 16 tall. ROM size is not an issue unless you want to save money mass producing a game.

Programming is object oriented, and Drag 'n Drop is mostly enforced, (unless you want to do some technical shenanigans). There are some preset modes, such as top-down and platformer, with adjustable parameters. You can also eject the engine code into C and edit it there (that's what I did to make it more Mario like). There is a popular plugin that adds a lot of functionality to the platformer engine, but it didn't exist back when I made my engine edits. A lot of technical stuff has been abstracted/encapsulated to make it more approachable.

The community is mostly Discord based, but most upload their games to Itch. There's a good mix of hobby projects, fangames, and commercial releases. Documentation isn't 100% complete, but people are quick to help on Discord. It's a viable engine if you can work around the limitations (one guy found a way to have the player character have around 2,400 sprite tiles despite the GB's hard limit of 92 or 64 or something like that due to clever loading techniques).