GBJAM8 (The Binding of Isaac: Game Boy Edition)

THIS PROJECT HAS NOW BEEN ARCHIVED!

The project has been archived to preserve its state at the end of 2020's #GBJAM8 contest. Development is being continued in a NEW REPOSITORY in the hopes of turning this prototype into a fully-featured and more realised game.

Below is the original README for this repository.

A demake for the classic roguelike The Binding of Isaac originally developed by Edmund McMillen and Florian Himsl. This homebrew redesign of the game was built from the ground up to run on the original Game Boy hardware itself (meaning it will require an emulator to play on the PC).

The project was made for 2020's #GBJAM8 and is more of a prototype as to what the game would be like running on original Game Boy hardware so, many features may be missing or lacking polish. Hopefully, in the future, this project could be fleshed out more into a well-rounded and enjoyable experience.

You can find a download for the game's ROM file over on itch.io.

Development

The project was developed using C and the GBDK library to compile into a Game Boy ROM. All other code was written from scratch for this project. Tools such as GBTD (Game Boy Tile Designer), GBMB (Game Boy Map Designer), and GameBoyPngConverter were used to create and generate tile graphics, maps, and splash screens for the project. All of these tools are available as open source from their respective links.

Building

All dependencies are included with the project so the only step needed is to run the build/build.bat file in order to create the output binary. The resulting GB ROM will require an emulator in order to be executed. I recommend BGB as it has a large number of useful features and is extremely accurate to the hardware of the Game Boy. Note that this build process works on Windows only and has not been setup for either Linux or MacOS. However, porting the project over to these platforms should be relatively simple to do.

License

The project's code is available under the MIT License.

The Binding of Isaac IP and all of its characters are owned by its respective copyright holders and I claim no ownership, this is simply a fan project made both for fun and educational purposes.