https://itch.io/blog/1088721/sneakpeek-gb-graphx

I am currently in the final stretch of developing GB-GraphX: a free tile-based pixel art editor for the Gameboy. The tool is functional as a fully featured 14*12 pixel art editor. To wrap things up, I just need to make the main menu prettier and iron out a few quirks.

At this stage, I am accepting auditions for demo art made with GB-GraphX. I will select 4 winners to have their art showcased on the itch.io page and will add them to the credits.

All entrants will gain access to all builds of the program and will receive the final build before everyone else. In addition, I will plug any socials/profiles of all entrants that they want linked.

If you're interested of being part of a new Gameboy playable pixel art tool, join my discord server: https://discord.gg/dAfzquwru3

https://da-flarf.itch.io/gb-graphx

You can check out the current build here

This looks very cool. well done! do you think there might be scope for GBC Colour mode in the future? maybe selecting one pallete of 4-5 colours for each preset? agreed some music would be nice too, I'm getting Gameboy Camera silly music vibes

I intend to make a Gameboy color version in the future. I never thought about using a palette for each preset. That's a neat idea! I only own a DMG, so the progress on testing a color port might be slower, but it will get done.

Thanks for the suggestion for OST style! I think I'm going to lean a little baroque, kind of tetris-y. Maybe throw in a collab with Bach or Scarlatti (public domain go brbr). I was thinking that in the menu, I could let the user choose which track to listen to

i gotcha if you need some color testing, i got my trusty gbc and everdrive on hand!

great idea on song selection like in tetris! best of luck with the project, its really cool. happy to test anything too if you need a hand and I have time, just reach out!

update: Save system is well on its way.

How it works:
1. on "new drawing" replace all tiles with blank and set the corresponding variables that represent tiles to 13 (the "blank" value)
2. on draw/erase, update the variable that corresponds to the tile with the matching texture (0-12)
3. On load save, replace the tiles using values from the saved variables

I am currently done with step 1, moving onto step 2. Sadly, I won't be able to see whether 1 or 2 work properly until I've implemented 3.

Regarding GBC features:

on the Game Boy Color, unique tiles are increased from 192 to 256, allowing for a lot of potential textures. I could also add more rows or columns to the GBC version using the extra tiles, but more textures seems like a better idea.

Now, here's the bad news. In the current version, GB-graphx uses a tile replacement algorithm represented by integers which correspond to textures within a single tileset. SINGLE tileset. You can probably see where I'm going with this. To allow the user to use all the available color palettes, I need to make the program reference multiple tilesets which will make the tile replacing slightly more annoying but will absolutely balloon the complexity of loading saves.

For this reason, I will wait until the DMG version is fully implemented, scored, and polished before working on the GBC version, and even then, due to the sheer complexity, I'll need to see some honest demand for a GBC version _{(like if the program gets really popular or liek.... if GB-graphX became a BOTB format or liek... money is cool)}

So yeah, I've been loving working on this program because it's the kind of Gameboy homebrew I'd download in a second, but man the code just takes forever.