Gameboy Demo of Arthur DiBianca's Excelsior on itch.io

Playing Project Announcements
1

As part of an ongoing mission to bring more Interactive Fiction into the realm of graphical video games, I am producing a Game Boy game with Arthur DiBianca and Polyducks, an adaptation of Arthur’s first inform 7 game: Excelsior.

Our team has been working, on and off, for the last ten months, and we finally have a demo that covers the first third of the tower. You can play it now, for free, in your browser, here:

Please take some time to check out the demo, and, if you like what you see, please consider supporting our Kickstarter Campaign as well, to help us finish the project.

Thanks,

Lance.

12 Likes
2

This game (in my opinion) lends itself well to adaptation, and I think the adaptation will be a better game than the original.

To give credit where it’s due, Lance and Ben are doing the work. I’m just providing some design nudges.

They worked with Ryan Veeder a couple of years ago to do a Gameboy adaptation of Ryan’s Mud Warriors, which I also recommend taking a look at.

7 Likes
3

Nice. Are you using GBStudio for the project or doing it in C/assembly? If you’re using GBStudio and need an additional programmer/spriter I am familiar with GBStudio and its limits that are specific to GBS and can lend a hand (of course, not for free).

4

We are using GBStudio. I appreciate the offer but we already have our team together for this project.

2 Likes
5

Looks cool. I got lost in the tower, but was wondering if the buttons could be used for dialogue choices. The conversations with characters so far were all linear.

Perhaps this is there later.

Best luck with ks.

1 Like
6

So you can’t play this unless you have a Gameboy, whatever that is?

7

I tried playing on mobile (on itch). It gave me the controls for a gameboy - the arcade-style arrow keys, the A and B buttons, and START. I guess it looks like a lot of arcade machines.

8

It worked fine for me in a desktop browser, without anything special installed – I presume the itch page has a browser-based Gameboy emulator.

9

Fair enough. If one of the programmers/artists won’t have time or something to do it anymore, my offer still stands.

10

Itch doesn’t have that, GB Studio has a web exporter that wraps ROM in the HTML5 shell. Kinda like Inform web export.

1 Like
11

Wow. Thanks for making us feel very old. :wink: :smiley:

3 Likes
12

Ha! I’m in my 50s. I just don’t know what a Gameboy is. I mean, I assume it’s some game-playing system, but there are a lot of them.

4 Likes
13

Wow, fair play to you. It’s pretty amazing that you lived through the 1990s but don’t know what a Gameboy was! :slight_smile:

2 Likes
14

Yeah, the gameboy was the mainstream platform that outsold everyone else because casual people used it. My mom is in her 60s and she played Tetris on it a lot. I played pokemon and Zelda on it.

It sold an enormous number of units:

IMG_9061
IMG_90612532×1170 249 KB

image
image1280×1552 135 KB

5 Likes
15

I have never evolved with technological advances well. I didn’t have a TV for nearly the entire decade of the 90s, and I had a computer for most of those years but I only used it to write on and play IF with.

I didn’t get a cellphone until 2019-ish, when all circumstances forced me to do it. I still hate it and miss my landline, so this trend continues. I think I was probably the last person under age 80 in Western civilization to get one.

6 Likes
16

Wow, this is impressive! I think Excelsior is a good choice for converting to graphics. It’s also neat to read about the technical hoops to jump through, at least in the big picture. (I didn’t realize GBStudio existed!)

I missed out on GameBoy games (though I had a GameBoy advance for a while,) so I was super thankful for emulators. It was fun to discover that certain games actually existed and were fun.

3 Likes
17

To answer the questions posted: GB Studio is a game dev app that allows you to write software for the Nintendo Game Boy and Game Boy Color.

But, of course, most people don’t have that hardware any more so there is a web-based option available that you can play in your web browser or on your mobile device.

Or you can use a Game Boy emulator like mGBA.

But yeah, some people know how to put the ROM on a cartridge and play it on the original Game Boy Color console as well. Of course, we all aren’t exactly strangers to old school tech :wink:.

This isn’t our the first IF Game we adapted. Like @dibianca mentioned above, we worked with Ryan Veeder to write a Game Boy version of Mud Warriors a few years back as well.

We’ve done a couple of jam games, too, but I wanted to focus this post on interactive fiction adaptations, since IF where I got my start and where all my inspiration originated.

1 Like
18

Yeah, it is still very much in demo mode. A lot of the characters and the outside world will be coming later. We mainly wanted a short version of the game, along with some set pieces that presented the artwork and music as well.