Hello all from GBPS development land, it's been a minute so I thought I would update everyone quickly on what progress I've made and what my next steps will be. 3D PrintingI've made a large amount of progress on the production of the physical elements of the GBPS. The biggest effort here was just getting the printer set up, a task that took probably a full day and a half of work to go from in box to set up and properly calibrated. The printer I went with was the Prusa Mini+, it suits my needs well as its print area is large for its price point, has a reputation for high quality results and reliable operation, and there are companies local to me who can service the printer should I experience any break downs. Here's a little video detailing my current configuration of the printer in my workplace. I've set up a livestream for the printer, mostly to make babysitting it easier, but you're welcome to take a look if it suits you. In the future I'll be upgrading this space to display more info about the progress of production. Moreover here's some of the results already coming off the print bed. I'm very happy with the dust cover which I think is close to what will be its final form. The cartridge case stills needs some work, mostly in the are of the document clips, but I'm sure with a little trail and error I'll get something that's both robust and functional. I'm looking forward to finalizing the designs and switching over to a higher quality printing material as well as a finer nozzle to give the finished results and high quality surface. Graphics Workflow I have finalized my workflow for producing graphics for the Game Boy. The system I've come up with, in the proud tradition of software development, smashes together a bunch of unrelated tools to accomplish some task they were never intended to. This new process will shave somewhere in the ball park of 600 hours off of development time across the whole suite when compared to what I was doing before. In time as promised I'll provide a detailed explanation and a step by step guide so you can follow in my footsteps, but for now here's a short overview. 1. Draw the art in Aseprite and export it as a 4 colour png. 2. Covert the png into a tile-set using TileMap Studio. Export the tile map and the tile set. 3. Covert the tile-set into a GBDK compatible include file using GameBoyPngConverter. 4. Run the program I wrote, GBC2A, to convert GBDK graphics file to an ASM graphics file. 5. Success! Misc. Updates Background Map Switching
This is not really that complicated of a task, but I have a set of methods that generalize this task reliably now. It's not fancy but it's part of the glue that hold a software project together. It's one less technical barrier between today and shipping software to users, and that's worth celebrating. Winding Down Prior Commitments 6 more weeks until I'm a full-time Game Boy Developer!
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