Ultimate Homebrew

Getting Started

What is it?

Ultimate Homebrew enables you to quickly and easily get started making games for your favorite retro gaming consoles.

Prereqs

• Docker or Podman, or whatever container system you are comfortable with. I personally use Podman.
• A chromium based web browser. Firefox works fine for the editor, but not all of the plugins.

Steps

1. Create a folder for your project on your host filesystem. I use linux and have a src folder in my home folder where I store all my projects, so for me this would look something like this.

mkdir -p /home/longjoel/src/my_gameboy_game

2. Spin up a new docker container with an ultimate homebrew image.

docker run -d \
    -v /home/longjoel/src/my_gameboy_game:/app/src \
    -p 9000:8080 \
    --name MyGameboyGame \
    docker.io/longjoelhome/ultimate-homebrew-gbdk:latest

This will take a few minutes as it pulls down the layers from docker hub, but once you have it installed, it's installed.

3. Start coding

Navigate to http://localhost:9000 and you should be greeted with this screen.

This is a server hosted instance of vs code. There are a number of extensions that are pre-installed based on which docker image you have pulled. For this one we are using ultimate-homebrew-gbdk so out of the box, here are the things that are set up for you.

• the gbdk compiler and environment variables.
• tasks to get you started including generate code from a template, make, and clean.
• a gameboy emulator to preview your game without leaving the browser.
• a tile editor for handling .gbtd (game boy tile design) files. Simply create an empty .gbtd file and start adding tiles.

4. Run the generate template task. One of the first things I recommend doing is dragging the clipboard looking icon to underneath the explorer tab so you can see all your tasks.

5. Run the Make task to build your new project.

6. In the obj folder there should be a new .gb file, go ahead and click on it to preview the rom.

7. Try out the tile editor. Create a new sprites.gbtd file in your src folder.

8. All your files are also available on your host filesystem in case you have other local tools you want to use as well.

Please refer to https://github.com/gbdk-2020/gbdk-2020 for more information on how to use the gbdk tools.