Our great sponsors
-
-
gb-studio
A quick and easy to use drag and drop retro game creator for your favourite handheld video game system
-
WorkOS
The modern identity platform for B2B SaaS. The APIs are flexible and easy-to-use, supporting authentication, user identity, and complex enterprise features like SSO and SCIM provisioning.
-
-
Phaser
Discontinued Phaser is a fun, free and fast 2D game framework for making HTML5 games for desktop and mobile web browsers, supporting Canvas and WebGL rendering. [Moved to: https://github.com/phaserjs/phaser] (by photonstorm)
As I went through the code samples of the Pokémon clone provided in the article, with only a minimal understanding of sprite maps, I was surprised to see that this clone was created entirely in JavaScript and with under 200 lines of code. I learned that JSON plays a significant role in how these games work. I also realized that Aseprite alone is not enough and that another piece of the puzzle, a map editor called "Tiled," was necessary to build these JSON files.
I recently played with an alternative to Phaser called GBStudio, which boasts "A quick and easy-to-use drag-and-drop retro game creator for your favorite handheld video game system." It is a full-featured editor or IDE for developing GameBoy games, which is very different from using Phaser. The major benefit of using GBStudio over Phaser is that GBStudio can export an actual ROM file that can be used with GameBoy emulators and even flashed onto a cartridge to play directly on a GameBoy, which is really cool. GBStudio also allows you to export the game for the web using a WASM emulator. This means you have multiple avenues for distribution on itch.io, even selling boxed, stickered, and flashed cartridges. One possible advantage of using Phaser is if you wanted to create something web based or multiplayer, something like "Among Us", then I wouldn't go with GBStudio.
TLDR; As a web developer I look into what it takes to make a GBA style Pokémon game from the tools used to make Sprites (Aseprite, Tiled) to the tools available for coding the game (Phaser, GBStudio) as well as avenues for distribution (ROMs, HTML, itch.io).
When I am interested in something that is programming related but not specifically in languages or frameworks that I am familiar with, I often append "JavaScript" to my search. This time was no different, I quickly found Phaser, a JavaScript framework that suited my needs. I came across an article called "Modular Game Worlds in Phaser 3 (Tilemaps #1) — Static Maps", which was exactly what I was looking for.