Bustfree!

A brick-busting arcade game for the Nintendo Game Boy

Bustfree! is a simple brick-busting game in the style of Atari's Breakout or Taito's Arkanoid, developed for the Nintendo Game Boy using freely available, unofficial tools.

(Bustfree! is not in any way affliated with or endorsed by Nintendo, Atari, Taito.)

Development is currently in a very early state; the interest here is primarily educational. You can watch development happen live on Twitch, or catch up with old streams on Youtube. The current streaming schedule is Monday thru Friday at 2PM Pacific.

The code for Bustfree! is provided under the MIT License and is freely available, as-is, for use in your own games. See LICENSE for the full details.

Compatibility

Bustfree! is primarily tested on BGB, a powerful Game Boy emulator and debugger. I also intermittently test on a Nintendo Super Game Boy (version 1) using an Everdrive GB running through an Analogue Super Nt. In theory there's no reason why it shouldn't work on any other model of Game Boy or Game Boy Advance (except for the Game Boy Micro, which doesn't support Game Boy or Game Boy Color games). If you encounter any compatibility issues with your hardware, please file a bug.

Release History

• Alpha 5 - March 9, 2021
• Alpha 4 - March 2, 2021
• Alpha 3 - February 22, 2021
• Alpha 2 - February 15, 2021
• Alpha 1 - February 8, 2021

Building Bustfree!

Right now I'm developing Bustfree! on Windows; the included "makefile", make.bat, is just a batch file. If you're on Linux or macOS you'll probably want to port it to make or sh (which should be easy enough, contributions appreciated ☺️)

Bustfree! is written using RGBDS, the Rednex Game Boy Development System, version 0.4.2. For make.bat to work you'll need it in your path; on Windows, I just put the executables right in the repo root.

Credits, Thanks, Other Useful Links

For more information about homebrew Game Boy development, check out gbdev.io.

The Pan Docs are my primary technical reference for the Game Boy hardware. Much thanks to all those who have written, contributed to, and hosted them.

As the primary tools I use, I'd like to extend my thanks to beware, developer of BGB and to the developers of RGBDS (history, current contributors on github).

Bust Free! uses the GBSoundSystem audio driver. The Tiled map editor is used to build levels. Some utility scripts are written in the Python programming language.

Much thanks to Nintendo for making the Game Boy, and to Gunpei Yokoi in particular for dreaming of it.