Workshop: Make a Game Boy Game

I recently created and ran a hands‑on workshop on making Game Boy games at the University of Tokyo, offered as an extra session alongside the Interspace Lecture Series. As always, all materials were provided bilingually in English and Japanese.

My goal was simple: every student should leave the room with a game they built themselves complete with a goal, a win state, and a lose state. Fitting everything into a two‑hour session was a challenge, so I focused on the essentials and skipped a few deeper concepts (like tile‑switching). I designed a small base game that students could build from scratch (see the image below), then offered a menu of optional customisations so they could follow their own interests: adding levels, audio, characters, and more.

Workshop Contents

• Why make a Game Boy game today

• Legal considerations

• Introduction to GB Studio

• The three‑layer system (Background, Window, Objects)

• Constraints of each layer

• Building a simple game

• Customising your game

• Compiling to cartridges

• Playing on real hardware

The workshop was a great success, with all attendees able to create a game! It was really fun, even though the workshop started with some of the students admitting they had never used a Game Boy / GBC before and almost all were born many years after the GBC was released!