Abandoned Projects – Seaborne Gameboy Game (2025)

June 29, 2026

“Make a Game”

The thought of making a game has been on my bucket list for as long as I can remember, and it bothered me to no end that every single game builder, even the “simple” ones, were not accessible to those without programming knowledge. To my surprise, I found GB Studio one day which actually solved most of the issues I had with other game builders that I had tried up until that point. It was simple, had lots of helpful resources and had a good community backing. The thing that sealed the deal for me is that I could export my game and actually play it on a Gameboy if I wanted to.

So I gave it a go, and to my surprise I actually got the hang of it pretty quickly. I’ve had the story of Seaborne written down in a .txt file since 2022, and figured I’d use that as the basis for my game.

Playing Around

I began making some super basic assets and threw a scene together using Aseprite and Tiled (Both incredible programs!)

I remember the first hurdle I ran into was the sound design. I wanted to make  everything myself (This will come up later). I recorded some basic sound effects like cow moos, doors opening etc but they either wouldn’t play or if they did, they’d be a static mess. I eventually figured out that the files needed to be an exact format with an exact bitrate. Basically, it had to be perfect or the Gameboy wouldn’t process it. Makes sense, but setting it up perfectly on Audacity was a nightmare.

I began making more scenes and connected them together.

As you can hear I got my “Mooooo” 🐮 much clearer, which is nice.

Realising I Can’t Do Everything

I also tried to make some music but I struggled a lot. I think if there were some GB music tools out there that were simple and worked with GB Studio, I’d at least make something basic but I just couldn’t. This was the first realisation that I wouldn’t be able to make my entire game myself, sadly. I would have to purchase music and use that.

Thankfully, I found Beatscribe’s incredible music talent, and purchased the following pack:

My next issue was scale, my “rooms” were far too large and empty, so I came up with a fancy border and made the area around the room dark. I then began making placeholders everywhere based on how I envisioned the story of Seaborne playing out.

I just realised the bed is pointing in the wrong direction LOL.

Experimenting

I started playing around with sprites and noticed that I could make the environment move if I added carefully placed “actors” that looked like background tiles.

I used some assets from some pixel art I made a few years prior, you’ll see these designs come up again with the school:

Breathing Life

It was at this point that I decided to add a bit of character to some of the areas to encourage me a bit more. I knew if I did at least one area right it’d make me want to do more, so I started focusing on the “CHILL” (Coffee) house. I also began making an intro screen.

Final version of the intro, I really like how it turned out.

Details and Changing Direction

I realised after making the intro that if I was going to make a “city” like map with streets everywhere, it’d probably be HUGE. So, I scrapped the idea and went with something more “farm towny”

I liked this idea a lot more, and it made me think about splitting the island into two. But, before I did that, I added some animations to the sea and cliffside, which I think is still pretty neat.

I then went off to do the lighthouse, which is something I add to most of my stuff from an old recurring dream I used to have.

It was then time to make the harbour, I think it came out pretty good.

Menus

Then, I began working on the menus a bit which were surprisingly easy. I added health and coins.

BATTLE

This is where things started getting hard, I wanted to make a battle system. So, I began making the basic layout. Monster in the middle, health at the top, some sort of magic meter on the left. For a placeholder, it worked and achieved exactly what I wanted but it was of course very bare bones.

It turned out that if I wanted to make a “big” sprite, I’d have to make it up of smaller sprites. This turned making monsters into quite the chore. To avoid any confusion, I numbered them all and eventually spawned in my placeholder ghost. Marowak’s mother vibes of course.

Taking a Breather

Making the battle system was exhausting, and I started feeling like I was losing the love at this point. But, I persisted and worked on something else in the meantime while I recharged. I began changing the colour palettes of my world quite a bit. It really started turning into what I envisioned (Pink and Blue of course).

Then, I took on a cutscene. THIS TOOK FOREVER, but it’s the thing I’m most proud of. It’s meant to set the stage for the rest of the game. It still needs a lot of work and better pacing/writing, but it works.

Enough avoiding, I knew I needed to tackle the battle system.

Revisiting the Battle Sequence

I added some music and changed the layout a bit. I also spent A SHIT TON of time making the health bars go down when the enemy was hit, it’s a lot more difficult than it looks!

Added a very rough quick sketch to represent a character

And finally, it turned into this:

The Overworld

Here’s a timelapse of the progress of the overworld, I actually really love where this was going. If I were to ever revisit the project, I’d just finish the map layout.

Want a full resolution version of this? Click here.

This is the final map before I gave up in full resolution. It features a forest, farm, small town, a more central “city” with an unfinished clock, a graveyard, a harbour, beach with lighthouse and a huge wall which the story would be cantered around.

Final map, click to enlarge.

I am insanely proud of myself for pushing through and finishing that battle system. It took everything out of me, and unfortunately in the end, killed the project because I knew that would be the tip of the iceberg (I estimate this would’ve taken me 4-5 years at least).

I learnt a lot about working with sprites, and definitely improved my pixel art game in the process. When things got tough, I really appreciated what a real game dev must go through, especially on something much harder to use than GB Studio.

It was a blast working on this project and I’m really glad I did it, but some things weren’t meant to be. I’d still love to make Seaborne into a full on story, I actually began it late last year but with the birth of my son, I shelved it temporarily until he’s older.

Looking back at the files, I spent around 1-2 months on this in total. What’s crazy is that it felt like triple that. Hyper fixation or what!

“Thanks for reading!”