Update 14: New website and learning to work around the limitations

First and foremost,  I updated the official Dancing Mad Studios website. So, when you get the chance, be sure to check it out.

Second, this entire experience has been quite interesting. By experience, I mean developing a Game Boy Color game using GB Studio. I am a software developer by profession and while the SDK does most of the heavy lifting, I have had to get my hands dirty on more than one occasion to put together custom plugins and making modifications to the game engine. However, the most interesting part of this entire effort is having to get creative and implement my desired functionality and graphics within the Game Boy Color's hardware limitations. But not just that, there are also a couple of quirks with GB Studio that I needed to figure out as well.

For instance, there is an issue with pinning an actor to a vertically scrolling screen set to Platformer mode. That is, if it is not at the top, it just doesn't show. I experienced such an issue recently. The player was starting the scene at the bottom left. The scene was a tower, so he had to work his way up. The pinned actor though, was the life bar. For whatever reason and even though I pinned it to the bottom portion of the screen, it was not rendering properly or even showing up at all.

UNTIL I stumbled upon a reddit post where someone was complaining about something similar. One of the supplied comments offered a strange workaround but guess what, it worked! All I had to do was pin the actor at the top of the scene and start my player at the top of the scene and during the scene initialization, immediately relocate both to the appropriate positions. You don't notice anything weird during gameplay which is great!

I made sure to comment that workaround in my code because I know that I will be doing more similar scenes in future levels. In the end though, this has been quite fun and a great learning experience.