iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Day 305. Today was another light day, as expected. But I still knocked out a few items on my "Bugs/minor tweaks catch-all" Trello card. I've been doing so few coding tasks recently that even fixing some dumb bugs felt great.

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Bownly @bownly.bsky.social · 12/10/2026

Day 304. Modified some more board specific tiles today. Namely the sun and neon chevron tiles for the Neo New Kyoto boards. The sun might be a bit too abstract for a healing tile, but it fits with the theming of the area, in that the teru teru bouzus want to ward off the rain.

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Bownly @bownly.bsky.social · 11/10/2026

Day 303. Finished up the female ninja sprites. Y'know, I read the other day that "kunoichi" originally had no female ninja connotations. The term comes from an intentional misreading of the character for woman. So there's some fun, half-baked trivia. #ScreenshotSaturday #Gameboy

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Bownly @bownly.bsky.social · 10/10/2026

Day 302. This extended weekend from yesterday through to Monday has been/will be really busy for me. So again, all I managed to carve out time for today was more admin-y type stuff. Should have a new clip to post tomorrow though.

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Bownly @bownly.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

Day 301. Spent very little time on the project today. What little time I had was spent working on the (p)itch page that I talked about yesterday. The copy seems good at this point, but I still need to take screenshots and finalize a demo build.

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Bownly @bownly.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

Day 300. To commemorate the big round number milestone, I started working on a custom build and a private itch page for the purposes of presenting the game to publishers. Wondering if I should make a trailer too. That would be a big challenge.

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Bownly @bownly.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

Day 299. Uniquified the tiles for the snowy theme and for the dojo theme today. Didn't take any before and after pics, so just wait until the game comes out if you want to see them. :^)

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Bownly @bownly.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

Day 298. Most boards are currently using the same icon art for stuff like arrows and damage/healing tiles. So today I uniqified the bamboo board theme's tiles. I'll probably leave the start/end/enemy icons untouched across all board themes, but the others are fair game.

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Bownly @bownly.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

Day 297. Redid the battle background for the kyudo dojo to better fit the redesigned overworld art. I'll miss the poles, but the pole-less version is more accurate to real life shooting ranges. (At least, according to the images I found online.)

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Bownly @bownly.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

Day 296. Here are the after and before pics of the dojo maps. From programmer art, to... better programmer art lol. Other than maybe the bushes, I'm happy enough with the look of things after the redesign. #ScreenshotSaturday #Gameboy

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Bownly @bownly.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

Day 295. Spent more time working on the dojo tileset today. Most of it was spent redoing the roof for the 1000th time. Should finish the area tomorrow, and I'll save the next progress pic for then.

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Bownly @bownly.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

Day 294. Worked on the tileset for the dojo's shooting range today. It's coming along, but perspective is tough. Before on top, wip after on bottom.

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Bownly @bownly.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

The plan is to get it on a cart, for sure. For me, having a physical cartridge on a shelf is half the appeal of GB dev. I've been putting it off for a little while now, but I really ought to start pitching it to publishers soon.

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Bownly @bownly.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Day 293. Mostly worked on the target practice logs today, and re-importing the newly redesigned village map into the game, which unfortunately is a partially manual process. But here's full the map. Btw, the logs have cards/a kunai sticking out of them, not mushrooms lol.

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Bownly @bownly.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

Day 292. Made a bridge. Didn't even plan to, but that's what ended up happening while I was redesigning the village lol. Despite the water looking incredibly simple, it wouldn't be the end of the world if I never get around to improving it. Gotta pick my battles.

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Bownly @bownly.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

Can't really do that either, unfortunately. Motion will look blurry on real hardware (not that anyone plays on stock hardware these days). But more than that, I'm drawing these to the bkg layer instead of using sprites. I'm pretty limited in what I can do, haha.

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Bownly @bownly.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

Day 291. Spent some more time on the house art from yesterday. I'm almost happy with it now. This target practice log on the other hand... yeah, it needs some work. Not every first draft is decent.

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Bownly @bownly.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

Yeah, I'd say it's more confirmation than anything. Not sure what you mean by coloring the negatives differently though. The font color? Anything other than black would probably be too hard to read, and I don't know of a way to change the palette of a single background tile anyways.

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Bownly @bownly.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

Day 290. Started working on replacing some of the placeholder art that I ripped from the Oni games. For a spriter of my level, this is a great first draft. But I'm far from satisfied with it. I feel like I'm going to have leveled up significantly by the time I finish this game.

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Bownly @bownly.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

Good point. I'd like to think that the down arrow is visually prominent enough to stand out at a glance. I'm also foolishly relying on the player to know when to expect a negative number, since all popup values are telegraphed in advance by either a card's description, or an enemy's stats.

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Bownly @bownly.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

Day 289. Here are some number popups in action, including an example of how negative numbers are represented (the -2 snow at 0:25). Do they disappear too quickly though? My #1 game design weakness is not making everything super fast. #ScreenshotSaturday #Gameboy #GBDK

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Bownly @bownly.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

Day 288. The battle number popups are basically done. There are a couple of unhandled edge cases, and I've only tested the most common scenarios. If I work on it tomorrow, I'll finish it up then. This wasn't even a planned feature, so I'd like to not spend much more time on it.

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Bownly @bownly.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

Day 287. Stayed working on the card effect popup numbers today. They're more involved than I bargained for. Makes sense in retrospect though. There are 108 cards, ~7 units of measurement, and 5 popup locations to account for. Not to mention the various timings.

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Bownly @bownly.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

Day 286. Been jumping between tasks all week, and today was no exception. Did some planning and initial code work to show numbers for card effects. Like if you get healed for 10 hp, a "♥10" will pop up next to your health total. Dunno yet if I'll end up liking it though.

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Bownly @bownly.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

Day 285. Mostly took a break from thinking about audio to do some more bugfixing and a little bit of sprite work. For some reason, I'd been putting off spriting up the female ninja NPC. Well, I didn't fully finish her today, but I got the first pass done.

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Bownly @bownly.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

Wow, thanks, I tried adding those NR51_REG |= lines and they seem to have made a world of difference. I'll have to test things out more thoroughly, but so far so good. They look like a more targeted solution than setting MONO_MUSIC to 1, but it's good to know that there are multiple approaches here.

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Bownly @bownly.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

hUGEDriver + CBT-FX. Is Toxa's driver a big upgrade from CBT-FX? Think it's worth making the switch? Audio is my weakest area by far, and I've just kinda stuck with whatever worked for me in the moment.

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Bownly @bownly.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

Day 284. Spent my dev time reading the docs today. Trying to understand how audio works, and how to potentially debug the undesired effects from music/sfx overlaps. Some of my sfx will turn on/off a channel on some tracks, or pan a channel to one ear. It's crazy.

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Bownly @bownly.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

Day 283. Finished off the battle screen pause/settings menu, and then rounded out the day with more bug fixes and tweaks. Looking at it some more, I might hide the cursor when paused. Not sure.

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Bownly @bownly.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

Day 282. Didn't end up budgeting enough dev time today to finish the battle screen pause feature. But it's no big deal. Future me is a cool guy. He'll be happy to finish it for me.

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Bownly @bownly.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

Day 281. Squashed some bugs today, but I found more than I squashed. It's all part of the process though. Also, I started work on a mid-battle pause feature. Mostly to have a convenient way to turn animations on and off in Ningami 2. Might show that off tomorrow once I finish it.

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Bownly @bownly.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

Day 280. Tackled some of the items on my ever-growing "Bugs/minor tweaks catch-all" Trello card. That mostly involved stuff like tweaking board layouts, tweaking starter decks, etc.

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Bownly @bownly.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

Dude, thanks a bunch. The shadow scroll vars vbl fn did the trick. And I was already using shadow scroll vars, so the implementation was braindead simple. Also, thanks for emphasizing the call order. That would've tripped me up big time lol.

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Bownly @bownly.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

Day 279. Look at that roof--it's completely solid! Massive thanks to the GB dev legend @bbbbbr.bsky.social for suggesting one small trick that completely eliminated my screen tearing. ...I think I need to go brush up on the GB docs.

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Bownly @bownly.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

Day 278. The screen tearing is slightly better now, as seen in this before and after. It's still pretty bad though. Any tips from the #gbdk wizards in the audience? Disabling my audio vbl fn fixes it completely, but that doesn't seem like a viable solution.

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Bownly @bownly.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

Day 277. Worked on reducing the screen tearing when walking around the overworld. Haven't quite fixed it yet, but I've identified some expensive functions. Granted, identifying them is the easy part. Making them faster is the hard part.

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Bownly @bownly.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

Day 276. Did 2 new animations today, but they're both too minor to bother recording a clip of. Now there's only one card left without an animation. Can you guess which one? Not very useful hint: there's a recently added animation that could almost work for this card.

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Bownly @bownly.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

Day 275. Finished the (smoke)bomb animation. It has unique bomb sprites to match the card being played. Also, I accidentally lied 2 days ago. This isn't the final animation. 3 cards are still unaccounted for. Oops. Back to the pixel art mines I go. #Gameboy #ScreenshotSaturday

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Bownly @bownly.bsky.social · 12/09/2026

Day 274. Work ran late today, so I didn't have time to finish the animation. Tomorrow for sure. I feel like I say this every time, but this one is already my new favorite. The movement is satisfying to watch.

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Bownly @bownly.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

Day 273. Started on the final(!?) battle animation today. It's a 2 part animation, and I've only done first part so far. Too lazy to record a clip of a half-finished animation, so you'll have to wait until tomorrow(?) to see the finished result.

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Bownly @bownly.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

That's the hope. I'm the kind of dude to play with animations turned off, but I know that they add a lot to the experience for some players.

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Bownly @bownly.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

Day 272. The 1000 cranes animation is more or less done now. The cranes have 8 spawn locations and 4 possible colors. And the amount of cranes per attack is proportional to the mana used to play the card. (Note: Mana wasn't subtracted here for demo purposes.)

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Bownly @bownly.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

Day 271. Having a real hard time figuring out the best way to implement this animation. The fact that I'm taking so long might make you think that it's going to be amazing, but it'll only be just okay in the end lol.

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Bownly @bownly.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

Day 270. Okay, so this sponge animation isn't one of the toughest ones that I mentioned yesterday. It's just a cheeky reverse of the water drop animation. But it's also a filler clip for today, as I'm currently busy working on possibly the most challenging animation yet.

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Bownly @bownly.bsky.social · 07/09/2026

Day 269. Another unique animation for a single card. It's simple, but I like it. There are only 9 cards without an animation left now. Though that sounds like a small number, I've been saving the toughest ones for last.

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Bownly @bownly.bsky.social · 06/09/2026

Day 268. A fun (to me) piece of trivia for this stapler animation is that I had to temporarily switch into 8x8 sprite mode to stay within the 10 sprites per line restriction. (The game normally uses 8x16 mode.) #ScreenshotSaturday #gbdk #Gameboy

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Bownly @bownly.bsky.social · 05/09/2026

Day 267. Very short dev day today. Worked on the final [spoiler] sprite work. It's ~50% done. Off the top of my head, this piece is the final thing that I can't post for spoiler reasons. Everything else is just polish and enhancements to pre-existing stuff.

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Bownly @bownly.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

Day 266. Finished the flame animation, but also, here's the oil animation mentioned earlier this week. With the addition of this new flame anim, I think I need to replace or update the old burning anim now. It just doesn't look as good anymore lol.

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Bownly @bownly.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

Day 265. I was working on yet another battle animation today, but it needs some more time in the oven. Should be able to wrap it up tomorrow.

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