In April of 2021, while in the midst of a protracted YouTube binge, I stumbled upon a video about some IDE that allowed you to create and export GB and GBC ROMs. The idea of creating my own game that could be put on a cart and played on a Game Boy filled me with such excitement that I simply had to drop everything, jump in and give it a shot. Two months later, after some experimentation and some time bashing my head against my keyboard, I released Knit Wit, my first GB Studio game.

It was a small game, simple in premise but it proved to me that GBS could provide a serious way to improve my artistic abilities and allow me to express myself creatively. I joined the GBS discord and shared Knit Wit with the community, proud of my first outing as an indie GB dev.

Some time in the next week, a user by the name of Jeltron got in touch and congratulated me on my game. Naturally I appreciated the thought and decided to check out what he had achieved with GBS himself. On his itch page, I found Opossum Country, a short horror game with an eerie and chilling aesthetic. The artwork on display was masterful in my eyes, and so I returned the compliment to Jeltron and his own game. 

We chatted about game dev and the possibilities that GBS could offer, about ideas for future projects and what we were working on at that moment. Jeltron then decided to share a work in progress for me to play. He gave me a ROM titled the_machine_6-14-21.gb and asked for my thoughts. As soon as I started playing the now fully realized and released The Machine, my jaw dropped to the floor. Suffice to say, I was extremely inspired by what Jeltron had achieved. I came running back to discord to gush over his work in progress, realizing that not only did we share a love for indie game development and Game Boy dev in particular, we also shared a deep love of science fiction, and had a penchant for discussing the larger “problems” of the world as we saw them. We had much more in common than one could really expect when finding a stranger on the internet and so, our friendship had firmly begun to form.

Now comes the moment that would really solidify our friendship. There is nothing quite like putting two acquaintances in the Pressure Cooker that is a three month game jam! GB Compo 21 had been announced, and I had been fooling around with an idea about a Mech that could dig underground and solve puzzles after playing a lot of Into the breach on steam and a little bit of Shigeru Miyamoto's own Mole Mania for the Game Boy. It seemed like what would be the biggest Game Boy jam on itch.io to date had come right at the perfect moment, and so I came to Ben with the idea and suggested we collaborate for the next three months. Ben approved of the idea, I would take the reins of game and level design, Ben would take care of the artwork and story and help out with game design himself and we would both share the responsibilities of coding (this part gets complicated but more on that in a later chapter). 

We started work with starry eyes and a million dreams, painfully unaware of just how much of a colossal undertaking this project actually was. We had begun work on Unearthed, a project that would push us to our limits as game designers and quite frankly as human beings too, a project that would last far longer than the three short months of GB Compo 21. This was just the beginning!

Two years later, Unearthed is now nearing completion! In the coming months, we will be retroactively taking you through the development of Unearthed in the hopes that you can learn from our wins and our near misses as we developed this sci fi passion project of ours (and even some of the…let's say…frustrations that go along with game development!)

We're currently looking for people to playtest Unearthed as we finalize its many facets. If you would like to download a beta build of Unearthed and help us smooth out the kinks, please feel free to join Ben's discord here!

Happy gaming! 

Tom (Gumpy Function)