Kip’s! Grimoire

Kip’s! Grimoire is a short Game Boy game demo I wrote over the past month to present at the Florida Polytechnic Fall 2018 Game Expo . The game features a witch named Kip who must collect magical grimoires to obtain new abilities and explore.

Play the game demo in browser on our GameJolt page

How to Play

• Use the GameJolt built in Game Boy emulator, download a desktop emulator (BGB seems to work best), or download the ROM and play on a flash cartridge!
• Move right and left with the D-Pad, use B to attack, and A to jump
• The first grimoire unlocks a fireball attack! Hold B to charge your staff and release a bolt of fire!
• The second grimoire unlocks the double jump! Mobility up!
• The third grimoire unlocks a magical flask to throw at enemies! Press Up and B together to toss a flask into the air!
• The fourth grimoire gives Kip her broomstick back! Fly in any direction and attack with A and B!

Our quaint little booth

Developing this demo was a really fantastic exploration into other mediums for video game design beyond PCs.  I didn’t quite finish everything I initially intended, and the development of the game was often fraught with all sorts of hardware misunderstandings on my part, but I really enjoyed the whole experience on the whole this past month going through and applying my skills.

It should be pretty clear, but if not, the game is heavily inspired by both Zelda and Castlevania.  Originally, my goal was to design a sort of Metroidvania for the Game Boy, but time constraints, difficulties linking levels together, and the overall limited memory constraints of the Game Boy kind of pushed that out of what I could finish in time.  That being said, Grimoire is a separate title we are beginning to develop that will be a heavily Castlevania inspired Metroidvania–but that’s a topic for another time.

Tools

• ZGB
• GBDK
• BGB
• GBMB & GBTD
• GBTDG

Bugs
This is a short demo, that in its current state, has a couple small bugs that will hopefully be fixed in a future release.

• Sometimes the haystack does not spawn above the well in the Stinky Swamp i.e. going into the well without the first grimoire will prevent you from progressing in the next level!
• In the Creepy Castle, the third grimoire can be obtained multiple times. If you have trouble with the mini-boss, feel free to exploit this, however, the game was not designed around having the flight mechanic for that enemy!

Major thanks to Zal0 for producing the ZGB engine and the community of people who have worked on and extended GBDK over the years!  Another huge thanks to everyone who demoed my game at the 2018 Game Expo!

-Nathan