Mapping Aaron’s journey from digital artist to Game Boy developer

Many gamers who enjoyed the family of Game Boy portable consoles during its heyday harbor nostalgia for the tactile and emotional experience of buying and playing physical games.

Maybe it was the barrage of wacky commercials, magazine ads, and preview articles in anticipation of a game’s release that made it so exciting to finally hold it in your hands. Maybe it was leafing through the instruction manual on the ride home from the neighborhood games store, eagerly absorbing screenshots and control schemes before reuniting with your Game Boy. Or perhaps, it was the sensory rush of playing the game for the first time — slamming the cart into your console, flicking the power switch and mashing the A button through the boot sequence despite knowing it won’t go any faster.

These are the cherished experiences Aaron Gadol (CRTOGRPHR) hopes to emulate with his first commercial release on the Game Boy Color — Zephyr’s Pass. We sat down with Gadol to learn more about his inspirations for the game, how he used his marketing know-how to invoke the feeling of gaming days gone by, and what’s next for him now that his first game is available.

GBSC: Let’s start with your background. When did you get involved in making games?

Aaron Gadol: I had a friend from high school, and in senior year, we created a film called Journey Bound, which got to the All-American High School Film Festival and won. So, it was shown in New York and AMC Theatres there, which was really cool. From there, he and I wanted to work on something more aligned with both our skill sets. So, I was like, “I’m really into games. I have a lot of ideas for them. We should try this.”

So, for a couple of years after high school, we tried experimenting with a couple of projects and demos. It’s funny. We created an early demo in Unity for what will now be Arkeo — my new project. From creating these initial demos, I just fell in love with game development, but I didn’t have the skillset to do it at a more extensive scale. I had my normal job by that point, and it was a process to learn these complex game engines.

In 2021 — after I let a lot of those dreams die in a lot of ways just because I got so busy with other things — I found the Analog Pocket, saw GB Studio on their page, and I was like, oh, this is an engine where you can build Game Boy games that can be played on actual hardware. It kind of blew my mind. I started researching it, and soon after, I created a couple of demos just to familiarize myself with the software. Then GB Studio 3 came out with color, and I was like: OK, this seems like the best time to start doing a game that’s a bit more ambitious. I thought this was an interesting lane because many people are interested in Game Boys, but there wasn’t a big game coming out soon at that time, so I decided to try i

I pitched the idea to the company I work for: a product development company that does publishing, and I was like: “What if we tried this market that seems to be growing and developed a game here?” They liked the idea. It was the middle of COVID-19 when all of our projects were on hold with manufacturers. They were trying to find things for me to do at the time, and this kind of slotted right in. So, it allowed me to develop Zephyr’s Pass closer to full-time.

GBSC: It seems like you have some experience with what I’d consider to be more complex game engines, such as Unity. What drew you to specifically develop for a retro handheld like the Game Boy Color?

Gadol: Zephyr’s Pass actually started as a game in Unity. The Unity build was done in a pixel filter on top of 3D assets. That’s what I was trying to do originally. I had that idea since 2019, but the big thing that drew me to Game Boy development specifically was the physical aspect.

Most of my skill set, in terms of schooling and experience, comes from design and graphic design, specifically. So, I always knew I wanted to make the game stand out from a design perspective. I wanted to push the visuals in terms of how I’m marketing this in a way that I hadn’t seen anyone take the time to do, and I’m going to do it on a more professional level.

I always called myself a middle-of-the-road game developer but a very good graphic designer and marketer. So I was like: “I’m just going to make a game that looks good and is functional, mostly, and then really market it so that it feels like an official Nintendo thing.” Being able to release it physically was the cherry on top of making this feel like a real game that you could have mistaken for something that came out in the late ‘90s.

GBSC: I don’t know if I would mistake it for a 90s game. I don’t think anything looked quite this good back then!

Gadol: No, but I mean, you’ve seen all the trailers and all the ads — bringing back those same receptors in your brain of what that felt like at the time. And that’s where I’ve seen the most engagement with my work. I was posting on the Game Boy subreddit that has around 100,000 people in it, and most of those people don’t even know this homebrew scene is happening.

When I posted my posters that went viral in our space, I got thousands of comments on them. People were like, “I can’t believe this is happening. I can’t believe these games are still getting made.” It was great, and I always found it as a way to get more people to find out about this community we’re in.

GBSC: Yeah, it’s incredibly cool. It feels like a renaissance of Game Boy development right now, with GB Studio 3 and 4 dwarfing previous versions in terms of features.

Gadol: Whenever you’re starting a game in GB Studio, you’ll get most of the way through some development, and then the next version will come out, and you’re looking at all these new features thinking — do I risk trying to port this thing to the new version and risk breaking everything? That happened multiple times through Zephyr’s Pass. The engine is getting so much better, and all these great features are coming. I had to work within 3.1 versus 3.4, which added all these extra features I wanted to use.

Again, with everything I’m doing, and trying to grow my audience the way I am, it’s really to get more eyes on this platform so that other developers can do this full-time. And I want that to happen. I think we can get to the point where these [games] are popular enough to bring people back to having small teams on these games instead of just one guy in his free time. The quality would just exponentially increase if we had actual development that was more intentional on a larger scale.

GBSC: You’ve had some demos here and there in various engines, but this is your first commercial game. What have you learned from developing a game for audiences to purchase?

Gadol: I think everyone says this, but it wasn’t really in my mind about how the scope would actually come into fruition with Zephyr’s Pass. Because for me, when you first start with Game Boy development, you’re like: “Oh, it’s a Game Boy game. It doesn’t need to be anything impressive. It can be really simple. But then, when you want to make it stand out, you wonder, “How can I make this more special? How can I push it further?” The scale of the project increased a lot faster than I was expecting.

So, a project that I originally thought would take eight months to a year of development went up to two years, then two and a half years, and then, counting QA, it’s pushing three years now. So, the scale of time investment to make a project such as this became much larger than I expected.

Also, there were challenges in managing relationships with the publisher, manufacturing, and getting everything out there. The game was done in QA at the beginning of this year. It changed multiple times through QA, and we had a lot of extensive bugs found but that process wrapped up earlier on.  And some fixes I made during QA ended up hurting the game more than helping, I later found out. So, that was something I wasn’t anticipating.

When you’re making a project like this and the scale is so big, I’ve learned that, for my next title, having effective bug testing features — such as quick menus for jumping around different places in the game — is something I’m taking into account at the beginning of development. So when I get to that final point, I can have the QA team able to jump around the game and effectively test it in a way that I never anticipated with Zephyr’s Pass.

GBSC: That is a smart lesson learned.

Gadol: And I’ve had to learn lessons partially from within the homebrew space for the Game Boy and from actual development studios.

These games are now getting treated closer to real games instead of homebrew. With ModRetro coming out and sponsoring these games, that’s a whole other side of it, which is cool, but these games are expected to be of higher quality even from when I started. I think Zephyr’s Pass popped off and became exciting because no one had seen graphics like this at the time. Now you look at games such as The Fallen Crown, and I’m like these graphics are so good — the quality from 2021 when I started to now has just been exponential in terms of the art and the game scale.

We need to be treating these games like actual games now.

GBSC: Your game is undeniably gorgeous. How did you push the limits of the Game Boy for your graphical style?

Gadol: In the early days, it was me learning pixel art. I’m a trained artist, and you can see that in a lot of my work. Digital art is something I’m used to, but pixel art was something I learned throughout Zephyr’s Pass.

I did an original pitch trailer for my company and for Incub8 to pick up Zephyr’s Pass. You look at that trailer compared to what the game looks like now — it’s night and day. The game’s art scaled throughout development, and I’ve gone back and redone art from the beginning multiple times. It was a gradual thing, but games like Star Ocean on the Game Boy Color or Lufia were huge inspirations for the art; you can see that for sure.

I tried to push the Game Boy art to look closer to a Super Nintendo game or a Game Boy Advance game rather than a Game Boy game. So I was trying to use techniques that they used in shading and adding complexity and using the color in a way that was different than I think most people used color on the Game Boy at the time.

I’m using it to fuzz detail — so I’m adding in a lot of detail into the pixel art, but I’m using the color to blend those colors together more so it has a perceived level of detail that’s higher, but it’s not overloading with a lot of contrast. So, the pixel art is high contrast, but when you add the color, it softens it, making it feel more perceptively detailed than it actually is. That was a technique I used a lot.

GBSC Mag: What was the one challenge, such as tile limitations, that stands out to you when trying to reach the fidelity of art you wanted to develop using GB Studio?

Aaron: I do see a lot of people talking about the tile limitations. And, to be honest, I can’t remember a specific map in the game where I actually ran into those limitations. Most of the time, I had a lot of variety in the color itself and not in the pixel art. I’m reusing a lot of tiles throughout the game, so the color was something I was pushing a lot.

So, I actually ran into the palette limitations most of the time. Most scenes are relatively light on individual tiles. It’s a lot of — in model making, they call it like kitbashing — using tiles in unique places and adding variety through the pairing of tiles rather than variety.

Even the overworld map is pretty sparse in terms of individual tile work, but you’re just introducing color in specific spots, pairing them together which makes it feel more interesting.

GBSC: What was your favorite biome or town to create?

Gadol: Mura felt really, really special. And I think a lot of people connected with that festival at the end of it. The music track that plays in that village really touched me. I love that track. Yeah. That was definitely a really fun area to do. But in terms of being proud of the art and the encompassing dungeon, Aka, near the end of the game, just really came together. I love that area and how it used an enemy you saw throughout the game as NPCs.

It was a fun twist that no one was expecting. Everyone’s going in there thinking: “Oh, I got to kill all these guys,” and it’s like, no, they have their own language and some humor mixed in. And that dungeon, being as expansive as it is, was fun to create. I think it came together really well.

GBSC Mag: you can hit eight color palettes real quickly when you have one palette for water, one for grass, and then a combination palette for the shoreline — and then it just builds up like that.

Aaron: That was the biggest hurdle and also introducing tile swapping later on in development. I used a lot of palette swapping for certain effects. In Mura, the airship level where you’re flying above the desert, I’m using palette swapping for that. But later on in development, I added tile swapping instead of palette swapping, and that was definitely a challenge to learn, because there were still weird glitches in GB Studio for tile swapping. But that added a lot to the movement of water, and the sand on the overworld brushes past the wind using tile swapping.

So that was definitely my biggest visual hurdle in the game, I would say.

GBSC Mag: What simple technique could quickly elevate a beginner’s pixel art?

Aaron: I’m using techniques that seem very complex, but if you break them down, there’s a lot of small techniques I’m pairing together with each asset to make it feel better.

For example, instead of using all four colors in a tile to add in a bunch of contrast, I used those colors to blend between each other. If you were to make a gradient, instead of having an equal dispersion of the colors, you’d use your darkest color and then your next darkest color to blend between the next lighter color. It’s little things like that.

There’s not one trick to give everyone. For my game, it was all about how to make it feel more like a 16-bit method of really smooth anti-aliased outlines and smoothing things in a way that makes them feel more like organic shapes rather than just pixelated shapes.

GBSC Mag: Give me your favorite and least favorite aspect of GB Studio.

Aaron: My favorite aspect is the speed at which you can test new mechanics and get a game running. If you’ve ever even opened Unity or Unreal, the barrier to entry is so high in terms of just getting a player character running around with your art and getting a visual for what you want the game to eventually look like.

With GB Studio, you can get a background, characters, movement and some basic mechanics in a weekend or even less, like in a day. GB Studio is the only engine I’ve ever seen where you can at least get that quickly. Adding complexity and turning it into a full game is a whole different story, but that’s something that no other engine has, in my opinion. That’s why I recommend it to everyone.

A lot of people are like: “Oh, I had a fun idea for a game.” They might not even want to make a full game. They just want to make a demo or something to show their friends and stuff. You can easily do that in GB Studio in a weekend. So, that’s definitely my favorite part of GB Studio.

Least favorite would be the — man, it’s so difficult because it’s all nitpicky stuff. When you’re using it every day, you’re just so used to it. It’s like: “Oh, why can’t I take this block of items, copy it and paste it in a new slot in the tree of commands?” You have to create Event Groups for everything so you can copy large pieces of scripts. They’ve gotten so much better now, but I still will sometimes wake up and start developing for three hours, and then there’s a crash. The crashing is sometimes an issue, and little things like that, but I still love the engine.

From my composer though, this is his first time doing Game Boy composing. He was using the composer in GB Studio for Zephyr’s Pass. The music turned out great, but he found that the music editor was sometimes not doing exactly what he wanted. Maybe that, but honestly, I love the software. It’s mostly great.

Doing tile swapping, which I know was improved upon recently, was really difficult.

GBSC Mag: Yeah. I’ve done tile swapping both ways. Then it used to be pretty difficult when you had to use a GBVM event, but now it’s a dedicated event.

Aaron: Even in my latest game, which I started on the earliest version of GB Studio 4, when they added in the overlapping background tiles feature, which I was like: “That’s what I need for my next game.”

Right after that, with a more recent update, they added in the new tile-swapping feature set, that would be super nice to use now, but I already did all the tile-swapping, because I figured it out. Now with tile swapping, I can do it easily, and so I’m like: do I have to go back in and like change all of that? I don’t know. So we’ll figure that out, but that is something that I’m glad they fixed and is running better now. But in an engine like this, there’s always going to be weird glitches that aren’t intended. Oh, one thing: sometimes the slowdown is so hard to figure out sometimes, you know?

In Zephyr’s Pass, there are plenty of areas where slowdown is going to happen. I’d seen it on other games on the Game Boy, so I just left it, but that was difficult. I only had like two enemies on screen, but their On Update scripts were in-depth with their AI. It would just slow down, and I didn’t know exactly what to nip and tuck to get it there. So the slowdown is something I’m always dealing with in GB Studio that I have to constantly keep in the back of my mind.

GBSC Mag: You mentioned ModRetro’s upcoming^[g] Chromatic, and there’s so many other ways to play Game Boy Games these days from original hardware to modded IPS Game Boys to retro emulation handhelds, field programmable gate array (FPGA) devices such as the Analogue Pocket, your PC, home consoles, etc. What’s the ultimate way to experience Zephyr’s Pass?

Aaron: Okay, this is interesting. I have my modded Game Boy Color with the best screen before they did the OLED. The game looks great on these displays, even without any color reproduction stuff. I think Zephyr’s Pass looks great. It’s really colorful, but I tuned the palettes as much as possible to look good on modern displays.

And then I always tested on the original. So, I do have an original screen that I tested on. That looks great. But throughout development, I would play the game most of the time on my CRT, just because it was really fun to do, and it gave me that Super Nintendo vibe I went for with the art. So that’s my ultimate way to play Zephyr’s Pass, but for most people, I would say some sort of original hardware, whether modded or not. I think, eventually, the Chromatic would be the best way.

The Analogue Pocket — I haven’t gotten one yet because, geez, they’re expensive — but that would probably be a great way too. I’ve had plenty of people send me screenshots of it, looks great on there.

GBSC Mag: That’s how I played it. And it looked great using both the regular and Game Boy reproduction display modes. It looks good.

Aaron: It’s good to cross-check. I played through the game recently on the original Game Boy Color and liked it a lot. They’re both great ways — monitor displays or original.

GBSC: Tell me about the narrative you created around Zephyr’s Pass with your marketing experience.

Gadol: Yeah. So, I’m super happy with how the game turned out, and I think that when people play it, it feels like a very fun and exciting experience because I tried to spend a lot of time on variety in the game and making it a fast-paced, fun experience.

But, I wasn’t focused from the beginning on adding a lot of depth to Zephyr’s Pass in terms of a gameplay mechanic sphere. I wanted an experience that anyone could play and enjoy even if they hadn’t touched a Game Boy since they were playing it when it first came out. I also wanted it to be a game that could immerse them in the feeling of purchasing a game at the time — like, back then.

I grew up with comic books from the late 80s. My uncle gave me a massive cargo ammo box of hundreds of comic books from around 1989 when the NES came out. All of the ads in there for those retro consoles changed my perspective on how I viewed games as a whole, and it grew my love of retro games in a way that was unique to me but I knew a lot of people still had nostalgia for. So, I have this fascination with immersing people in the experience around a game by giving them ads and giving them … like in the trailer — it’s about using the visual elements of that time that people remember and reintroducing those now.

I wanted to present all the ads in a way that felt like you had ripped them out of a comic book or a magazine — that was my whole thing. When people get the game box and look through the manual, I spent so much time making that art really, really good and having that experience fully seamless. When I was working with Incube8 on the packaging for Zephyr’s Pass and the manual, I was like: “Oh, is it okay if I go into the template for the box and make changes to the texture of the manual and add all these effects and stuff?” And they said: “Well, no one we worked with has wanted to do that before, but you’re a designer, I guess, so you can do it.” They let me have complete control over the entire experience, from the sticker sheet and manual to the ads and how we’re presenting everything to the T-shirts that we did.

It just gave the game a level of authenticity and professionalism I wanted to bring to the platform. It’s the attention to detail in all aspects, not just in the game, but in everything around it, that I think makes Zephyr’s Pass really special. It makes it an experience that’s not just a game, but it feels like you’re part of something when you get the box and you get the manual.

GBSC: I’m really excited to see the manual. The death of the video game manual instead of the in-game tutorial level is one of the saddest things. I vividly remember buying Mario Kart Super Circuit for the Game Boy Advance, opening it on the car ride home and flicking through the manual, looking at the screenshots and amping myself up for when I got home and could start playing.

Also, one of my favorite games is Ninja Gaiden for the original Xbox. I very much remember the layout of the preview article in Game Informer Magazine that I read repeatedly, just waiting for it to come out so I could try it for the first time.

So, I think most people who experienced that time in gaming have those memories, and the experience you’re creating around Zephyr’s Pass will hopefully unlock that. 

Gadol: I think with what GB Studio Magazine is doing, it does have that classic Nintendo Power feel to it that, sadly, we’ve seen less and less of. We just heard the news about Game Informer closing down. That was so disappointing because Game Informer was great growing up for people. Having GB Studio Magazine now and seeing my work — that was emulating print work, and I spent so much time getting into the nitty gritty details about what printed work looks like from that time — in the magazine is just so incredible.

We had Zephyr’s Pass ads in the last few issues, and that was so special to be able to look at that and see the work I spent so much time on actually being physicalized, and that’s what makes Game Boy games special. Even if you don’t have that cartridge, having a flash card and playing it on a Game Boy is just as special. It’s that physical aspect of games that we’re getting lost from. It’s slowly dying, but I think we’re in a renaissance of it. It’s exciting to see people caring about it in a way that supports people and helps it grow to reach larger audiences.

And I think it will grow even more; going back to what ModRetro is doing with the Chromatic, the fact that they partnered with GameStop and are putting those things in real stores for people to come and see is the future of in-person games. For collectors or people interested in physical items, seeing products in stores is so special and makes people want to go to a store again. Retro game stores are still so special to go in to play the games or look at the boxes on display. That’s what’s so special about Game Boy right now.

GBSC: And I often feel like the moment that a game you’re developing in GB Studio feels real is when you build the ROM for the first time and try it out on actual hardware. You’re like, okay, now it feels like a game. And that moment is so accessible for pretty much anyone.

As you said, you can get the bones of a project up and running in a weekend, pop it in your Game Boy, and that’s when you feel like, okay, I made something.

Gadol: It’s so funny when it gets that accessible. People will get very overzealous about their potential, right? They’ll be like: “Oh, I could make a whole game with this.” And I fell into that early on with Zephyr’s Pass where it was like: “Oh, I was able to put this together so quickly, like, I could build a whole game really quickly.” And then it’s like: “Oh wait, game development is more than just a character walking around on a background. There’s so many more layers to it.” The mechanical depth of even a simple game nowadays is so deep.

It’s a lesson I’ve had to learn over time, and it’s something that I still haven’t fully learned because my next game, which I thought was going to be easier, has been dramatically tougher than Zephyr’s Pass in many ways. It’s turning out good, but you’re still always going back and relearning that same lesson of scope creep.

GBSC: And that’s what I want to end on. You’ve teased it a few times. You’re working on a new project. I know it’s still under wraps, but what can you tell us about it?

Gadol: Okay. I will say it is a love letter to another thing that’s so special to me. And I actually teased it a while ago on my Twitter. I think a few people have seen it, the screenshot I did of a very 1930s office with a man wearing a fedora that has no affiliation to anything.

It’s just inspired by it, but it is an adventure-style game that I’m really excited about. It has a lot more mechanical depth and takes inspiration from Metal Gear. It’s closer to an open-ended stealth experience with adventuring, dungeons and archaeology themes.

GBSC: Stealth on the Game Boy — that is an undertaking with the limited AI that you can use on the system.

Gadol: I mean, you can look at Ghost Babble, and that’s a good representation of the mechanical intricacies of what I’m doing, and I’m adding in more survival elements and more of a continuous open world system, which I think will add a lot to the game.

It’s more ambitious than Zephyr’s Pass in a lot of ways. And the art style is completely different. It’s a new push for me, and it’s been exciting to develop that style that’s so different from Zephyr’s Pass, which I’m really excited about.

But it still has that very iconic thing to me in that it’s trying to emulate an experience that we all have nostalgia for and it’s trying to re-spark these things in your brain that are like wow, this feels like something that I’ve seen before. Instead of being inspired by Zelda, maybe it’s inspired by the comic-book- and movie-heroes we’ve grown up on and the visuals of comic books and movies from the 80s.

It’s still using these same techniques in terms of marketing that people love me for from Zephyr’s Pass, but it’s in a different frame that has its own spin that I think is going to be really exciting for people to get into while they’re waiting for the game to actually come out.

GBSC: That sounds brilliant. I can’t wait to hear more about it. Is there anything else you want to leave readers with?

Gadol: The biggest thing I can give to people for their games is to think about them as an experience both in the game itself and outside of the game. When you’re trying to get a game out there and get people to see it, the biggest lesson to learn is that you need to get people invested in the story. Part of the story is in the game, and part of the story is in how people interpret the game before they even get it, the feelings they have associated with the characters or the feeling of the world.

It’s inspiring people to bring their imagination, connecting with your audience and having them follow along with the journey. It’s such a valuable thing that we can do as Game developers — we shouldn’t be closed off and keep everything under wraps.

I think we should get people excited and invested in what we’re doing and don’t just hope that people will buy your game just because it’s a game. Build a relationship with your audience that they feel invested in. I think that’s a really cool thing that people can do to give their game more life. 

GBSC: Absolutely. You mentioned the quick pacing of your game and the storytelling. You nailed the blend of retro feel you want without any archaic aspects of a retro game that you would rather leave in the ‘90s. You didn’t make me backtrack through the dungeon I just walked through. You let me save whenever I want. There are all these quality-of-life features where I never felt like I put down my Game Boy after a play season without feeling like I progressed.

Gadol: It was a risk for me, because when you do that kind of pacing, the game can end up being, like, an hour long. So, that was something that back in the day, people were more accepting of games doing that, because they felt like they were doing more.

I was developing this game on all these levels, and you’re like, how long will the game be by the end of this? It turned out to be probably a three- to four-hour experience, which was my goal. But for some people, it’s taken longer and for others, it took like an hour and a half.

GBSC: Well, I think you judged your audience well. People who played these games back then are now in their 30s. They have a full-time job. They probably have a family. Most likely prefer a shorter, well-paced experience over a padded experience with a lot of filler and is difficult to navigate.

Gadol: And for me, the value of Zephyr’s Pass is in the variety. Every location you go to feels like its own unique thing. There’s a constant variety in mechanics and things you see and do in the game, but I think it feels more like a complete experience than a game with repetition.

GBSC: Wonderful. Thank you, Aaron, for your time. I appreciate it.

Gadol: Yeah, this was so much fun. I love talking about Zephyr’s Pass and the Game Boy industry. It’s something I’ve loved for so long and meeting all these people now that are other developers is a dream come true for me. I feel like now I have actual relationships with these developers and it’s not just me, you know?

GBSC: We’ll certainly have to do it again when you get closer to the finish line with your new project.