🧪 Dev Log #1 – Translating Chaos to Cartridge

The first public release of Nano Battle – Alpha Protocol is live!

This is our first real attempt to take what we created on the table and make it sorta work on a Game Boy screen. It's the earliest version of what will eventually become something bigger, but already it plays fast, messy, and kind of brutal just like we hoped!

What is Alpha Protocol?

If you're coming from the board game side of things, this is a digital spin on a prequel of sorts to Nano Battle. As an Operator, you control a single robot called Alpha in a top-down, arena style survival mode. Your job is to dodge enemies and blast everything. There’s no end goal yet, just survive while taking out waves of bug like creatures until a rift gate appears. Destroy it, and you escape the area.

This build is a test bed. A playground. A way for us to figure out what works, and what totally breaks, when we translate a physical game into 8-bit form. Future games are already being laid out in different genres to give each Nanoid in Nano Battle their own backstory.

The Hard Parts

Getting this to feel right took more work than expected. GB Studio is a great piece of software, but game design is a fickle beast! A lot of the design challenges came from trying to rework ideas that originally belonged to a physical tabletop game. In Nano Battle, Alpha can dash, sprint, punch, shoot and has access to special moves, but not all of that works in a tiny Game Boy environment. Scripts are tricky to wrap your head around when your also creating variables to track and possible break things all interacting together simultaneously. I still have a head ache...

Movement and Shooting

One of the hardest parts was figuring out how to handle movement and aiming at the same time. We wanted players to be able to strafe and shoot in different directions, but the Game Boy has limited buttons and no second stick.

We tried locking your aim with the B button, and it worked! But it wasn’t fun. Gameplay felt sluggish and kind of dull. So eventually, we let go of that and made B trigger a dash instead. Now you can zip through enemy fire, dodge with split second timing, or even slam into enemies to deal damage and squish them instead of making them explode, at the cost of a life point. Dash perfectly though, and you’ll avoid taking any damage at all. This totally happened on accident, a happy little accident.

Projectiles and Limits

We hit the Game Boy’s sprite limit fast, I get why scenes in games like legend of Zelda are only as big as the screen size now. Between bullets, enemies, and effects, it doesn’t take much to overload the system. We had to build the scripts and logic in a way that wouldn't grind everything to a halt and it took a fair bit of trial and error to get it this far.

We also knew we wanted hold to shoot as an option instead of mashing A. We’ve read how button mashing can be painful for people with arthritis or joint issues, and we wanted the game to feel more accessible. But getting that working without causing infinite loops or kernel panics was tricky. If the script wasn’t called just right, it would crash really quick once things started updating behind the scenes.

The Death System

In the board game, losing a Nanoid can be permanent, in the Nanoverse without a Nanoid you are dead in the proverbial water. We wanted that same sense of consequence here but having a life limit seemed pedestrian, so we started tracking how many times you’ve "killed" your Alpha. now you have a score that feels like a par in golf.

The game gives you a cold, slightly judgmental title based on how many Alphas you've lost. It's subtle right now, but we’re planning to build on it. The idea that you're sacrificing robots, and whoever’s watching isn't always happy with your performance will be important. As a prequel to Nano Battle you're not in the Nanoverse just yet. Anyways!

What’s In This Build

• A 16x16 pixel Alpha running around

• 8-direction movement and 4-direction shooting

• Health and death system

• Basic enemy spawns and respawns

• Health drops (Spark Bits)

• Prototype HUD for Health and Nanomite goals

• Player rank/titles based on death count

• Placeholder art and sounds (to be improved!)

What’s Next

• More enemy types and behaviors

• A tighter, cleaner dash mechanic

• Scoring system, upgrades, unlocks

• New graphics and refined animations

• A possible campaign mode, we don’t want every level to be an arena!

This build is early. It’s a little clunky, definitely experimental, but it’s playable, it’s running on a Game Boy, and most importantly, it feels a bit like Nano Battle. That’s a huge step for us, well me, Tony, the guy behind this and the entirety of Nano Battle 💥

Thanks for checking it out. We want (and need!) your feedback. 

There’s more coming soon either way, you cant stop me!

– Tony