In BrewOtaku #002, we had the pleasure of interviewing László Rajcsányi, a Hungarian developer specializing in the use of GB Studio. His expertise lies in creating remakes of games from the early 1980s for the Game Boy and Game Boy Color. He has already released over 200 games so far, so be sure to check out his awesome work!
Hi László. Please introduce yourself.
Welcome and thank you very much for the opportunity. My name is László Rajcsányi and I live in Hungary, on the shores of Lake Velence, the second most famous lake in Hungary. I have two adult sons, who always test my games when I ask them. My wife is big Atari 2600 fan, and she also helps find bugs. By now, I have been working as an insurance broker for over thirty years, but my hobbies have always taken me in the direction of Commodore related things or into the demoscene.
You can be considered a GB Studio power user. Why do you choose GB Studio over GBDK or 6502 assembly?
I discovered GB Studio in early 2021. It appeared in my search results completely by accident. I thought I’d check it out, because I’ve always wanted to make a game myself, but I couldn’t code. The coding part of this, however, fascinated me, because it is so simple that you don’t even need a lot of knowledge to create something beautiful. If I had an idea, it was always realized by my friends, because they were able to code. I always just came up with ideas. Until I came across GB Studio, I never dreamed that one day I could make a game myself. A lot of related YouTube videos, made by enthusiastic fans, helped me a lot and there was a group on Facebook too, that I joined. All of these places helped me to choose GB Studio.
What are the biggest advantages and disadvantages of using GB Studio?
The advantage is clearly using drag & drop, but minimal programming knowledge is required to create your first game. The system is extremely reliable, and for me, it’s structured in a very logical way. Of course, you need some training and experience to figure out what to do, and a couple of tricks. You can export the engine and modify it. It’s often needed. The downside is that you can’t do many things with it yet, but it’s being developed constantly and is getting better and better each update.
Looking at your homepage, you have created more than 100 free Game Boy games. At least monthly we see one or two new ones. What’s your intention behind it?
What is my intention? Nothing! I do it for my own pleasure and for the few people who enjoyed the past like myself. People can simply dive back into memories. I enjoy exploring the logic behind the original creations of century old games, as I mostly create remakes. Authors back then came up with solid characters and added up to the gaming culture from its early commercial days. It’s a great feeling to see a sprite coming to life on a different system, and overall making a game playable for another system. It makes my heart beat faster, thinking back when I was a small child (now almost 50 years old) and looked up to these developers. Now I still look up to them, but I deeply examine their technical knowledge and learn from it.
What is your personal GB Studio made favourite, out of your own plenty of games, and why?
I really like simple and easy-to-understand games, and I prefer to rewrite them. Of course, it turns out that, no matter how simple it looks, the code behind it is often very complicated. In such cases, I suffer a little and I don’t like them so much any more. 🙂 I have a lot of favourites, I could play them day and night, but my real favourite is ‘Finders Keepers’. This game was not a big success on the Commodore and had more fans on the ZX Spectrum, but it was one of my absolute childhood favourites. When I remade it, I contacted the original coder ‘David Jones’ and he answered. Unfortunately, the conversation ended after two to three e-mails, but it felt good to talk to David, who influenced a phase of my childhood.
How much average time do you spend to create an average Game Boy game?
The thing is, I redo games in very little time. If I start a game, and it’s keeping me busy for a long time, then unfortunately I get bored, and it’s very likely that I won’t finish it. I create games in two to maximum seven days. Simple games without music and many scenes are done in two. ‘Tír Na Nóg’ or ‘Laser Squad’ seemed almost impossible, and they slightly differ from the original because I was not able to bring them closer to the original.
Do people appreciate your work, and do you get feedback?
This is a very good question, thank you very much for asking this. Sadly, I think not. At the beginning, there were comments on the games. I really enjoyed that 95% of the comments were positive. These people were usually older and have emphatic skills, younger people might not have yet. They would rather praise than despise something. They also have fun reviving games from their childhood. If you release a lot of games, like two to three per month, the feedback slowly decreases.
Would you recommend GB Studio to newbies, who dive into game development the very first time?
Of course, I recommend it! Moreover, I would consider it the best possible idea if children would be introduced to this program for the first time and learn the basic logics of programming. They will quickly get a sense of success through this. I’d like to shake Chris Maltby’s hand all day to congratulate him for this piece of software he has created here over the time.
Do you remember the biggest struggle, when you used GB Studio the first time? What was it?
There were days when my mind was so focused on the logic of the game that I had a terrible headache, which didn’t allow me to sleep proper. Thoughts and formulas just ran through my head. It teased me a lot, but I thought I would finish ‘Panik!16’. It didn’t turn out ideally, and I would do it totally different today. The game still suffers from bugs and was possibly the worst and most tiring thing I’ve ever created.
If you have one free wish regarding GB Studio, what would it be?
I don’t really like the direction version 3.0 took. For some reason, it has started too much towards programming logic. I wish we could expand version 2.0 with features that allow us to swap one tile for another on the screen, so I could work on a remake of my favourite game, ‘Boulder Dash’. However, version 3.0 would require a lot of my time to get up to date again.
Looking at the many games you made, which ones are original games and not remakes?
There are more than ten original games. I offer them via itch.io, which allows me to promote, collect feedback, as well as to see statistics. The stats tell me that my own game ‘Pushingo’ has been viewed most times and has more downloads than ‘Treasure Island’. My wife would see ‘The Farm’ at second position. ‘Hugo’ is a game in Hungarian language, and I believe it’s the first Hungarian Game Boy Color game ever. I like my own games, but the real challenge is, when you have to rewrite an existing game, without losing its original gaming experience.
Visit: https://wls.hu/
