An Important Update Regarding the Course On-going:

Although I wanted to keep this course freely available, due to the massive amount of time these lessons take to create and my current financial situation, I will unfortunately have to start charging for the course.

As other community members have put in considerable time to translating various currently available lessons, Lessons 1 to 6 will remain free so there is a community resource that covers the basic and some intermediate concepts for those wanting to learn how to make a platformer at no cost.

From Lesson 7 onwards, the Let's Build a Platformer! course will require a payment. For now, I will not be releasing any more lessons until the entire course is complete. Only when it is a complete package can I charge for it, in good conscience.

For those people that donated, I will generate some keys of the course so you won't have to pay for it when it releases.  You can also have a key for the digital version of Unearthed as a thanks for your generosity. DM me via Discord if you don't hear from me soon (I may have trouble tracking you down). I have disabled donations for now but anyone can still download Lessons 1 to 6 and view each Devlog Overview for a bunch of free assets for use in your own projects.

I'll provide some updates every so often as I work on the course over time so you can check out whats to come. In fact, a Lesson 7 ROM is now available to play in-browser. Here is a little tease for what to expect to learn in Lesson 7, too:

• Storing the Player Location Throughout a Game
• A Note on Continuity Between Scenes (or Paying Attention to Design Details)
• Updating Variables to Suit Checkpoints
• Displaying a HUD Using the 'Set Submap' Method
• Displaying the Player's Current Location in the HUD
• Displaying Icons and Other Static Information in the HUD
• Displaying Number Strings in a HUD
• The 'Modulus' Operator
• Replacing Tiles According to Tileset Values
• GBVM Scripts
• GBVM & Variable Value Ranges (or What's INT8 & INT16?)
• HUD Positioning, Top or Bottom?

I tried my best to continue pouring time into working on the course for free but its just not sustainable at this point. I hope my decision is understandable. Thanks to Priamo. J, ProtoPixel, ChunkySteveo and LostKatana for the help with translations and additional lesson guides up to this point.

All the best and happy coding,
- Tom (Gumpy Function)

P.S. I have set the game to 'Color Only Mode' to improve the performance and as a little bonus, I thought I might share a little tip for those of you that want to upload a web.zip color ROM to itch and also want the colors in your game to display in true color (not the desaturated colors GB Studio forces on the palettes in an attempt to emulate how they would look on an un-modded GBC). Please note, I have only colored the menu scene, the rest of the game has been set to a monochrome palette in the interest of saving me time.

How to Set Palettes to "True Color" When Exporting to Web

1. Export to Web in GB Studio as normal.

2. Go to "Your Project Folder Directory" ...\build\web\js"

3. Open the 'script.js' file

4. On line 15, change CGB_COLOR_CURVE to a value of your choice.

By default, CGB_COLOR_CURVE is set to '2' and is desaturating the true colors of your games palettes as a result. Setting the value to '0' will enable true color in your game when played in-browser on itch.io

5. Zip the contents of the \web folder and upload to itch as normal.