Fang the Fox for Game Boy Color

Fang the Fox is a real Game Boy Color game. Five Embers were stolen from Grandma Ember's Hearth and the Sky Isles are sinking. Guide Fang across 24 floating islands, beat the five Ember bosses, relight the Hearth and follow the rift down to the Primordial.

Play it above in your browser, or download the ROM and play it on a handheld, in an emulator, or on a Game Boy Color from a flash cart. It saves to the cartridge, like the real thing.

The adventure

• 24 floating islands: forests, crystal caves, ancient ruins, frozen peaks, volcanoes, an enchanted glade and the Void.
• Turn-based: walk into a monster to fight it, into a friend to talk. Every monster plays by its own rules.
• Five Ember bosses (Goo King, Ancient Guardian, Ice Colossus, Volcanic Dragon, Rotheart) and the Primordial.
• Grandma Ember, Hoot the owl, Rudy's gem shop, Lumen and the Fairy Queen.
• Braziers to light, blocks to push, ice to slide across and paths that crumble under you.
• Level up and pick perks, find 20 relics and five lost kits.
• Two save slots on the cartridge that take turns, so a save cut short by the power never costs you the other.

Made for the Game Boy Color

• Every island redrawn within the Game Boy Color's limits and kept at night, while lava, crystals and portals glow.
• A pause screen with a world map, your quest, Fang's stats and perks, and options for music, sound effects, volume and screen shake.
• Hold SELECT to see the whole island at once; arrows at the screen's edge point to foes out of view.
• The Tiny Bit Adventures album recreated for the Game Boy's four sound channels: Fang the Fox, Forest Home, Forest Exploration, Slim Monsters and Plasma Blast. There's a sound test on the options page.

Controls

• Move, attack, talk: D-pad (arrow keys)
• Fire Spin (once learned), next line, choose: A (X key)
• Eat a fish: B (Z key)
• Pause screen (map, quest, Fang, options): START (Enter)
• See the whole island: hold SELECT (Shift)
• Fast forward (browser only): hold F

Controllers work in the browser too, and phones get an on-screen pad. Click the game first so it hears your keys. Your browser keeps the save; clearing site data deletes it.

Where to play

• Browser: above.
• Handhelds and phones: RetroArch with the Gambatte, SameBoy or mGBA core (Retroid Pocket, Anbernic, Android, iOS).
• Computers: mGBA or SameBoy.
• Real hardware: any flash cart (EverDrive GB, EZ-Flash Junior...) on a Game Boy Color or Game Boy Advance. Color only: it won't run on an original grey Game Boy or a Super Game Boy.

The ROM is a Color-only MBC5 cartridge: 256 KB with 32 KB of battery-backed save.

How it was made

I've never written a line of C. Fang the Fox started as my browser game, and I asked Claude Code, running Opus 5.5, to port it to the Game Boy Color. By the end of the same day it was running on my Retroid Pocket: about 3,500 lines of C written by Opus 5.5, about 19,500 more written by its build script from the browser game's own maps and data, and a bot that plays the whole game to the credits. The full story: Fang the Fox on the Game Boy Color, built with Opus 5.5.

Credits

• Austin Ginder: the game's direction and testing, and the music: the Tiny Bit Adventures album (2023).
• Claude (Opus 5.5 by Anthropic) in Claude Code: the C code, the build and test tools, the pixel art, the story text, and the Game Boy arrangements of the album.
• Tools: GBDK-2020, hUGEDriver (music driver, public domain), PyBoy for the tests. Browser player: binjgb by Ben Smith (MIT) with code from GB Studio by Chris Maltby (MIT).

License

Code and pixel art: MIT. Source on GitHub. The music is not covered by the MIT license.

More from Tiny Bit Adventures: the browser version of Fang the Fox · tinybitadventures.com