Halfway Done With 2-Bit Game Boy Tarot Card Project
2024-03-21 - [53] 1:1
In the end of February 2022, I decided to start working on a Game Boy homebrew game project. That project was a tarot card reader for the Game Boy. The complicated part of that project though is that I need the tarot card designs to be converted to something the Game Boy can use, so I have slowly been working on those designs since.
At the beginning of 2024, I only had 8 designs done out of the 78 tarot cards. One of my 2024 new year resolutions was to try and do 1 card design each week in 2024, which would get my total up to 60 or 61 at the end of the year out of 78. I have been blowing past that rate though! This is the 14th week of 2024 and I have done 31 designs this year. That means I'm at 39 out of 78, which is halfway through! I can now comfortably do only 1 a week if I wanted to and be done by the Winter Solstice.
These Game Boy tarot card designs are the Rider Waite cards designed by Pamela Colman Smith. The Rider Waite deck designs were first published around 1909 and are in the public domain, so I decided to use those designs. Creative liberties had to be used to shrink the card designs down to 67 by 116 pixels of only 4 colors. The gameboy medium of 2-bits of color (4 shades of green) and a screen resolution of 160 by 144 pixels certainly limits what I can do with these designs.
If you are following my Mastodon account (@vi@mastodon.social, otherwise you can search @vi@vigrey.com on your fediverse instance), you will likely have already seen me post the cards as they are finished.
All of the cards I have finished so far can be found at the following link. All 22 of the Major Arcana cards have been finished and now I'm just working on the Minor Arcana cards. I hope you like what I have finished so far.
My overall plan is to get physical Game Boy tarot card reading cartridges made and sold along with some physical print cards with these designs. The Game Boy cartridge mapper I plan to use is the same Wisdom Tree mapper, which was used for quite a few unlicensed Game Boy games that were usually religious in nature. The mapper has already been implemented in quite a few Game Boy emulators and is considerably easier to get all of the chips for compared to finding clones of the official Nintendo mapper chips for the Game Boy.