itch.io

As far as I know, none of the organizers made the “turning my back” argument. That was just me, and I am not an organizer nor a member of the gbcompo project, just someone who spends a lot of time in the GBdev community. Antonio Vivace is focused mostly on it being unfair to other contestants and volunteers involved in the event, as per the conversations in its #gbcompo25 channel.

I have removed the link. Sorry! I have reproduced the full contents of the post here instead, with any links to my own content removed.

I listed precedents in the form of other major competitions which impose similar, or even harsher, requirements on their participants, to explain that this is not an unusual policy for a game jam, especially one with prizes/rewards at play. Yes, everyone who submits their work to these competitions - the NESdev compo, for example - has to either allow distributing their work in this manner, or not submit their work to that specific competition. My stance is specifically that it is not uncommon or unreasonable for an event, especially in the social circles GB/GBC homebrew was born out of, to impose such expectations!

At the end of the day, many freely available GB/GBC games have already been turned into commercial products. You can do this by releasing an expanded version of the game (which has precedent), by putting the same game on a physical cartridge, or even by paywalling ROM downloads but not the web emulator (which another gbcompo entry has done). Even allalonegamez’s own 2025 entry, Zorvad, which is still available on Itch, has had a commercial release announced while still being playable online. The competition has not interfered with any of those - it only stepped in when a game which was entered in the competition was threatened with the possibility of it not being available online at all.

“Speaking of social contracts, I just think that developers shouldn’t have such a demand on the free labor of organizers and judges. If they want their game critiqued and promoted, they should pay for it.” /hj

I’m surprised by this, given that entries for GB Compo 21 have been hosted indefinitely on GitHub since, well, 2021: https://github.com/gbdev/gbcompo21 - the same goes for the 2023 and 2025 iteration. Were you not aware of this?

The same applies to adjacent homebrew competitions: the yearly NESdev competition requires all ranked and judged entries to consent to being included as part of a freely distributed multicart, whereas the N64brew jam has a similar policy of mirroring compo releases on their GitHub.

This also goes outside of homebrew competitions and into demoscene. For example, the largest demoscene party, Revision, states in their rules that all entries presented will be mirrored on scene.org. Another large party, Evoke, explicitly requires contestants to accept that their works will be freely distributed online.

This also goes beyond the West. The Japanese WonderWitch Grand Prix, a hobbyist console game competition that ran from 2001 to 2003, also stipulated consent for free distribution.

I believe that access to games which were the result of a competition co-funded by the community helps the community as a whole grow. The social contract has two sides, not just one, and I think the non-developer side can feel rightly betrayed in this situation.

EDIT 2: I wrote a blog post that makes my stance clearer, but I have been asked not to link to it directly. I respect this request, and as such I am pasting it in its entirety here:

Two days ago, an author requested all of their games to be taken down from the Homebrew Hub, a project to preserve all non-commercial homebrew software created for the GB, GBC and GBA family of consoles. This included the only remaining public copy of said author’s gbcompo23 submission, “The Host”, which placed fourth in the competition. However, as the competition’s rules held that works submitted to it should remain available to the public in some fashion, this led to a dispute.

As someone who cares about the state of homebrew development, I foolishly got involved in the dispute after Antonio Vivace, the organizer of gbcompo and operator of Homebrew Hub, reached out to me. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move. Two days have passed. I’ve received a few dozen total downvotes, some thoughtful criticism, and read a few concerning pieces of misinformation. As such, I’d like to make my perspective on this clear.

To clarify, I am not an organizer of gbcompo23 or gbcompo25. I was not involved with them in any manner. I was and am speaking purely in a personal capacity - my opinion was requested purely as that of a friend.

For the sake of completeness, I am linking the game author’s statement on the dispute. If the gbcompo staff releases a statement, I will also link it. I recommend reading those first to get a more informed look on the matter.

The Bad

Let’s start with the bad.

As part of Antonio asking me about how to handle this dispute, I loudly pondered the idea of demanding a return of the reward money. While I did not recommend doing it in the end and I was working off of incomplete information, I feel that even entertaining this idea has contributed to causing damage which should not have taken place, given that almost two years have passed since the payout and that the human impact of enforcing this would greatly outweigh any potential outcome.

I regret what I said and will try to be more cautious in the future.

The Dispute

I ultimately recommended immediately removing all works in question while imposing either retroactive or future disqualification, acknowledging that choosing the former will most likely lead to the dispute becoming a public affair. This occured in public - in the #homebrew-hub channel on the GBdev Discord. After talking to me, Antonio chose to retroactively disqualify the creator’s games and asked for the money to be refunded, then proceeded to work on getting them out of the public website. As I stated above, I now believe that requesting the refund, no matter how well intentioned, was a bad decision, and I regret having my hand in it.

Nevertheless, I continue to stand with the decision of disqualification. To bring up the exact rule I consider violated:

The submission must be available for free for the public (and not only the judges). Submission will be published and kept online for free on the competition website, while you are free to keep working on it (and eventually charge for it/make commercial usage).

To address a common point - I agree that this rule is really poorly written and leaves a lot to personal interpretation. Someone on Reddit suggested that it is deliberate tricky wordplay, which means the organizers probably at least have a lawyer on retainer. I consider that to be a bad faith read of the situation; usually, highly imprecise wording implies the lack of a lawyer, and I am certain that is the case here as well. Read the text of any major software license or terms of service agreement - most of them are quite precise about the rights granted and requirements imposed, if in a bit peculiar and terse in the specific language used. Usually, the vagueness there is hidden in not disclosing intent, as these documents are typically written with the interests of the side commissioning them in mind.

In his post, the game author claims, thrice, that the games were online for the entire required period and even well beyond. However, the rules never specified a period in the first place, and I find myself wondering where the idea that one was implied to be limited to the competition’s duration came from. Can one be assumed? My personal position stems from observing the historical and cultural context.

The Game Boy homebrew community descends directly from the subculture of demoscene - Anthrox was a demoscene and game cracking group which Pan was a member of, and it was under its name that the Pan Docs were first released and distributed on warez BBSes in early 1995. Throughout the demoscene, it is fairly customary for all competition works to be freely distributed online through a network of independent mirrors - see, for example, the rules of the party Evoke or Silly Venture. This rule, of course, does not extend to any later releases or derivative works - for example, the group Dekadence makes it clear that they consider any unauthorized YouTube uploads of their recent works, for example Ihmesorsa, to be an infringement of their copyright:

This production may NOT be distributed in video form without our explicit permission. Contact us at dekadencedemo@gmail.com BEFORE making your video capture public, or we will issue a takedown.

Similarly, many other homebrew game jams have traditionally had a clear expectation of the submitted works being avaialble for free in perpetuity. Take the NESdev compo, one of the longest running such game jams. It ends with all ranked and judged entries being bundled into a single NES ROM with a custom multicart mapper, which is then distributed by the organizers. An author may opt out from this by submitting to a second category with looser restrictions, but doing so makes their entry ineligible for ranking.

I hold the belief that it is in this spirit that the rule was written, and discussions with inhabitants of the GBdev Discord appear to validate my belief. The weak wording is, in my opinion, a matter of falsely assuming this to be a common cultural norm. Said phrasing, if taken literally, may even have some unintended side effects. The competition website is not, technically speaking, the author’s own submission page - however, linking to it gives them more eyeballs and allows a space for reaching out to interested players directly.

With this in mind, I continue to hold it is unfair to benefit - especially financially - from a community effort, then turn your back on said community. Unfair does not mean prohibited - copyright law does apply here, and the Homebrew Hub was never the competition’s website either. However, I don’t think one can violate a competition’s spirit and expect no bridges to be burned in the process, as made evident by the people who have reached out to me in support of the disqualification.

To clarify, though - I’m talking about the specific expectation of taking down all access to the version of the game as was submitted to the jam. There is nothing wrong with commercializing an entry and never has been - for example, from the same competition:

• Hermano by Pat Morita Team, the first place winner of gbcompo23, makes the jam version freely available, while a later, expanded version requires payment to access. This was never an issue, and the expanded version was never distributed on Homebrew Hub or by the gbcompo organizers.
• Feed IT Souls by Gumpy Function, the second place winner of gbcompo23, does the same thing: free jam version, paid post-jam version. This was never an issue, and the expanded version was similarly never distributed on Homebrew Hub or by the gbcompo organizers. The same is true for BenJelter and Gumpy Function’s 2021 winner, Unearthed.
• Enceladus by mr.papshmir, the third place winner of gbcompo23, can only be played for free on itch.io through a web emulator, with the official download of even the jam version there requires payment to access. This was never an issue, albeit with the caveat that the gbdev.io copy of the jam version hosted on Homebrew Hub does remain available for now.

None of these creators were prevented from making money from the effort they put into the jam. That would have been obviously unfair. I have no issue with any of that. What makes allalonegamez’s case distinct is that they demanded that the jam version of his game become unavailable to the public period, while refusing to even engage with any argument to the contrary. I consider that to be a breach of the social contract between the GB/GBC homebrew community - which is not just its developers! - and the game’s developer, even if it technically allowed by law.

Is it fair to these other developers, who have chosen not to take down their jam versions, possibly because they believed it was required of them to keep them up? Is it fair to the individual donators to the prize pool, who may have made the decision to support the competition based on the understanding that this contributes to a future library of freely accessible works? Is it fair to the judges, who spent days working for free, sifting through over a hundred entries, potentially with the same assumption at play? Are they not equal members of the community? I can’t know that - I’ll have to wait for some of them to speak their minds, if any decide to do so.

The Ugly

As I discussed this matter with other people from the community, I have learned that this was not the first grievance directed at the staff of gbcompo, and decided to look into a few more, for the sake of completeness if nothing else.

One issue some people have with them is accepting a sponsorship offer of hardware worth 2280 USD in retail from the FPGA-based console reimplementation seller ModRetro, controversial for being owned and operated by a military-industrial complex beneficiary and entrepreneur. As I understand it, this decision was thoroughly discussed internally, but I am nevertheless disappointed to see the leaders of a community of hobbyist creativity lend its reputation to this kind of business.

Another issue some people raised is the organizer team having allowed art produced using generative AI models under condition of full disclosure, applying the same rules for it as for any pre-made assets. I am more ambivalent here. Obviously, it makes them scabs in the ongoing labor dispute, that much is undeniable, and I know many people for whom this alone is unforgivable. However, I also understand that they prioritized being able to understand how many people are opting to use LLM-derived material and giving the judges the transparency required to adjust their scoring accordingly, as opposed to potentially rewarding someone for fraudulent work whose provenance they did not disclose. Personally, I’m not sure if this was the right way to go about it.

On a separate note, this is also not the first time the GB/GBC homebrew community has been divided. There are three major Discord guilds dedicated to its efforts, not one - GBdev, GBDK, and GB Studio. I think it’s important context to remark that the community of GBdev has managed to alienate both GBDK and GB Studio thought leaders in the past with its opinions. Even if some of the opinions held have changed or the people have mellowed out since, the drama scars remain.

In this vein, I’ve heard some people privately accuse the GB Studio community of bringing “money people” into the mix. I find that to be a concerning mindset which encourages a kind of elitism and gatekeeping that I personally dislike and that the community of GB Studio creators had to face in the past. Conversely, I’ve heard some people accuse the gbcompo organizers of being aligned with the “money people”. That doesn’t hold up to scrutiny to me, either! All gbcompo expenses and donations are public information - I don’t think any of the organizers make money from this event.

This section would not be complete without bringing up the factor of personal privilege. It’s easy to hold such strong opinions for the people of GBdev and myself, who are largely employed in the tech sector and don’t need to worry about putting food on the table. Would I hold such stances were I not so fortunate? It’s really hard to say; I dare not guess.

The Disappointing

I expect future homebrew competitions to take clearer stances here. For example, the upcoming N64brew Jam has already clarified its relevant rule yesterday, in part due to this dispute (added clarification in bold):

5️⃣ The final game’s source must be publicly available on GitHub (IE Open Source), but you are free to license it as you wish (GPL, BY-NC-ND, etc…). You must allow that we keep a copy of your submission’s source code publicly available in perpetuity.

Nevertheless, even if the broader homebrew community extends beyond its creators, it is only the creators who make or break a jam. They will decide if such rules are acceptable or not, by participating in specific events or by avoiding others. It’s not like the GB/GBC community has no alternatives. Maybe the times are changing. Maybe I’m just out of touch.

I have been contributing to various homebrew and modding communities for over 15 years, including experimenting with GB Studio for a time. Likewise, I have been contributing to the preservation of homebrew for many years. I have done almost all of this work for free, without expecting compensation and often under highly permissive terms. This was always done with the underlying belief in a shared cultural commons that is being built by doing so. In my view, people were free to not donate to these commons if they did not want to for whatever reason. I generally had no issue with someone charging money for something built on top of it, at least where license terms were not infringed. I was happy to see more and more games receive commercial releases from various boutique manufacturers. However, I do take issue with someone taking away something once provided to these commons. People in retro gaming spaces cherish every piece of so-called “lost media” that is found and made available, no matter the means - why must we create more of it?

This dispute, and people’s reactions to it, show me that this framework of belief is not as universal as I had hoped. If people can revoke things from the cultural commons at will, then it is not something built, but ephemeral. As such, a different interpretation becomes tempting - one which I’ve occasionally argued with myself about many times in the past. Through its lens, my choice to give away my labor is not part of building a community, but mere evidence that I am not capable of creating something people in general would want to pay for, or that I am wasting my skills and time by not monetizing my users and instead contributing to something “greater than myself”. That is one disheartening realization to ponder, and not one I would like to agree with. It is, of course, not the full story and just an extreme position - albeit one which feels bolstered by the events of yesterday.

To be clear, what I put out into the public and under what terms is my decision only. It is my labor and I own it, just like how the gbcompo contestants’ labor is their own and they own it. In all cases, we have to accept the consequences of our choices - the good and the bad. I’m not seeking words of sympathy - I just want to state my feelings about this. I don’t think this is a dispute in which my stance is necessarily correct. You are welcome to agree or disagree, to back me or to vilify me. In the end, I’d like to think that none of this will affect my motivation for giving away more of my labor in the future, but I don’t trust myself to be that selfless. I’ll try my best, though.

(end of blog post as quoted)

This is the original content of the post:

It was my idea that put demanding the return of prize money on the table. (I did not directly suggest doing it, for various reasons; but I did entertain the idea.) It was also my idea to disqualify the works retroactively. To be clear, I am not an organizer of gbcompo23 or gbcompo25, nor am I involved in any of the teams, nor am I a moderator of the gbdev Discord, or anything like that. I was consulted purely on the basis of providing a personal opinion. The full conversation which led to this is available on the gbdev Discord in the #homebrew-hub channel.

I believe it is unfair to benefit - especially financially - from a community effort, then turn your back on said community. It is your right, you are correct in saying so, but it is also a bridge that you are burning and you must be aware of that. I made the suggestions mentioned above in this light, after consulting some other people to get a reality check myself.

The administrator of the website in question, Homebrew Hub, is Antonio Vivace. He also operates the gbdev Discord and organizes gbcompo. There was no solution in which taking a combative stance, even if justified by law, would lead to “major Game Boy publishers” not finding out - because these people all talk to each other, because all of these projects are highly interconnected.

The rules state, quote, “Submission will be published and kept online for free on the competition website”. You are correct that there is no specific time period listed. However, at no point was it stated to be specifically Itch, either. The website which hosts the rules is gbdev.io, not itch.io. The rules say published, but they don’t specify by who. An interpretation which sidesteps linking to authors’ Itch pages completely is, therefore, potentially just as acceptable. I don’t know - I ultimately recommended Vivace to get a real lawyer before doing anything extreme, but it would probably be much more expensive than it is worth.

It is really unfortunate that they were written so imprecisely, but I suppose the organizers felt it was unnecessary to be pedantic, given that the communities Game Boy homebrew owes its heritage to (in particular the demoscene) see this kind of redistribution of competition works as a kind of common law. I am pretty sure this will be amended for future events.

For whatever it’s worth, I recommended removing the works irrelevant to gbcompo immediately, as my problem was specifically with what I saw as a break of its social contract.

EDIT: After getting a broader sampling of feedback online, I agree that suggesting an escalation all the way up to “return our prize money” was a mistake on my behalf. Even if I pointed out that it was a nuclear option with massive asterisks and did not recommend in the end, I should have pushed back on taking it that far, as maybe some of this could have been avoided.

There’s hundreds of indie games for the WonderSwan - it even had an official homebrew devkit, the WonderWitch. It’s just that there are very few such titles made after the console’s life and/or in the Western scene, which makes sense given its lack of release outside Japan and a few Asian markets.

Very fun short game, thank you!

Hey, just as a heads-up - the WAV .ZIP includes "Moody Dungeon", which is marked as a Ko-fi exclusive, but not "Moonlight Town", which is not marked as such. You might want to correct one of these.

The *port* is still in development - the original game was last worked on 30 years ago :-)

Regarding the torch/shoot thing - that's how ZZT acted since 1992! The goal of ClassicZoo is to accurately reproduce its behavior, and fix only those bugs which have no impact on edge-case gameplay mechanics some existing worlds may rely on (that usually translates to "cause crashes/hangs").

1. SuperZ is Super ZZT - that's a distinct game engine. See https://museumofzzt.com/file/s/szzt.zip for worlds (.SZT files).
2. Old file dates? That is very strange - they should all work. More information would be great to have.
3. There should be emulated PC speaker sound, but I didn't find enough time to dig into Amiga's sound architecture in time for the jam's ending.

As per the official site: "For better performance (and to run on 640×256 screens), run setenv FPC_VIDEO_BUILTINFONT vga8 before launching the port. This may be fixed eventually, with ClassicZoo getting its own 8×8 font bundled." This is a limitation of Free Pascal's text mode emulation.

From there, just run the "ZZT" binary. For various reasons, worlds are not distributed with the binary - you can find them on the Museum of ZZT; the original four worlds or some recommendations! As the port is a quick job utilizing Free Pascal's (surprisingly easy to get going) Amiga toolchain, and is not perfectly Amiga-optimized, it won't run particularly speedily on an unexpanded 500/600 - a CPU accelerator is welcome.

There's a bit of an edge case here - I have submitted a project, "ClassicZoo". The Amiga port has technically only been in development since December, which would meet within the rules. However, since I'm the person responsible for the original reverse-engineering of ZZT's source code in March 2020 and most of the bugfixes/updates beyond, it could be argued that my personal involvement in the codebase stretches far before the jam's start date. On the other hand, the jam's rules state that using existing source code is allowed... I'll leave judgement to you on that one.

It's a really sweet conversation.

The Hall of The Kunger Binb was written with (a modified version of) the lightweight Zeta emulator in mind. As such, it depends on quite a few emulation inaccuracies or additional features created by it -> such is the fate of an emulator designed to run two executables.

However, it is possible to work around the inaccuracies and provide such functionality on a real DOS machine.

Download BINBFIX v0.1, which should hopefully take care of everything; run "binbfix" before launching ZZT, and run "binbfix u" after you're done!

Doesn't mean the game isn't computationally intensive (due to having a complex script parser written in Turbo Pascal) - I recommend at least a 486@40MHz for guaranteed smooth playthroughs. (And, of course, keep discussion of any issues specific to real PC playthroughs to this thread.)

Known issues:

• The keyboard movement isn't as smooth as under the Windows/etc. build - this one might be a bit tougher to fix, but doesn't really prevent or strongly hinder playthroughs.