If you've been following our social media channels, then you'll know doubt know that we've been playing a lot of Dragonyhm recently. It's a brand new game for the Game Boy Color/ModRetro Chromatic from Spacebot Interactive, one that comes on an actual cartridge with an actual box and manual just like the good old days, and it's one of the best games I've ever played, period.
I sat down to speak with the creators of the game, Chris and Bumbiss, to learn all about how they came up with the idea of Dragonyhm, what it's like creating such a successful game within the retro gaming community, and the resurgence of creators developing Game Boy Color games (which Dragonyhm has a lot to do with!)
The following interview is made up of segments from my podcast recording with the Spacebot team, so definitely spend some time listening to the full episode to get the full feel of what it's like to release a Game Boy Color game in 2025 as well as Chris & Bumbiss' thoughts on the future of Game Boy game creation and much more!
Getting To Know Spacebot Interactive
Retro Dodo: Thanks for joining us today Chris and Bumbiss! If you could tell us a little bit about your roles in Spacebot Interactive that would be great, and then I will crack on with talking about one of my favourite games that is currently still in my ModRetro Chromatic and will probably never leave - I'm talking, of course, about Dragonyhm.
Chris: Yeah, so I am the owner of Spacebot and I was project director and lead programmer for Dragonyhm. And I am also head of publishing at ModRetro, based in the UK.
Bumbiss: And I am the creative director of Dragonyhm, which when there's so few of us really just means I am the art and sound guy.
Retro Dodo: So let's talk about the game. I want to unpack it because Dragonyhm for me has been an absolutely incredible journey from the moment I put it in the Chromatic. It's an incredible piece of work. We put it in our list of the best Game Boy Color games of all time, rightfully so, because it is brilliant. I guess for starters from us all, thank you for making this game, and we should probably get you guys to give a little brief overview of the game story itself for anyone who hasn't.
Chris: Yeah, so basically it's a brand new RPG and it's strongly influenced by games like Legend of Zelda, Dragon Quest, Grandia, and Final Fantasy. And the kind of premise of the story is you wake up as Chris, who's the son of...
Retro Dodo: The Yhmszindr?
Bumbiss: I've never had to say it out loud to anyone publicly. I would say Yhmszindr (pronounced Ihm-zin-derr). And if you want, you could put a little accent on the end of that. Sorry if I offend anyone from this culture out there, but I want to say it's kind of a little bit of a Norse thing, the 'rolled R' ending, or somewhere around that region. And it has a meaning, but I'm not telling you what it is.
Retro Dodo: Why are you two so mysterious? I don't understand; is this because something else is coming that we're going to find all these things out in? Or do you just not want to tell me because you physically don't like me? I need to know which one it is before we carry on!
Chris: It's kind of like spoilers. And we want things to unfold naturally. So he's basically there to protect the kingdom of Archend, and so he's gone missing, and that's how your adventure starts, as Chris trying to find out where he is.
A Legend Is (Dragon)Born(e)
Retro Dodo: Take us back to the dawn of the game, when you kind of got the idea and how you started making it because the amount of lore in Dragonyhm is kind of Tolkien-esque for me. There's a lot of stuff going on in there; the amount of lore, the characters, the storyline–it's a massive feat. So, how did you come about storyboarding all of this, getting it all together, coming up with ideas?
Bumbiss: So, Dragonyhm, originally at its core, is actually Chris's idea. The core of it was a story that's really just about a kid, the hero. You're like a teenager, and your dad is this esteemed hero of the kingdom, who just disappears one day, and that is something that's obviously still very intact in Dragonyhm, but I kind of filled out the details of exactly what that journey is to finding him, and the world behind it, kind of in the hope of having something that was more distinguished, kind of just making it flashy, I guess.
Bumbiss: I'm really big into lore myself; whenever, when I get into something, I'll read some books about series that I like that are just like video game series or otherwise, just some supplemental material. And I like knowing that stuff and when like little references to that extra content makes its way into the main sort of game. That's a thing that I really enjoy. And so I guess, part of it is also trying to maybe bring more satisfaction to people with interests like mine than some other fantasy series have done.
Bumbiss: Games like The Legend of Zelda leave a lot of questions sort of unanswered, and there are so many... there are often expectations that fans could have that just maybe don't get met, because that's not really their priority. But I want to maybe give some more concrete stuff to think about. Like, there are a few instances throughout Dragonyhm, where if you want, you can just talk to a character optionally and learn more things that you otherwise wouldn't have. Things that I've bothered to think about the details of. Having said that I do take a lot of inspiration for the overall tone of things from games like Zelda, or also from Pokémon a little bit.
Retro Dodo: One of the things that we described, Brandon and I, when we first... Brandon bought the game first and said to me, you need to try this game. And he described it as, 'It feels like you're playing a Zelda game with Pokémon battle mechanics.' And I instantly thought, 'This is it. I really want to try this.' And then when I got into it, it felt like much more than that.
Creating Characters
Retro Dodo: One thing I really liked is the inclusion of a colour manual. It's nice to open it up and see all the different characters, where they come from, what they do, and their role in the game. How did you both get your heads together and create these characters? Because they are what drives the narrative. They are very deeply connected to the world that you're in. And you know, they're just, you can't help but kind of get immersed in what they're doing from the get-go. You know, which one of you thought it would be a great idea to have a little, a little, I mean, what even is a Quakzal - a little fish?
Chris: Yeah that's right! Well, that was a joint effort because I thought that we should have a mascot for the series because I'm a big fan of Final Fantasy and like the Chocobos and that kind of thing. And I said to Bumbiss, 'We should come up with a mascot, something cute that people can kind of recognize throughout the series.' And he went away and designed the Quakzal. And it was perfect.
Bumbiss: There's so much I actually can't say about it. But it will be revealed eventually.
Retro Dodo: Again, it's like talking to Secret Agents...
Bumbiss: You yourself noticed that there's a lot of attention to building a world that is larger than the game experienced. That was a very intentional thing on my part, to make this seem like a place where these characters live. They are around before you are as the observer. They have all their verbiage, they refer to events that you don't get to see and won't get to see before the credits.
Retro Dodo: They refer to things that make you seem like you instantly are like you are learning about a world that already exists. Yeah, so like when you wake up in Link's Awakening, and it's like everything's there for the first, it seems to have just been plonked there as you have been. This is like you've fallen into this world that has existed for thousands and thousands of years. And again, the lore element, if I read The Powers of Tolkien or The Heroes of Tolkien and go back and look at the lineage of the characters that he created from the times of the Silmarillion and stuff, I get that same feeling from this little 8-bit game that you guys are very humble about.
Chris: There are names in the game that refer to actual people. To be honest, the character of Kris came from me developing Dragonborne to learn GB Studio, and it was just a bit of fun at the time. And I just named the lead character Chris with a K, and it just kind of stuck.
Retro Dodo: When did you start making the game then? What was the timeline of you sitting down together to get ideas through to the game arriving on my desk with a ModRetro sticker on the top of it?
Bumbiss: I think it's 2021.
Chris: Yeah, that sounds about right. But it did start out as being a much simpler project. We were literally just going to colorise Dragonborne. And then GB Studio was kind of making leaps and bounds in terms of the features that were available at the time. So we started migrating the project, the new versions of GB Studio. I think we did that two or three times. And that took time because basically when you migrate a project, you have to redo some scripting and that kind of thing to make it compatible. But it opened up a lot more features. And that's when our ideas kind of started expanding because we had the ability to realize these ideas.
Becoming Game Developers
Retro Dodo: So what are your backgrounds then? Because obviously, Chris, you said that you started making Dragonborne in GB Studio. But have you had a background in game creation growing up? Is it something you've both come to later in life? Is it something you've tinkered with your entire lives?
Chris: Yeah, well, I got into it later in life. I'd always been interested in it. And I've always been a huge fan of the Game Boy. That was my first console as a kid. I shared that with my brother and I got really into collecting for the Game Boy. And I nearly had a full set of European games. That's how much I collected for it.
Retro Dodo: You can't just throw that out there and go past that. You nearly had a full set of the European games for the Game Boy.
Chris: Yeah, I think I was like 90 off. But I've trimmed it down massively because I've got two kids now. And it was just money sitting there that could have gone towards stuff for them. But basically, I've always been into the Game Boy, always been really interested in game development and the kind of experiences that developers could create through developing for the Game Boy, which is obviously a pretty limited bit of hardware. And during lockdown, I just had a lot more time on my hands, and I decided to really try and take game development seriously. And then found GB Studio, and literally Dragonborne was my first project as I was learning the engine.
Chris: And whatever I had in my head, I was just scripting, and that's how Dragonborne was kind of conceived. And then I started posting about that on Instagram, and it received a fairly decent amount of attention to the point where people were asking me to release it physically. And that's when I started Spacebot. I self-published Dragonborn, and then I worked with Isma, who's now a good friend of mine, to publish the first run of Deadius. And then it kind of went from there.
Chris: I decided that I wanted to release a colorised version of Dragonborne, and I noticed Bumbiss was posting pixel art and some other stuff. I was looking for somebody to join the team to help, and it turned out that Bumbiss is extremely talented, and we ended up working together really, really well, and our kind of visions are aligned, and we've kind of taken it from there. And yeah, like I said, we speak every day, and now we've created this game that we've put out, and people seem to be enjoying it, and that's what we wanted.
Retro Dodo: And Bumbiss, what's it like when you see the public perception of this work of art that you've created?
Bumbiss: It's surreal is just the word for it. It often doesn't feel real, and there's also an amount of like, I think with any artist or creative type, and maybe this changes as you get more successful, and like your ego adapts to it or something, but it's like there's self-doubt, and you don't want to believe that, that like people feel as strongly as they write in the comments about it. Like, I've seen people say it's the thing they're most... it's the game they're most looking forward to, the release of.
Retro Dodo: Have you guys got your heads together to think about what a sequel could look like?
Chris: We have thought about it.
Bumbiss: We have ideas.
Retro Dodo: That's as good as I'm going to get, isn't it? It's just nice to know that you guys have enjoyed the process so much that you are thinking, 'Yeah, we could do another one of these. It's something that we would like to do. It's something that we'd enjoy the process of.
The Future Of Game Boy Game Publishing
Retro Dodo: Where do you guys see the future of Game Boy game publishing going? Obviously, Chris, you do a lot with ModRetro in your other role out of Spacebot Interactive; how do you guys see the future of the Game Boy, because we're seeing a great resurgence of retro gaming coming back now?
Chris: Yeah, I think the Game Boy development scene is expanding and growing rapidly, and I think that's off the back of GB Studio coming about and how accessible it is. And, yeah, like the quality of the games coming through is improving constantly, and the bar is always being set higher. And, yeah, ModRetro especially, we have some really fantastic games coming through that we'll be announcing in the coming months. So, yeah, I think the scene itself will continue to grow, we'll continue to see the bar being set higher. And, yeah, I don't think it's gonna stop anytime soon, really.
Bumbiss: I look forward to the idea of a potential resurgence of games like this being mainstream. I don't know if that's like realistic. But I think it is more realistic than it was before, given ModRetro's appearance. I think they're pretty keen on bringing that to the forefront of people's conscious consciousness. And that's something I really like. Yeah, I don't know. It's in a good place. It is staggering the kind of quality that people are getting out of Game Boy development. Some of the late-stage Game Boy Color games from the early 2000s are really impressive because they had some years to learn the hardware and how to get the most out of it. And now we have people who have had multiple decades worth of time to build on that. There's just really impressive stuff.
Retro Dodo: It's quite nice for me to be able to sort of convince you guys how you've had a massive impact on this as well. With the advent of Dragonyhm coming back again, we're getting, you know, we're getting new people, new generations into RPGs again, into like actual puzzles and not just like slash, slash, slash, slash all the way through, you know, sitting down and thinking and making diagrams and notes and looking back to that manual. So I think like 100% of you guys have had a massive effect on this, on the scene itself, whether you, whether you see it or not. And I'm glad that I can get to tell you that. And I'm sure all of our listeners would 100% agree with, you know, the epic work that you guys have done!
Thanks to Chris & Bumbiss for joining us on the Retro Dodo Podcast to chat about creating their incredible Game Boy Color game Dragonyhm and all things retro. Don't forget to listen back to the full episode using the player below to find out more about creating Game Boy games, how Bumbiss created the music for Dragonyhm, and some exclusive information about the game that you won't have heard before!
