for reasons unclear to everyone I have jumped into GBA homebrew development because it "doesn't seem that bad" thanks to butano, an extremely-good-looking C++ engine for GBA
as someone who usually works in very high-level game engines (Godot, previously Game Maker), even Butano feels a little "close to the hardware" for my experience, despite the fact that it definitely isn't (you can render text with one line of code!), but I can confirm it was surprisingly painless to get started! the developer has quite serviceable docs and a lot of great demos, including a really impressive 3D game.
by the end of the day I had a mockup of a game running that rendered a background (scrolling tiles, natch), took input, and saved data to SRAM, so I'm calling it pretty successful so far. my actual motivation is retro platform jam 6, which I may or may not participate in but like
imagine running a game you made on actual hardware (an actual emulator on actual jailbroken hardware because I bet GBAs and flash cards are not cheap enough rn). cool, right
