Heya! I'm Valen Hinojosa, a programmer, music nerd and general tinkerer of things, specially the Nintendo Game Boy (Hello GBDev!) and other retro videogame consoles. This site is a showcase of my works alongside some other random stuff. :P Enjoy!
Check out my games on my Itch.io page! You can also find my "resume" of videogame work here!
A couple of my most notable projects...
A Game Boy Color port of my PICO-8 port of Jefftastic's Pizza Delivery, a silly single screen platformer about Stanley (definetly not the Guardian from Petscop) trying to deliver pizza. I've been working on this port since 2023 using my own tooling and to test my abilities. Hopefully out someday!
A Game Boy Color demoscene-style production crafted up by me and my amazing friends Lucien.D20 and Honexcess (Under the name WitchBiz). It showcases many fancy tricks, including wireframe vector rendering, Zombie Mode audio and a record breaking Hi-Color scroller! We placed #1 on GB Showdown 2025 with this one!
The first GB Studio-compatible sound effect pack released back in 2022! A collection of 32 sounds compatible with VGM2GBSFX. To compose these sounds I wrote my own Python tooling to convert Furnace clipboard data to many Game Boy SFX formats. Since its release, Sweet Sounds has been used in many games and places, including one released on Nintendo's eShop! I'm sure the number of games using it is in the hundreds (ᵕ—ᴗ—).
A GBDK-2020 compatible Sound effect driver released back in 2021. I wrote this driver while developing WWEM-GBC since at the time there were no GBDK-compatible drivers for sound effects, which meant developers had to rely on the Game Boy's sweep & envelope hardware for SFX, which creates very simple Atari 2600-like sounds. I ended up creating an alternative player for an old SFX engine from the 2000s called FX-Hammer. Due to it's ease of use and being the first one easily available, it ended up being used in many games and still pops up every now and then, even if the code is garbage ( ꩜ ᯅ ꩜;).
A port of one of my favorite original games, WizWiz Elevator Munch on PICO-8, also my first Game Boy project and my attempt at an entry to GBCompo21... it was developed in GBDK-2020 and due to my lack of understanding of the hardware and SDK, there came a point that the ROM was too bloated and messy to even load correctly or build. You can download the last "working" build here or listen to the finished soundtrack here.
A simple PICO-8 game about protecting a cat from monsters in hell using your mouse. Originally I developed it because I had energy and spare time (Oh how I miss that...) inbetween two game jams, plus a little prototype of a drawing program made out of animated fireballs. T'was surprisingly popular at some point, more than my other games at least - maybe it was the cat theme or the mouse usage?
