Animated Game Boy!

Howdy! Geril here.

This month we've made some assets for a scene that will feature our previously re-introduced female character. She'll be playing Donkey Kong on a classic Nintendo Game Boy system, and the console is even animated — so you can check out the gameplay.

For the Game Boy asset, I made a high-res Game Boy in Blender, baked it to low-res and Lussy finished its textures in Substance Painter.

The hard part was the animation.
I recorded a bit of gameplay from the classic Game Boy Donkey Kong game, and then exported its frames as images. Then Lussy put them together into one big texture.
In Blender, I made a plane for every frame and then made them move separately by shape keys.
So every frame is a shape key that moves the appropriate plane up a bit inside the Game Boy, to bring it just under the screen's surface.

And the animation is just that. As time passes, every frame goes up a bit, becomes visible, then goes down. I synced it to the sound of the gameplay, so it matches up.
After testing it on Sketchfab, I even gave it some bones, so now it looks like Mr. Invisible is playing the game.

We liked it, so we ended up publishing it even without the character.

You can check it out here:

Game Boy: Donkey Kong gameplay by ExceptionGate on Sketchfab

We'll put together the full scene later. I even made a low-res N64 with a Hori controller for it, and Lussy's in the process of modeling her old childhood CRT TV.