MGWJ 2025 - El Tesoro de Boturini

Having technical restrictions can be a great way to focus on creativity and gameplay design. This is what we did for the Mini Game Work Jam 2025, creating a nonogram game in GB Studio.

Background

First time participating in the Mini Game Work Jam, a game jam organized by the National Anthropology and History Institute, has been a great experience. The secret theme is La Biblioteca Nacional de Antropología e Historia, which is a Library in Mexico City that holds a lot of historical documents, maps and pictures. The game is inspired by an important document that can be found in this important Library, the Boturini Codex, an ancient document that tells the story of the Mexica people and their migration to the Valley of Mexico. This is the main reason why the game is called “El Tesoro de Boturini” (The Boturini Treasure).

Process

NOTE: This project is a work in progress, and the game is not yet complete.

This project is a mix of an adventure game and nonograms, which are logic puzzles where you fill in cells on a grid based on numerical clues. The game is designed to be played on the original Game Boy console hardware, using the GB Studio engine, which allows for easy development of retro-style games.

To start the game development we started by creating a top-down adventure game with simple player movement and dialogue interactions inside basic rooms. The player can interact with objects and NPCs to gather clues and solve puzzles. The nonogram puzzles are integrated into the game as a way to unlock new areas and progress the story.

To read more about this project development and description</a> please visit the GitHub repository and the itch.io page.

Conclusion

This project has been a great learning experience, and we are excited to keep working on it. The game is still in development, but we need to release it on August 31th. We are also looking for feedback and suggestions, so feel free to make a contribution or open an issue in the GitHub repository, leave a comment on the itch.io page, or just play the game and let us know what you think!

We FOSS!