New Game - Escape The Pit
After spending 5+ years working on my biggest long term project Crystal Slaves I was pretty burned out and spent a year or so not doing much game development stuff. There's a longer post in there somewhere about it I haven't thought about writing, but basically in the midst of burnout I made and released a bitsy game Flame in a single sitting to get something out. Around December or so I had downloaded GBStudio again and thought about making a game with it. Called Escape The Pit
My main goal was to do very little in terms of implementation and technical work - no new mechanics other than what GB Studio comes with out of the box. I settled on making a little platformer, sort of in the vein of Jump King, and the idea of having to get out from a deep pit sort of started to form. I was stuck on trying to find asset packs that I could start prototyping with, but then I thought "I should make these myself" and eventually bought Asprite after trying to get various image editors to work with pixel sprites and indexed colors didn't work.
Asprite is the right tool for the job and came with a lot of good features that were helpful, like visible grids and being able to pick colors from an index. I got to work making a basic player and platform tileset. Importing the map into GBStudio and setting up collisions and map entry/exit was very straightfoward. so from there I got to making a test map to run around in. Once I had the "art asset pipeline" set I could generally make a level in about an hour.
I really wanted to make something in the spirit of Far Away Time's post about making good small games , especially after doing so many complicated and large scale productions. I only really worked on the game in my spare hours at coffee shops on my aging Surface Pro 3. This was mainly to keep myself from burning out. I settled on 9 levels, with 3 levels each using the same tileset. I wanted to do a flying level for the finale but I didn't want to...implement enemies or shooting lol...so you just fly for a little bit and the game ends.
Making tiny pixel art and decorating levels was fun. I did feel a bit insecure that I wasn't "making something new" and instead was making a baby platformer for babies. I even abandoned the conceit that you could fall to the bottom of the game world from the top. I did add small cutscenes inbetween some levels where the protagonist says things to himself. Mainly because it was funny.
GBStudio is really easy to work with if you have low expectations. I like the idea of being able to easily compile a Gameboy compatible rom without writing a single line of code. The suite of tools was easy to work with - I was even able to compose a simple song.