Pixel VS Poly

I do have a love of old pixel art, especially as designed for the Gameboy, Gameboy Color, and Gameboy Advance, which differs from the pixel art of the SNES, or the NES, in that it was designed for an LCD screen where you could see the pixels, rather than a CRT which would blend them together. But it is not just aesthetic appreciation which causes me to love pixel art. It is also the things pixel art says.

A tile mapped world says “this world can be broad and expansive because it is built out of reusable components instead of bespoke ones. A tile mapped world says “you can dig on every ground square, instead of just in designated digging spots.” It also says “I’m not going to pretend this is a movie instead of a video game.”

These statements have been made by 3D graphics; notably Minecraft. And so, as I play around in 3D, I’m trying to do so in a way where I keep those implicit statements pixel art gives. I’m intentionally creating a tilemapped world.

In fact, at the moment, I’m rebuilding Prelude to Nightmare in a different art style. If it works, I can expand it out to an RPG with robots, or whatever I like.

This little tech demo only proves that the tiles are possible. The movement code is no good, though I’m pleased with how well it works for all that. And I think I’m okay with this look. It’s low poly; near the amount of polygons a playstation or n64 game would have, though I’m using that budget not as an aesthetic, but as a way to keep complexity low. It isn’t pretending to be a movie. But it does have potential to look nice with a little polish. An adventure game or JRPG from this perspective would be, in my view, a worthy accomplishment. So I’m going to make myself some nuggets, and forge ahead.

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Changing my mind on art style yet again. Except not.

So this month I’ve basically settled on spending the next month storyboarding kids’ books, and working on my RPG engine in between, with individual kids’ books becoming the project of focus if I like the storyboard a month after the storyboard is finished.

How, then, shall the RPG look? Well, I have three basic options: 3D Low Poly. Hand Drawn. And Pixel Art.

Each of these art styles has advantages and disadvantages.

• Low Poly: More intrinsically dynamic worldbuilding. I can make worlds with multiple layers and not worry about implementing a hacky Z dimension. I can implement jumping in a top-down game. I can switch between top-down and side-scrolling perspectives on a whim, keeping all the assets. Also, it’s more marketable than a pixel art game. Consumers repeatedly express irritation that every indie game and its brother is pixel art. When I make Drone Fu, switching parts for characters as you customize your robot will be super simple. However, I’ve done almost nothing in 3D, and so my experience level is much, much smaller.
• Hand Drawn: My hand-drawn art is simply the most unique and therefore the most marketable. Building worlds that look like an illustration is intrinsically rewarding, and rewarding for the player to look at as well. And if I get paid to make games, I have more time to make games.
• Pixel Art: I can produce it much faster. I personally love it as much as I love the other styles, even if customers as a rule don’t. The more games I make, the better my games will be, and producing games in pixel art allows me to finish more projects faster, even if I don’t get paid. Moreover, tilemap based games allow for a more malleable world, and the idea of letting the player dig every ground tile, chop down every tree, and so on pleases me.

In all three cases, I’m keeping the hand-drawn RPG interface I’ve been building. Reason being, it works in all three cases. Suppose I make half a dozen JRPGs in a gameboy color pixel style, and then use them to do a team up with a writer, but we create a hand drawn, or 3D RPG. The actual graphics used for the interface will have to be swapped out to fit the game in question, but the HD style and logic will not.

It works least well with pixel art. But it works well enough that I am content.

And that last scenario is kind of the deciding factor for me. I think if I build a dozen small RPGs fast, I will grow as a game maker and create something truly special. If I pick the hand drawn style, I’ll make two, maybe three games total in my whole life, and its a roll of the dice if any of them are truly great. And since I’ve decided that the books are my thing, it’s okay for me to prioritize gameplay and personal evolution over marketability.

So I guess in the manly month of March, I will be making a gameboy RPG with an HD interface. On the side. After I’ve storyboarded a little.

The Price of RPGs 4

I’ve been building out a JRPG interface based on the Last Legend Zero prototype:

I’ve been playing Monster Crown.

It’s a self conscious monster taming game that tries to capture the magic that was in the first couple generations of Pokémon and has been largely missing since. And I think it’s a heroic effort.

I don’t think it’s worth the price of admission. If they fixed the bugs and cleaned up the interface, I would recommend it at $10. With all the glitches, I wouldn’t pay more than 5. But the creator is charging $20.

Now, the glitches feel like a man trying to bash together something in Unity who doesn’t really understand what he’s doing. So I have high hopes for the sequel. With the successful launch of his first game, the creator of Monster Crown will have improved as a game maker. The next one might be worth the price of admission.

And I do somewhat enjoy the exploration. And more than one of the monster designs hit for me, which is a hard ask. The combat system is a miss for me.

Monster Crown calls into question the chief weakness of the art style I used for the Last Legend Zero prototype, and am using for the current JRPG prototype: The beat-em-up perspective makes the world feel smaller, more bespoke. Square grass tile after square grass tile tells the player that the world is huge and allows for wild possibilities like cutting down trees and burning bushes. Bespoke assets tell the player that the world is small, hand crafted, and unalterable.

This looks cool and all, but you know the terrain might as well be made out of adamantium. The world is a fixed thing you cannot really affect.

And yeah, in Monster Crown, and the old Pokémon games for that matter, the repeated trees may as well be made out of adamantium. Whereas I’d like to make a game where you can just burn random bushes.

So… that top-down, RPG perspective calls to me.

Now, technically, I don’t have to scrap any of my work except for the Wren Sprite. Nothing I’ve done so far dictates the perspective of the 2D world. I could just start building out my own retro gameboy style universe and slap the existing buttons and doodads over the top as-is. But should I?

Should I redo my interface work in pixel art to make it fit? Build an HD top-down perspective? Or just keep the work I’ve got and trust that it’ll look fine as an HD interface over a LD world? Well, let’s stick my text boxes on top of that Monster Crown screenshot and see.

… you know what? I think it’s fine. Good enough for me.

And I’ve half a mind to make it a monster taming game as well. Take the therians of Warsprite and put them in an adventure. Why not?

Addendum:

Yeah. I’m okay with this.

The Price of RPGs 3

… I think I’m going to work on some fairy tales. Finally do that version of the 3 Pigs I’ve been threatening; bring it full circle. Or remaster Jack and the Beanstalk in my style. And in between, I think I’m going to start building out a JRPG; see what happens.

Captain’s Log m•5•6•1: Embracing

Took my month off. Tried to storyboard a kids’ book. Didn’t work. Did a game jam. Did okay.

Here’s kind of where I’m at.

I decided to roll my game dev back to the gameboy-esque standards. I’ve been slowly rebuilding Prelude to Nightmare using all the knowledge I’ve gained about Godot since I made it. Here’s where it was…

.. and here’s where it is..

A long bit away from where it was, but with numerous improvements. Things I’m doing “right” that were being done in a hacky way before, but I didn’t know.

Quite the whirlwind tour to come back to the beginning. But to my way of thinking, if it took Yacht Club Games a bazillion years to finish all their Shovel Knight promises, and they have way more skill and experience than me, then… 🤷

Time to start biting off smaller bites or something.

Meanwhile, since zero of this process is making something new, my brain has been freed up to consider what I should make. Refactor the kids’ book ideas. That sort of thing. And I keep circling back to John Michael Jones.

Maybe Wren would be better off motivated as a monster hunter/collector than a bounty hunter. Maybe that would fix her story. But I’m already exploring that angle for Princess Pluot. I don’t want the characters to overlap! Maybe I can do an action story for Jump the Shark. But why not do the action story with John Michael instead? Man, I wish there were more stories that had X, or Y. John Michael has these things!

One of the things I was worried about was trying to take the story of a kid getting sucked into a game, and making a game look like the story. For instance, I gave these trees zigzag bark and square moss and flowers that aren’t physically connected to themselves all as ways of signaling that John Michael is in a digital world..

But good old pixel art does that just fine.

Indeed, I originally planned to have the comic be black and white in the real world, and colored in the game, as a nod to Wizard of Oz. But I want to tell the opposite story from Oz. I want kids to enjoy the fantasy of being sucked into a video game, but then also have it feel natural when the characters in the game say, “Ah, but in real life I have friends and steak and wind in my hair.” So the “real” world should have color, and the game should be black and white.

So yesterday I colored John Michael’s first comic, and then made a proper cover for the first arc of the series.

So that’s where I am. Gearing up to release John Michael Jones Fights a Dragon. Simultaneously developing a Hat Trick game. And trying hard to nail it down to just those two things for now.

Captain’s Log m4•q1: Will o’ the WIPs…

Wren Valen draft is stuck. The problem with continuing a story that is over a decade old is that my plans don’t all work anymore. Looks like I may have to redo it from scratch. Sad, because this moment:

..is both the place where the train jumped off the ancient rails, and the thing I am most committed to keeping.

Right. Set it aside. Draft something else. Just keep going until I have one or more actual books to make, right? Sure. Maybe.

Looking back at the last couple months:

I mean, yeah the first one is nicer to look at. It’ll sell better, probably. And it takes no more time to make than something similarly detailed in pixel art.

But a heck of a lot less than something like the second, which also looks nice, will print nice, and can be assembled in a fraction of the time.

More to the point, if I’m making a comic about John Michael and his friends falling into a game world, it works better if the game world look like a game.

Along those lines, while trying to dig myself out of my book plot corner, I’ve been pondering what sort of game I’d like to make if I were making games just for the heck of it, and not as some sort of massive multimedia project.

Go back on the road to 8 Lives Left/Breath of the Gameboy?

Action platformer with Mega Man influences?

Digital Monsters on your phone?

Bring back the RPG/Adventure engine?

Right now I’m sleep depraved. I’m leaning towards a turn based RPG with influences from Link’s Awakening, Mario RPGs, and games nobody’s heard of any more like The Magic Candle. But where this ship goeth, nobody knoweth. Except God. Who may well will that it run aground.

Just wanted to toss my thoughts out there before retiring to ponder.

Captain’s Log M4•62: Aftermath

I’ve been on the same project too long.

2 months building a comic and tinkering with an attached game, for production in the Mad Christian Mondays newsletter. My tolerance for a project maxes out at 2 months. I find one month is optimal.

Worse still, I’ve been trying to develop a comic/game for Mad Christian Mondays since December. It’s only the current iteration that has had 2 months of effort put into it. The project as a whole is closer to four.

It isn’t right. With medication, it is possible, but even with medication, I am better served having multiple projects that I switch between. I need to harness my ADHD, and reserve fighting it for critical moments.

I lost a week at the end of March to the burnout. On a whim, I joined Ludum Dare 50 just to try and clear my mind. And my mind has been cleared. John Michael Jones needs to be set aside for a month or two. Which doesn’t mean I can’t launch the comic and run it — I have more than a month’s worth of work built up. Only that it needs to go on the back burner for a while.

In the mean time, I made a game with frogs in it.

Ludum Dare 50. Waterlogged. It’s nothing special. But, for something thrown together by two guys over three days, it is something decidedly okay.

As I push John Michael on to the back burner, I want to note a couple of things for the record:

1. Right now, the game engine uses HD, hand-drawn vector art. But the comic will put John & friends into a digital world. I half plan to use the HD art game engine for the game world, but a part of me wants to use either pixel art or low-poly 3D art, to really sell that the world is different.
2. 
   Here are two vector drawings of characters. The first uses a technique where I draw with a tablet and try to imitate my pen and brush inking, then convert this raster image into a rough vector approximation, color, and assemble it. The second, I draw the image in Inkscape directly. The first is slightly closer to how I like my art to look; the second is significantly easier to tweak.
   If I am making vector game art, I need to pick a lane and stick to it. But I like them both.

But, so long as I am working on a different project, I don’t need to make that choice right away. And, after all, I may decide upon mulling it over to stick to pixel art for the game world/game engine. Who knows at this point? All I know is I need to let it simmer for a month or two.

What should I do this month? Well, a few ideas occur to me.

1. Could spend a month trying to learn a language. I am currently tinkering with Toki Pona, and I have tinkered with Japanese for years. Sure, if I go all in on Japanese for a month, I won’t suddenly know the language. But I will be better at it than I was before.
2. Always wanted to make a stenotype minigame to teach myself stenotype. It would be a useful product, and would benefit my various life goals.
3. It’s been a few months since I worked on Hat Trick. Some Hat Trick comics, stopping once a week to ink a John Michael Jones comic, might be a good plan.
4. The Therian Virtual Pet is wildly different from the John Michael Jones stuff. But therians play into that story, so if I started work on it, I would come back to John Michael Jones in a couple months having worked on something different, but still having made progress.
5. My wife occasionally reminds me that she would enjoy more adventures of Wren Valen the Flying Privateer.

There is something that I also want to note down. When I did the Ludum Dare challenge, I initially published Waterlogged as a Windows game because I already had experience doing so, and I didn’t want to get stuck in unfamiliar territory right before the competition ended.

But once I had done that, I re-published it as an HTML5 game that can be played in the browser. And it worked so smoothly and so well I was caught off guard. I think I may want to publish more things this way. Make comics that are animations in game engines, and publish them to itch.io.

It’s not any one specific project at the moment. It’s just a thought that needs further thinking.

Captain’s Log M1•O1: I dunno

At the start of last week, I got Spaz into the game engine. Everything seems to be going about as swimmingly as it can.

But I promised the Mad⳩ Crew I’d take a look at the comic when my “two-month” game was done. And since Last Legend Zero is done with me pretending it’s in production, when it’s actually still in the tinkering phase, I turned to the comic.

I was recently reminded that Isekai Is My Favorite genre, from Narnia, to Oz, to Digimon. No, I haven’t seen any of the popular anime, That Time I Got Hit By A Truck And Woke Up in a Fantasy World Where Girls Like Me, and I don’t intend to. I found the first two episodes of Sword Art Online sufficiently tiring to repel me from that particular formula. But Portal Fantasy is my jam. Why not have the escapism be actual escapism?

The first night my mother was home, instead of sleeping, I played various old vidya to try and drum up inspiration for dialing back Last Legend. What I got instead was a notion:

A man sees a bunch of people hunched over their phones. Feels his family has spent too much screen time. Decides to go camping. He drags his kid away from some vidya. Kid reluctantly goes along. At the campsite, finds a retro console in the basement or attic of a cabin, or in the woods or something, and gets sucked into a video game world.

It’s not the first time the idea of isekai’ing someone into a retro game world has occurred to me. John Michael Jones was made to go there at one point…

Well, what I have for John Michael and his family at present doesn’t really fit the story idea. But then, I’m not a huge fan of the story I’ve got going for them, either.

So, I’ve begun toying with the idea of taking this idea, and adapting John and his family into it. Fleshing out situations, world settings, and the like. And making concept art to go with it…

I still haven’t got anything solid. I have some notions that, if I keep pushing them, will turn into a setting that might make a good comic strip or storybook.

So now I’m at a sort of crossroads. I can spend February creating Spaz Invaders. I can spend February developing the comic. Both are good to do. Both feed into each other. I am going to do both. The question is which I will do first.

I’m going to put a bit of thought into it today. This week, I’ll be getting my papers in order, though, and February will be a new year.

Captain’s Log M1•G3: Smaller Bites of the Elephant

So, a few things have changed. Now that my mother’s home, someone needs to stay on call throughout the night in case she needs anything. My sleep schedule still hasn’t recovered from being an overnight stock boy last summer, so it was easiest for me to make the shift.

More to the point of these logs: looking at what I’ve done in the last week and what I aim for this week. You already have my notes on the matter. The fact of the matter is that I bit off a larger project than I expected, and I also put a project into production when it should have remained in the tinkering stage.

All is not lost. In fact, very little is lost. 70% of the work I did for Last Legend Zero can be retooled for any game I want to make. Of the other 30%, most of it is still useful for multiple game projects I’d like to get to, and all of it can come up again if I take Zero off the back burner and put it on the front.

So let’s scale all the way back and start with a shmup. I know, I’ve said I’d rather do anything but another shmup, but that’s no longer true. I’m willing to use it as a stepping stone to larger games. Let’s take the work I’ve done on palettes, screen sizes, controls, menus, and so forth, and reuse it to finally finish my old project Spaz Invaders.

We’ll keep the art style consistent, consider this all one project, and keep on trucking.

When I finished the brainstorm, I put together Spaz, used him and myself to scale a coin:

.. and then got to work building the basic shmup movement animations for Spaz.

He still needs to be able to spit fire, hover for aim mode, charge his breath, take damage, and die. Ideally, I’d also have his spines sway in the breeze while he glides. But animating a character like this has been very enjoyable. I’d forgotten how much I love the absurdity of smears.

This week I’ve got to take a couple days and get back into the good graces of the paperwork brigade. Hopefully I’ll finish in a day or two, and have Spaz up and running before the end of the week, but I make no promises.

M1F 3

The following is copied and pasted from my analysis of my progress on Last Legend Zero.

ID	Notion
1	The epiphany I had for the Last Legend Comic, M1E20, is an excellent direction.
2	However there are several problems with Last Legend Zero.
2.1	Most notably, development is not proceeding at the predicted pace:
2.1.1	I cannot complete a game of which I am proud in the remaining 2 weeks of January.
2.1.2	I would want a couple of weeks per planned region (3 to 7 regions intended) plus time to market and polish besides.
2.1.3	I am also not satisfied that the gameplay is, by itself, satisfying, which demands more prototyping.
2.1.4	If I were to force myself to pinch off a technically complete, but hastily cut off game, with zero testing and polishing, I might just barely make the March 15th release date at this rate.
2.1.5	This I must not do. I must never again “produce” games in which I take no pride.
2.1.5.1	(I may, of course, make rapid prototypes, but that is another matter)
2.1.6	Therefore, to complete the game properly would take 14 weeks, not counting testing and polish. This would indicate a May or June release at best.
2.1.7	I have already put a solid 4 weeks of development into it.
​	Moreover…
2.2	I do not have more than the broad strokes of the story in mind.
2.2.1	I lack important details like the antagonist, and importantly, the ending.
2.2.2	This is a big deal. Without a complete draft, a project must not go into production.
2.2.3	Last Legend Zero is still in the tinkering phase. It is improper to give it a release date.
2.2.4	This should have been recognized and acknowledged from the outset.
3	These combined issues have implications for the Legend Game Tower.
3.1	If I am going to make a 2-month game, then a 4 month game using the 2-month game as a foundation, &c, as planned, the points under 2.1 indicate that it cannot be Last Legend Zero, but must be a smaller game.
3.1.1	It has to be smaller than a point-and-click adventure game, yet move us towards my ultimate JRPG-centric goal.
3.2	Nor, per 2.2, can I justly say I have begun Production on any game if I yet lack mechanics and extensive knowledge of the minimum world of that game.
3.2.1	I may justly say I am tinkering or prototyping. And these are fine and necessary.
3.3	Thus, to make a “2-month” game, I need to choose a first brick in the tower that is small enough to make in two months, and sufficiently well-conceived that it may swiftly move from Tinkering to Production.
4	This does not mean my last month’s work was for naught.
4.1	All of it can be used eventually.
4.2	Most of it can be used immediately. Several components are genre agnostic:
4.2.1	The HD interface/pixel world
4.2.2	The palette shader
4.2.3	The options menu and boot system
4.2.4	The State Machinery
4.3	There are some caveats:
4.3.1	Dialogue is vestigial in many genres I like.
4.3.1.1	However, as much as I enjoy retro mime, if my game lacks in dialogue, it is not aiming well toward my goals.
4.3.2	The mouse/touch control scheme is low priority or nearly useless in every genre I’m aiming towards except point & click adventures and JRPGs
​	This, then, frames the question:
5	What can I proudly build in a single month on the foundation I’ve laid for Last Legend Zero that moves me closer to the Legend Framework?
6	The answer will be small. Something on the scale of Pong, Breakout, or Space Invaders. My gut says it will have to be a Space Shooter.
6.1	I know I said I never wanted to make a Space Shooter again, but now, with the meds, I’m sure I can hack it, as long as it’s only the first step.
7	I have a handful of Space Shooter designs that will serve for a first brick.
7.1	Spaz Invaders is a good choice that admits almost instant work.
7.1.1	It has the advantage of allowing for an immediate platformer followup.
7.1.1.1	The world art thus generated would be well-suited to Last Legend material.
7.1.2	Spaz is sort of in Limbo because of his overlap with Jump the Shark
7.1.2.1	Perhaps echoes of the same Chrononic Resonance.
7.2	Candy Raid is almost as good as Spaz Invaders.
7.2.1	Obviously, with two published games starring Candy, this takes advantage of existing momentum the best.
7.2.2	But I’m really very done with Candy.
7.3	The space shooter starring Angel from Crossover Arcade. Meteoroid.
7.3.1	More story-driven. Plays into future ensembles. Utilizes dialogue.
7.3.2	Suffers from being more story-driven. This game, also has problem 2.2 to contend with.
8	At this moment, I am leaning so hard towards Spaz Invaders that unless something else occurs to me, I am just about guaranteed to choose it.