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.
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?
Jump the Shark & Paruvrew is the most polished book I’ve produced to date, and close to the quality level I’ve been hoping for from the first. However, it is the end of a long road. It would be good to summarize the lessons from each step down that road.
The Adventures of Jump the Shark and Sera Mermaid was my first foray into making kids’ books. I did not know whether I could, or whether I would be sufficiently pleased with the product. Therefore, I downloaded a book on how to make books on Amazon and followed its instructions, constructing the PDF on Canva. I worked hard to pander to my kid, so that if it all went sideways, at least I’d have one happy customer.
From it, I learned I needed to do heavy work on my color palette, I wanted to have more control over the creation process than Canva afforded me, I didn’t particularly like the 8.5″x11″ form factor.. and that I could do the work. I had that potential.
The Amazing Alphabeasts was my second foray. This time I tried constructing a palette in advance, using Amazon’s preferred 6″x9″ form factor, creating an educational book, and crowdfunding it via Kickstarter.
From it I learned the color palette needed further tweaking, that Kickstarter is a viable platform for me (I reached 50% funded halfway through the campaign, but abandoned it due to personal life events), and that I never again want to make an ‘edutainment’ book.
Hat Trick 1: the Death of Arthur utilized a template, and tested making a black and white book. I learned the relative costs of producing black and white verses color. I also learned that cutting off a story halfway and promising a sequel is foolish. To this day, I haven’t finished out the story promised in Hat Trick 1. I surely must, though, to reclaim my honor.
Jump the Shark & The Pirate Princess tested a new palette, and with only a tiny number of tweaks the one I use to this day. It tested a formula I mutated from several functional book-writing formulae, with an eye to making bedtime stories. The formula worked fine, but I realized I needed to storyboard my books as I write them from this point forth. It also started life as a digital popup book built in Unity,
Bunny Trail Junction is webcomic hub that to this day hosts John Michael Jones Gets a Life. For about 4 months, I kept it running daily comics, publishing black and white monthlies in paper on Amazon. I learned that I did not like the 3-panel format I’d come up with, that for all its advantages it was more trouble than its worth on most websites, I furthered my skills at inking with a brush, and I realized that small children looking for children’s books aren’t liable to be found on random webcomic sites.
Awesome Moments 1: The Kings of Earth was my first Bible Story book, and my first book produced on my display tablet. I learned that inking on a display tablet is tedious; I need to pencil and color on the tablet, then ink on paper with ink. I also learned that if I come to the end of my first month of working on a book, and feel burnt out, I should simply set it aside for a month and come back to it. I will get it done faster that way than if I try to push forward. I also devised a watercolor-based workflow for coloring in ClipStudio that I didn’t get to use for Awesome Moments but did get to use for…
Jump the Shark & Paruvrew, which tried out the new size format Bunny Trail Junction pushed me toward, the workflow I settled on after Pirate Princess and refined in Awesome Moments, and the watercolors. And it’s so far beyond the other books in terms of workmanship that I almost want to redo all the others. In fact, I do want to redo the others, I just don’t think I have the attention span to produce the same book twice.
The process is as follows:
Create a rough outline of the book. Clearly define the hero and villain and their goals. Figure out the climax. This step takes a day or two.
Storyboard the book. Create low resolution doodles and coloring, and a first draft of the text in Clip Studio. This step takes about a month, but may be faster, and doesn’t absorb all of my time that month, or even most of it. I can storyboard a book while working on another project. It is risky, however, to dial in and storyboard the book faster, so that it is done in a couple of days.
Produce the print test. Load the storyboard pictures into Scribus, and write the second draft into that Scribus file. Produce a cover, and send it off to Amazon for a printing proof. This process takes a day or two.
Wait a month or so. Do something else. Leave the book alone.
Read the print test out loud, and mark corrections in it for the final edit. This takes about ten minutes a reading, since they are kids’ books.
Produce the final illustrations. This takes a day per illustration or more, and ends up being about a month of work.
Done.
So, the process in total takes about 3 months. However, it is not three months of work. The storyboarding month can be spent producing storyboards for multiple books, or producing a storyboard in the morning, and then working on a game or a comic book. And the need for me to wait a month between spitballing the book and producing the final illustrations isn’t spent doing nothing. So realistically, if I made books full-time, never worked on comics or games, I could put out at least 4, and as many as 10 a year.
Now, I’ll probably aim for that 4. Aiming at the 10 is a bad idea because with my ADHD, not jumping from project to project is actually more inefficient. My mind rebels against focusing on one thing much longer than a month. It took me four months to do a month and a half of illustration for Awesome Moments. And that’s with industrial strength stimulants. If I had spent the intervening two months working on something else, Awesome Moments would have been done at the same time, better, more polished, and I would have the intervening two months’ work to show for it.
But aiming higher, maybe trying for six, might be a good thing. I have hundreds of stories from my childhood that should be dusted off, improved, and released (with, of course, the caveat of I don’t like to write the same story twice). And the jump in quality from book to book is quite high. With a little more practice, I might start turning out books that are more than just idle amusements.
My wife took me to the new Dreamworks flick for my birthday. And it reminded me of the importance even of my idle amusements.
I’ve discovered in my dotage that I’d rather like to be the abominable tribrid of Lewis, Seuss, and Eastman and Laird. This pleases me. It suits me. And there is a call for it.
Focusing on it, as much as I can focus on any thing, is no bad thing.
No bad thing at all. The Mouse is coming out with its latest desecration of its former desecration of Hans Andersen’s Little Mermaid. I could furnish a less slick, but more wholesome and more true to the OG story. I did a poster of 3 ninja pigs versus a samurai wolf. That possibility deserves exploration. The Alphabeasts may be retired as an educational tool, but as a setting to improve upon Star Trek, they are quite well fit. And of course, I can always work on Hat Trick. Get some actual stories out there.
If you look at the project page, you will see that Jump the Shark and Paruvrew is finished. For funsies, I’d like to post a fun two-page-spread from storyboard to draft to final.
And to show how far my process has evolved, here’s the same image side-by-side with a comparable image from Pirate Princess:
The evolution to my process that has happened over the last two books is immense, and worth discussing in and of itself. That’s going to get a separate blog post of its own, which will be linked here. I’m very excited about it. I can’t wait to hold the finished book in my hands. And I’m subtly excited about making more books. Perhaps lots more. Perhaps a book every other month. But perhaps not. Even though every book I release is better than the last, and even the first was good enough that I thought, “man I should have started this years ago,” I don’t think I have the will to make book after book after book. Even though most of my work on video games is inconclusive, I think I have to do it, in between books, to keep my ADHD in check.
Which brings me to February. February is the month of my birth. So February is the month I sit back, look over what happened in the previous year, and try and figure out what I’m going to aim for. It is a month for reflection, and I log out of Twitter to repristinate my thought. And that deserves its own blog post, which I’ll link here after I write it.
But I get grumpy if I’m not progressing some project. So most months, my policy is to pick a project on the first of the month and ride it out to the end of the month. But in February, my policy is to switch whenever I feel like it. Give the ADHD full reign to remove all obstacles to musing. Embrace the chaos.
Towards the middle of last month, I was toying with my perennial RPG engine, and my current thoughts on that deserves a blog post of its own, which will be linked here. Towards the end, I was thinking of working on the Therian Virtual Pet, now renamed Warsprite. But as soon as I got into the month, I lost interest. Now, I’ve got 4, yes, 4, different platformer ideas vying for attention in my head.
And the work on Jump the Shark and Paruvrew and John Michael Jones Gets a Life has got me considering making more comics. Both reviving Re-Tail, reviving Hat Trick, and building out on my system of “game graphics” that can bring back regular Bunny Trail Junction comics. This topic deserves its own post as well, which will be linked here.
So this is a top-level hub for a series of in-depth brainstorms I intend to do over the next week or two. And all of them have the additional caveat of I’m trying to sort out a long term profitable career. In the arts. In the burgeoning age of AI democratization. My success is not urgent to me at the moment. I have a day job which feeds me and covers the bills, and permits me time and energy to put towards my projects. But the job will not last forever.
Awesome Moments has ground almost to a halt. Almost. I can get out an illustration a day most days of the week. I’m only 5 illustrations away from completion, so I’m going to keep pushing forward, but while I’ve debated making a final super push of two or three illustrations a day (these only take me a couple hours to do), I’ve decided no. I’m going to give every picture my full attention, and if I try to force it I’ll be tempted to get sloppy.
The thing that has absorbed my attention this week has been trading cards. I’ve liked cards my whole life. I thought they were fun in the Amber Chronicles. I loved them in Digimon Season 3 (known as Tamers to us Digimon snobs). I didn’t really get into Yugioh or Magic the Gathering, but I wanted to.
We closed out last week just a little shy of all the needed gameplay (namely, going places, clicking on things, and having my scripts play as a result). Thanks to a helpful plugin called Dialogic, I had no need to make my own dialogue system…
And Godot comes with pathfinding out of the box, albeit buggy pathfinding, which may mean I need to apply a couple bandaids of my own.
The hope was to have all the gameplay systems done that week, spend this week making a Complete Game, and then the rest of December and January expanding the game.
As of the close of today, I have reached the point I aimed to hit last Friday which is… not great, but better than my other missed targets by a lot. Crosswiring multiple forms of input in Godot proved challenging, but not nearly so challenging as Unity. With Dialogic coming with choice boxes, and me spending my first couple days implementing palette management and a custom animation system suited to my prejudices, my Godot RPG Engine is now more capable than my Unity RPG Engine, and I have less experience with Godot on the whole.
Here’s my sweet, sweet radial menu radial menuing.
But that is not (for me) the most exciting bit of news. Unhappy with my test graphics, I began the process of doing research and mockups into the sorts of graphics I’d like to do in my game. I have wavered between my hand-drawn style and pixel art in the past. And one of the reasons is I can make competent pixel art, but not unique pixel art.
Until now. The dam broke.
That’s a mockup, but that’s the style. It means the characters (except for the piqha) need to get larger, but I’ve realized I can bring the feel of my brush into the pixels. In fact, I’ve done it before:
I am now genuinely excited for the art I am going to bring to this game, and to future books and comics, even if it is low-res adventures.
When I ended the week without reaching my goal, the plan changed. This week is no longer for finishing, but for building. Next week is not for finishing because of Christmas. The last week of December is now for finishing. But that’s fine. I went for two months so I would have that space to work in.
So this week, the plan is to build out from this foundation. Get the game looking interesting.
Next week, I intend to work on it some, but not a ton, thanks to Christmas.
And the week after that is a race to make it a complete game. That is, having the win or lose conditions, the music, the options menus, the title screens, and so on.
Usually I post all this stuff to Twitter as I do it, but ever since I hit on the art direction, I’ve been holding off. I want my next salvo to hit hard, with lots of the new art to gawk at.
According to schedule, this week is supposed to be the first full week of development on Last Legend Zero, in which basic gameplay is established. Next week, then, is the week of “finishing” Zero, that is, ensuring it is a finished game, so that anything added or refined during the remainder of the development time is literally added or refined. However, yesterday I had a mild cold, and today I slept in due to the some moderate symptoms.
Additionally, I spent the last week developing a workflow that would create HD graphics that I could then reuse in books. However, there are still several advantages to using pixel art, and I recently was reminded of them.
At the moment, most of my work can be re-purposed easily. Turning my HD palette shader into a pixel art palette shader will only make it simpler, not more complex. The palette management system I’ve devised for the one shader will work for the other. I’ve made almost no graphics for the game.
So, let us weigh the pros and cons of making a game in both pixel art and HD graphics with these emoji: 👾🖋️
👾 Pixel Art is Future Proof: As screen resolutions improve, pixel art will continue to look just the same.
👾 Pixel Art Implies More Gameplay: The more bespoke an asset is, the less you can do with it. The more reusable the assets are, the bigger the world feels.
👾 Pixel Art is More Gameplay: Pixel art takes less time to make, meaning more of my time and money budgets can be devoted to the actual game.
👾 Pixel Art Runs on Potatoes: The lower the resolution of the active area, the less work the computer has to do, the wider the range of machines that can run your game.
👾 Pixel Art Palette Controls are Tighter: Instead of having to adjust several related colors into several other related colors, I can simply turn one color into one other color. This allows for shading, and for larger palettes if I so desire.
🖋️ HD Art Is More Distinctive: While pixel art styles vary, especially as you go up in resolution, unless you try to adopt a fairly extreme style, your game will not stand out from other pixel art games. An HD hand-drawn game will always look like Hollow Knight to some degree, but it will have more of an identity of its own than a pixel-art game.
👾/🖋️ Pixel Art Is Considered “Cheap”: You have to charge less for the same amount of effort if you make your art pixelly. Although with the current plan, we’re already talking price ranges that fit pixel art just fine, so this isn’t decisive for one or the other.
👾 If we do pixel art in 3D, we can replace it with HD art at a later date: This means committing to pixel art is not committing against HD art.
👾🖋️ HD Art works better for illustration, but not decisively: There are plenty of kids’ books and shows that use illustration styles that seem sloppier or otherwise less good styles. And, in fact, if I make children’s books with pixel art illustrations, I will be doing something that few people do. It will be a distinct book style.
🖋️ Pixel Art Implies a Computer/Virtual World: While I do want to mix Digimon, Wreck-It-Ralph, and Tron for a virtual setting, and both art styles can be used to mean both kinds of world, HD art is better at representing both realities.
👾 I have better tools for animating Pixel Art: Aseprite is simply better than any HD animation tool I own. It is certainly better than animating by pencils and guesswork.
🖋️ I’ve Always Wanted to Make a Hand-Drawn LookingGame: And here’s where I trot out the classic pen test of piqha:
🖋️ Godot Does Not Gracefully Translate Inputs Into Differently Scaled Viewports: In Unity, I could set one camera to a pixel art scale, and one to an HD scale, and mix and match the styles, which is how I made this lovely thing: Mixing and matching scales like this doesn’t work out of the box in 2D in Godot AFAIK. Although, this isn’t a total win for hand drawn art, as it does work out of the box if I do a 3D world:
🖋 Piqha Just Work Better Hand Drawn.: Here I want to do a compare and contrast between the above picture and one I generated in Aseprite that, for some reason, refuses to export correctly. But it refuses to export correctly, so I can’t.
So it looks at this point like Pixel Art is winning by a wide margin, especially if I use a 3D world.
This week’s task, as I said, is to get the basic gameplay up and running. Next week’s task is to turn it into a complete game. Time to buckle down!
Update:
I got scale-mixing working in Godot and it wasn’t even hard.
As of Captain’s Log LB•11: The Primacy of Vidya, I have decided that henceforth instead of making comics, games, videos, or books as the fit takes me, I will be making games and then deriving comics, books, and videos from the games as much as possible.
It’s no good for some things, like Awesome Moments, obviously. In that specific case, I am content. Awesome Moments is a record for my own children, and I feel a little odd about making it a product. But I do need to make a product.
I’m working using a concept/business model I am calling the Game Tower.
Game Towers
A Game Tower is a game development technique wherein you make a miniature game that is a Complete Game that implements a core mechanic of some larger game you would like to make. Then you release and sell that game. Then, on top of that miniature game, you build a larger miniature game that has an additional component. In this way, you build a tower that grows towards the dream game you wish to make, while also increasingly funding that game and expanding your track record.
Note LA•S9
I have discussed before how I find dismal projections of how little money indie game developers make to be encouraging. Partly because I’m old poor, so a coder’s “I could never live on this” is easily 50% more than I can hope for as a Lowes Greeter. But partly because of the way Game Towers work. The projections in question assume you are marketing from square one each time, but every brick in a Game Tower helps sell the brick below and the brick above.
I have two Game Towers in the running. A JRPG Tower, which we’ve spoken of and…
The one I’ve chosen, Game Tower Awakening, is building a foundation with my favorite games in mind, especially The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening for the Gameboy, with later influences from Megaman and Megaman X.
The first brick in that tower is familiarize myself with the Godot engine, try out some graphical and gameplay ideas, and see how that goes. And so I have done. Hat Trick: Prelude to Nightmare was made in Godot, tested the ideas, and is technically a Complete Game, even though it is not a good game.
Today’s Choice
Now, this is not the first game in the tower to be ‘financially viable’. Nor can I follow the proper methodology with this game, as making it has taught me several things I want to change on the ground floor. So after concluding I should focus on vidya, I debated two options:
Release the Proof of Concept with no real gameplay to the world and immediately begin working on the second brick.
Spend up to a week polishing the Proof of Concept so that it can be reasonably considered a real minigame.
The advantage of 1 is that it does a better job as a marketing tool. Hat Trick: Prelude to Nightmare was not meant to be a mere proof of concept. It was meant to market the Hat Trick comics on Bunny Trail Junction And it was meant to market the second brick. Right now, it’s not a good game. All it can really do is prove I can make certain things.
To make it a good minigame, I have a week or more of work ahead of me. Animating goblins, developing rudimentary AI, filling out the levels, changing the music at dramatically relevant times, and adding a bunch of satisfying beeps and swooshes to the menuing. This puts me a week or more further away from making the second brick. No big deal?
It would be good to do. I have learned a lot of stuff about Godot making this first game in the engine. There’s a bunch of things I want to do completely different now. And I know from experience that game dev will always be like this. If I start over, build a new foundation, by the time I get a game out of that, I will have a ton of stuff I’ll wish I’d done differently. Pushing forward to make the minigame a proper minigame would mean I begin work on it with even more notions of how I can do better.
But some of the changes I intend to make are fairly drastic.
Some Changes
For instance, I want to build my animation system differently so I can compartmentalize animations and reuse them between multiple characters. Oh, and here’s a big one.
I’m going to ditch 2D for 3D.
Not entirely. I still intend to use the same sprites and tiles. But I will do so in a manner reminiscent of Paper Mario or Octopath Traveler, albeit with an overhead perspective instead of a side-on perspective. So more of a Pokémon Black & White kind of look.
See, one of the things I love about Link’s Awakening is all the jumping. To add top-down platforming in 2D would be complex. I’d have to carefully consider how to emulate the third dimension. How to alter and sort the graphics as they get higher or lower. How to track which parts of the map are at which height.
If I just shift that gameplay into Godot’s 3D engine, I get all that stuff automatically.
And I can take a Link’s Awakening style adventure and make Megaman or Sonic levels by tipping the camera on its side a little.
And I suspect (I do not know, but I suspect) that Godot may succeed for me where Unity failed, allowing me to prototype gaming in pixel art, and then slip HD art with the same proportions in if I decide to make the game more ambitious.
Unity, I had such high hopes for you!
The Choice Revisited
Now, let’s take a quick look at Option 2: cut off my proof of concept where it is and begin building the second brick now.
If I am correct, I should hit a stage in developing the second game where I can take a couple of days, build out the first brick’s world and situation in the game in progress, and simply publish it in place of the proof of concept. That is, a month (hopefully less) into making the second brick, I can paint the second brick to look like the first brick, and get all the advantages of finishing the first brick first, as well as the advantages of cutting directly to the second brick.
So that’s my choice. Today or tomorrow, the Proof of Concept will be available for download on bunnytrail.itch.io/hattrick0 and then, later, when I can recreate it and more in the second brick engine, it will be swapped out.
The Second Brick
The Second Brick is a ninja stealth combat game where you play a snow leopard ninja my wife uses as her online avatar, sneaking around and killing therians. Tenchu Z in the Link’s Awakening engine. Aside from the meager marketing I manage on Twitter by my lonesome, this has the advantage that I can have her run betas on her Twitch streams, and enlist her fanbase in spreading the word.
The Third Brick…
I have many, many friends online who are writing excellent books and comics and drawing attention. Releasing the second brick is all the proof I need that I can turn one of these into a still bigger game. I have lots of ideas for several properties, but we will see who is amenable. With our audiences combined, the Third Brick will have an even greater reach.
And Beyond?
That JRPG Tower I was working on? The one that’s more marketable, has better storytelling potential and so forth than the Tower I’ve chosen to build just because I happen to like it more?
It may have very different gameplay than this Tower. But I might be able to take the work I do on graphics and dialogue and world representation, and use the same foundation for a second Game Tower.
Logic Monkey Media 