Its been almost 2 years since I released Flatwoods, how time flies. I had some free time today so I drew up this little picture to show how the game might look if I was to make it now with the way my art has evolved.

For those who are interested I am currently working on a new game called Shooty and the Catfish, you can follow its development here! Its coming along really well and I really cant wait to share it with the world! https://www.tumblr.com/blog/shootycatfishgame

I am also working on an animated short called Deep Water and you can follow its progress over here! https://www.tumblr.com/blog/visitorsfromdreams

DEVELOPMENT Pt03 - Fill the Garden  You cant just have a game with a main character that’s a Lemon, that would be silly, you need to surround him with other delicious fruits and vegetables as well. Well, surrounding Lemon might be a bit of a stretch, outside of Lemon, Flatwoods only ended up with an additional 3 characters.  First up we have Lime. Lemons little brother, Lime.

Because of course his name is Lime, he is a little Lemon so what else would he be called. Truth be told, Lime didn’t really have a lot to his character. I wanted people to know he was still very young, and I tried to convey that through the flavor text around him. He wets the bed, his shelves are full of children’s books and he has a photo album of his baby photos beside his bed. I find kids are pretty hard to write, they tend to be energetic and say cute things in real life, but how to really make them seem distinct, especially in a tiny role like this? I don’t know, I tried to give him at least one distinctive trait, he enjoys watching his brother get into trouble, but then again I guess most siblings do? Don’t they? Next we have Lemons mother, Clementine.

Clementine is the most under developed character in the game, I suck at writing female characters, this was my first time trying to in years, and to make it worse she kind of had to be a literal 50′s mother to make sense in the context of the game. This is an issue I am aware of and am really hoping to rectify in my next game Shooty and the Catfish, with Catfish hopefully being a more well rounded female character. There are illusions to Clementine being a single mother, there’s a photo of Lemons father hanging on the wall and he comments on how he hasn’t seen him in a long long time, so maybe he is off working or perhaps its something more serious, but either way, Clementine is just trying to do whats best for her kids. Lastly we have Mr Fisher...

DEVELOPMENT Pt02 - From These Seeds a Lemon Grows

So who do I make Flatwoods about? The original urban legend has a tonne of different people involved and I didn’t want to be using anyone’s real names. That said, one of the teens who allegedly saw the monster that night was called  Eugene 'Gene' Lemon, and when I saw that last name, I knew I had to use it. Of course in real life Eugene was a human, but due to the squat nature of most of my character designs, making Lemon into a... well... Lemon, made sense. In the urban legend Eugene was about 17 years old, and this is where I wanted to diverge a bit. I grew up as a kid in the country. Behind my parents home was a massive hill that had a plateau on top that seemed to go on forever. 

I spent a lot of time as a kid alone and exploring the forests, the more open areas, the dams, there was just a tonne to do and see up there. Despite the fact that I don’t think West Virginia and where I grew up in rural Australia have much in common, I wanted to try to make a game that in some way recaptured the feeling of exploring that environment as a kid, using the story of the Flatwoods Monster as a back drop. This is also why you as a player never know anymore than Lemon does in game, I feel like when I was a kid I would just find random things up on that hill and just make up my own stories about how they got there or what they were. This is what lead to the weird pieces of metal in the game. While I wouldn’t say I put much of myself into Lemon, I did want to make him relatable, especially to anyone who did similar things as a kid. Once I new the game was going to focus on Lemon, next up was the design. I actually started with the sprite first as it was the newest element to me in terms of experience. I wanted the game to have a Game Boy Color aesthetic (something I will talk about in a future post) and I wanted his sprite to be the same size as a standard sprite from say the Pokemon or Zelda series on Game Boy. This lead to his 16x16 design.

Once the sprite was finished (I don’t think I ever changed it from what was supposed to be the first draft...) it was time to design him for what would later turn out to be the animated cutscenes. While I only ever really did one rough piece of concept art, it was enough to give me a rough idea of what he would look like through the game. I have never really been great at drawing the same character the same way twice and it really shows in the animated scenes for Flatwoods. I don’t his animation is on model once, and im fine with that.

I was pretty happy with the initial design, it was perhaps a little plain, but it was a good starting point. Outside of a couple anonymous messages telling me I only drew “mayonnaise characters”, a term I had to look up because I was unfamiliar with (and a rather odd claim against someone who draws mostly odd colored monsters and Muppet type characters) his design was relatively well received. With just a small amount of refinement we ended up with a very polished iteration as you see below.

By this point I would say the design was 90% there. Once animation started I realized I was using a more rough edged aesthetic on the line work, so I had to go back and redesign Lemon slightly for the portraits. His nose was the only other big change from this design to the final design.

Well, its been a little over a week since Flatwoods was released, and for the most part I couldn’t be happier with how things turned out. Things didn’t go perfectly, and I definitely had some things pointed out to me that I will take on board in future projects, but on the whole I feel like Flatwoods release (more so than its development in a lot of ways) was a great experience. That being the case, I thought it was time to do a Post-mortem on the game, and the experience of actually making the game. This would be one hell of a huge post, so instead I will be releasing it in small chunks over the next... however many days it takes to write it... So where to begin. Well, I guess the best place to start would be the games development itself. DEVELOPMENT Pt01 - Seeds of an Idea Flatwoods was originally intended to be a short film, but I think its origins go back further than that. Back in 2012 I had started work on preproduction on an animated series called “Shooty and the Catfish” for the youtube channel Happy Hour, this was eventually dropped and picked up by Cartoon Hangover who developed it for a number of months with me before the whole thing was dropped due to changes in the Youtube landscape. You might be wondering what that has to do with a game like Flatwoods, but in essence, the project had an episode dedicated to the Flatwoods Monster. Not just as a tribute to the cryptid, but it also dealt with similar themes to the sequence in The Legend of Zelda: Majoras Mask which also happened to feature the Flatwoods Monster (or something very much inspired by it). I wouldn’t say it was intended to be a parody so much as a homage or tribute, as the monsters design is iconic and has been referenced in a tonne of media over the years. Fast forward to 2015 and I am trying to work a lot of these Flatwoods Monster ideas from Shooty and the Catfish into a standalone short, and thus Flatwoods was born. Not long after work had started on the short RPG Maker MV was announced, not only that BUT it was coming out soon, and for Mac OSX as well! I had dabbled with running RPG Maker VX Ace in wineskin but it had always been a nightmare. Now however, with MV heading to OSX I could finally make games as I had always wanted. I dabbled in RPG Maker back in 2003 when I was in high school, but had not really good the chance to experiment with it since.