#micalpixel-text

Another month has passed! Here's the progress report on my game for February 2025!

Ability Ramifications

Towards the end of January, the gameplay underwent a major change: the main character (May) would now have two abilities: jumping, and whistling. She could now jump over (most) enemies. And she can whistle to "stun" most enemies. These would complement the game's cozy nonviolent theme. And gave players more agency and options than just "walk around the enemies."

This change had major ramifications:

Enemies had to be re-balanced with stunning and jumping in mind.

The game needed a tutorial where these abilities could be taught.

All maps needed to be reworked (ie, deep water was no longer impassable - May could now jump over water.)

The game could be a bit longer, since these abilities will keep the gameplay fresher for longer.

Due to #2 and #4, the world map has been enlarged (from 6x6 rooms to 8x8). The old world map (shown below, in an unfinished state) was no longer needed.

I've been working on the above throughout February, and oh it's been a lot. I started calling this "Version 0.3" internally, because it's such a different game now. "Version 0.2" lasted about a week - a period where jumping and stunning was possible, but not Bits - another major change which is discussed below:

Bits

Since May cannot kill enemies, and therefore, cannot collect "spoils" from them, this game lacked a collecting-mechanic that is common to lots of games similar to this. This also meant backtracking was not going to be fun. If you got nothing from dealing with all those enemies again, then it would be repetitive and tedious.

So, I added Bits: A currency. Bits look like tiny green squares. They can appear in the following two main ways:

1. Static Bits. Maps will have lots of Bits sprinkled around the ground, similar to coins in Mario or gems in Spyro. Once a Bit is collected, it's yours, and won't appear in that spot again. Some Bits will be easy to collect, some harder. You don't need to get them all, but you do need to get a bunch to beat the game. There are several kinds of static Bits:

Regular: Just walk into it to collect it.

Floaty: You must jump to collect it.

Deadly: You must whistle at it turn it onto a Regular Bit, then you can collect it.

Deadly Floaty: You must whistle at it, AND jump to get it.

2. Random Bits: Enemies will sometimes spawn with a Bit on them:

If a Bit is on an enemy's head, you can jump over the enemy to get it.

If a Bit is afflicting the enemy, you can whistle at it to get the Bit off of them.

Bits should make maps must more fun to explore, and let players decide whether which ones are worth getting or not.

Playable Demo

I started working on a demo to use for an initial internal playtesting period. This will consist of about 1/2 the final game. Enough to get feedback on the gameplay and initial impressions from playtesters. All of the following were worked on in February towards that end:

Created a new 8x8-room overworld concept map, with general layouts, plus a new list of all other maps and their layouts.

The underground cave tileset was improved significantly.

Lots of changes to the overworld tileset (especially tall grass, water, and dirt paths)

An indoor house tileset was added.

Started working on a "garden" tileset.

Lots of changes to main quests, NPCs, and sidequests.

Lots of bugfixes.

Switched to Godot 4.4.rc1 for the game engine, to make sure everything still works before they do an official release.

Improved the minimap.

Overhauled the main village area to be 3x3 rooms in size, including a tutorial on abilities and enemies.

TL;DR The concept layouts for maps are basically done, and now I need to put them in the game, add the updated enemies and NPCs, and quests. The game's world can be fully explored, but it's very bare.

This has been a very productive month for me, which seems crazy because it's also been very stressful for other reasons. But being able to work on this game in the afternoons has been very calming yet energizing.

Games Played In February

I continue to try new games for inspiration:

Spyro Reignited: Spyro 2 and 3: Solid games and very relaxing 3D platformers. Spyro's abilities give these games a very different feel from many other 3D platformers, where jumping is the main focus. But here, it's more about charging, flame breath, and gliding. It's nice.

Chico and the Magic Orchards DX: A short but sweet GameBoy-Color themed game about a squirrel who rolls a large walnut around to solve puzzles. I love the GameBoy, and squirrels, so this was a must-play. :D

Song of Nunu: A story-driven 3D-puzzle-platformer. Made by the same devs as RiME - another game I enjoyed. Despite being a spinoff game, this game is very, VERY good. A lot of love and care went into it, and the result is beautiful. If you like puzzle-platformer games, especially ones with dual-protagonists like Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons, or you like Ghibli-like stories about a kid and their magic beast friend, you'll like this too.

Ending

Another month has passed, so here’s another update on my gamedev journey. The goal is to create my first video game using the Godot game engine.

(Prior Updates: May, Initial)

Research

The main goal for June was research. Play other character/exploration-focused games with no farming or combat elements and see what they do to keep things fun. Here’s what I played (or watched others play)

A Short Hike: A game about a penguin climbing a mountain. Finding new people, new areas, and moving/gliding were very enjoyable. The game’s 3D environment with pixelated graphics was also a new experience for me. A very nice cozy game.

Rakuen: I love this game. You play as a kid stuck in a hospital, trying to help other sick patients, while also exploring a fantasy world described in a book. Lots of exploration, puzzles, and focus on characters. Catchy music too. Kind of exactly what I was looking for. I think Undertale fans would enjoy this one.

The Stanley Parable: A choose-your-own-adventure game. No NPCs, just movement and a very entertaining and well-crafted narrator.

Potion Permit: You play as a chemist who just moved into a town, and must make a living brewing potions while getting to know the town, its people, and the wilderness. The first life-sim game I’ve actually beaten. The lack of time limits was greatly appreciated.

Shenmue (Watched not Played): An important piece of gaming history. I watched a playthrough of this one, just so I could see this game at its best, and not miss any important events.

Freddi Fish 2 (Watched not Played): A point-and-click adventure for children??!… What’s this doing here?!?! Well, this one wasn’t on my original list, but I realized the point-and-click game genre had many similarities with the walk/talk/trade-items gameplay I originally envisioned. Plus this one had no game-overs and no frustrating trial-and-error like many do. Studying how a different genre handled that kind of gameplay, while making it very accessible and entertaining, was a good learning experience.

Kena: Bridge of Spirits (WIP): I started this one, more for fun than research, but haven’t finished it yet. Beautiful game. As others have noted, it’s like playing a Pixar movie.

OneShot (Not Started Yet): Ran out of time. 😒 Next month. Really looking forward to this one.

All in all, I took 10 pages of notes. Things I noticed, liked, disliked, wanted to think about.

Prototype

On June 20, I began work on an actual prototype (“Prototype 1”). Code from my earlier Godot projects was collected, combined, and improved. The goal is to implement every important mechanic in the game. Everything the player should be able to DO in the game, the prototype should have at least ONE place where the player can do it. In a very condensed environment that's easy to test. Physics and graphics can be fine-tuned later. This prototype is all about functionality. For example:

Walk in 8 directions.

Talk to an NPC.

Choose an answer when the NPC asks a question which triggers different outcomes.

Walk to the edge of a room and appear in an adjacent room.

And overall, things have gone very well! I have a page-long checklist of everything I want to implement in this prototype, and it’s about half-done. :D

Except menus.

And except puzzles.

Puzzle mechanics aren’t added yet. I realized the mechanics I was planning did not have much synergy and were very simple. I also want to review the notes I took during research and study puzzles in general. So, back to the drawing board, for now. Puzzles are the next major step. And I think I have a pretty good idea how I want to change them.

Audio

I made a text-blip sound effect (hear it in the video above) and a placeholder “song” of 6 notes to use for testing music. Since this game’s art style is based on the Game Boy, I did some research on the Game Boy’s sound capabilities.

It has four “instruments” that can play sounds simultaneously, aka “channels”:

Channel 1 and 2: Pulse Channel. Each can emit a quadrangular wave

Channel 3: “Wave” channel with user-definable waveform

Channel 4: A noise wave (think static)

Channel 3 is the most fascinating imo. You can define your own timbre of the sound to be played. If you ever played a Game Boy game that had a unique-sounding song that, chances are it was a custom waveform via this channel. (Also, if you ever played Mother 3, the movie theater part with the retro-sounding music did in fact use the original Game Boy audio capabilities in the Game Boy Advance, and also includes these sounds.)

There is software that can reproduce the capabilities described above in order to create Game Boy-sounding music on a PC. I’d like to experiment with that in the coming weeks. The Game Boy was capable of some really good music. Limiting my scope to its capabilities for the same of my own sanity, plus the flexibility of that wave channel to create custom sounds, seems like it can produce some really nice results, which is very appealing to me.

Graphics

I made a font! It only includes English letters, for now, but it works! I used it in the “Save Pointy” art earlier this week and the prototype video above, and intend to use it for everything going forward.

Closing

I grabbed several of the character sprites from The Spriters' Resource for The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening, Oracle of Seasons, and Oracle of Ages in order to take a closer look at how the animations work. (Thanks to "Mister Mike" and "TAILSSBS" for ripping these.)

And it's fascinating just how much variety there is with so few pixels to work with. Take a look at each characters' eyes and how they move. Look at each characters' fists and how they move. Whether the characters rotate from side-to-side, or bob up and down, or barely move at all. And try to see what each of these differences communicate about each character and their poses, and why the artist chose them.

I'd gone into this exercise to see what sort of rules were followed here - what they all have in common. And there are many similarities which separate this style from those of other games. But I wasn't expecting so many differences. I counted at least 9 different ways characters moved their hands - and that's just the human characters. And just the ones that are "regular-sized". To say nothing of the larger character sprites on the right. (Who, just like in yesterday's post, sometimes have more than 4 total colors because they consist of multiple sprites overlaid with each other.)

This was an informative exercise.

I really liked the Phonograph man in the bottom-right too. Love how animated the phonograph's horn is, in order to communicate that it's playing.

So, while I was studying pixel art styles on video game consoles with 2-bit colors (IE, 2^2 = 4 colors per sprite), I noticed something interesting. With Earthbound Beginnings' sprites, most of the NPCs have, as expected, four colors. Three actual colors, plus a fully transparent "color".

But there was something funny about a couple of them, including the main character...

There's FIVE colors??!

Yeah, let's see:

Black

Peach

Red

Blue

Transparent Pixels (no color)

How is this possible? The NES has strict memory limitations. Only four possible colors per sprite, and one had to be transparent.

So, I loaded it up in an emulator and pulled up the sprite-viewing window.

What's going on here?

Hmm.....

Hey, wait a minute!

It's four separate sprites y'all. XD

They used four separate smaller sprites, with the top two having four colors and the bottom two with four slightly different colors. Which gives them five colors for what seems like a single larger sprite.

Math checks out.

Hello again! Another month has passed, so it's time for another monthly devlog!

Story and Quests

As mentioned in the last devlog, I was not satisfied with the main quests in my game. They felt forgettable, too fetch-quest-y, and felt disconnected from the game's world and lore.

There's been a lot of improvement in that regard. I'm currently planning to have 3 main quests ready for the game's first playtest. I've fleshed out the characters on paper and made their quests feel more relevant, and hopefully fun.

I also decided to increase the final game's quest count from 6 to 8. Originally, I planned for the game to have just one dungeon-y quest. But I've found that an overworld where backtracking is commonplace isn't a great place to put challenging enemies or complex puzzles. So, I'm adding two dungeons and moving a lot of the ideas into those. This will make things feel less cramped from me trying to cram so many ideas into a single dungeon.

State Machines

I reworked the game's characters and objects to use state machines. Each object now has exactly one "state" at all times. Standing, walking, idle, frozen, thawing, etc.

Previously, this was all handled with...a lot of if/else checks. 😅 State machines make it much easier to change their states during cutscenes. And it lets me divide up their code so that each state's functionality is in one place (typically two functions - one that runs per-frame, and one to initialize the state whenever it changes).

Enemies can now be frozen by your whistle ability. And after a while, they will start to thaw out. Two states, both of which now have custom visuals which are similar for all enemy types.

Text

The game's text box has been a source of annoyance for a while. The game's resolution is only 160x144. And I'd hoped to keep text aligned to 8-pixel lines to mimic the limitations of old game consoles (especially the Game Boy). But I want to have realistic dialogue and meaningful conversations. Having just two lines of text makes that very hard. And there wasn't a good way to easily convey who is speaking, in cases where multiple characters are onscreen. I suspect this is why, on many old games, the protagonist is silent and conversations with more than 1 other character were uncommon. But that feels too limiting for me.

So, I ditched the tile-aligned text limitation. I also added a sprite on the text box to indicate who's speaking. Also trotted out an old 3x5 pixel font I made last year but never found a use for, to indicate their name. And I like it! A lot.

With the text box now in a good place, I feel much more comfortable working on the game's cutscenes now, since I have a better grasp of what the text box's limitations are.

The text boxes also changed from a parchment-style to a wooden-block-style. This fit their new tabbed look a bit better. Cursors were also changed to pink arrows, since the pink protagonist is the one technically making those decisions.

Graphics

Lots of graphics received overhauls:

May's walk animations were updated yet AGAIN. In particular, the sun's highlights in her hair are toned down, and her side-sprites no longer have her shoulders appear so far behind her head. I wanted to get this feeling right before I start making other NPCs in the same style.

The forest area, and garden area, now have their own unique look (see the first 2screenshots in this post).

Colors were consolidated for many things. Lots of sprites used similar but different colors, making them all looks kinda off. Part of this is due to their graphics being made at different points in time, when palettes were different. In such cases, they now use the same colors.

Tall grass now covers May's feet when she walks through it (and slows her down too). This mechanic will be used to make some areas more difficult. Tall grass is harder to navigate. Areas that constantly change from tall to short grass will be even harder.

Next Steps

The current goal is to have an internal playtest with half the game's quests in a polished, complete-able stage. Current things on my mind for this:

Finish the scenes, NPCs, and maps needed for those quests (and the tutorial area too).

Add a nice-looking title screen. And reveal the game's name! 🥲

Add whatever other menus are needed.

And finally, music and sound effects. 😵 I haven't started on this yet (other than a blip-sound when text is displayed). This will probably take the longest...

I now have two tumblr blogs.

@micalpixel-art is where I will post any standalone artwork that I made, plus reposts of other peoples' art (especially Undertale).

Hello everyone! Another month has gone! Here's my May-game gamedev progress report for January 2025!

"Ideal Room"

I posted about the design philosophy for this game, and what an "ideal room" should be like, and finally made one.

First visit: Analyze the room, figure out its puzzles/enemies, and "solve" it to proceed.

Later visits: Room is familiar, easier.

Include optional harder content, ie flowers.

In short, there will be *some* backtracking, as well as a focus on making the game pretty accessible to everyone, but with optional harder content for those who want more of a challenge.

Object Code Consolidation

In preparation for working on enemies' code, I consolidated all ingame objects to be sub-classes of one of three types: Area2D, StaticBody2D and CharacterBody2D (all Godot node types). Each one had built-in support for my scripting engine. This would make working on enemies much easier.

I also overhauled and documented the collision layers which the game needed as part of this work.

Enemy Design

A lot of work went into enemy designs this month. Basic visuals, their ingame behavior, making tables of how they differ (pros and cons, situational differences), and so on. I coded up what was the then-current lies of enemies, and made a video to show them off. The player's goal, at this point, was simple: Just stay out of their way. And uh... That increasingly felt like it wasn't good enough...

Uncertainties

On and off through this month, I felt unsatisfied with the direction of the game.

NPCs felt too detached from the world. They existed for their quests and that was it. They never commented on the unusual way enemies work in the game. They felt kinda forgettable. The quests didn't feel connected to any meaningful lore, either. They didn't make me want to explore or know more about this little world.

Enemies felt boring. Different, but boring. It was neat that they could interact with some puzzle elements. But they still felt rigid, like there weren't enough ways to present the same enemy without it getting repetitive. I prototyped some dungeon ideas, and the end result was just cramming more and more enemies into room to make them feel new and/or harder. I didn't like it.

May also felt boring. To play as. She could walk around enemies, maybe find a switch that would change some things nearby, and that's it. I'd originally wanted to give her some abilities, but had scaled those back in order to make a simpler, smaller game that I could finish more quickly.

These things combined, and the game didn't just feel like a scaled-back first-game. It felt incomplete. It felt wrong. Like this was going to be a bad game.

Here's an example of brainstorming room designs. It looks crowded and repetitive, doesn't it? I was probably a bit frustrated when this was made, due to not having answers to any of the problems above.

Two games I played for the first time this month helped give some perspective. One was the first few levels of The Adventures of Lolo 3. A top-down puzzle game which features a small number of enemies and puzzle objects, but a (brutally hard and) shocking amount of depth. This game required defeating enemies. But you had options. You could go around enemies, block them using other enemies, freeze them, push them, and blow them away. This game gave you options. It had player agency. Mine didn't.

I also played the first Spyro game. Spyro has two abilities for dispatching enemies: Breathe Fire and Charge. That's it. Every enemy can be beaten with one of them. Even the collectibles were such that you often had to use one of those abilities to get them. There was a sense of flow to knowing which one to use and when - a rhythm - which my game lacked.

And I went back to the drawing board.

Overhauls

I made a new spreadsheet of enemies. This time, mapping out different ways they could be overcome. All could be overcome by going around them - if the room allowed it. But now, I added numerous other ways. And some enemies were immune to some of those ways. Learning their strengths and weaknesses, and learning when to take advantage of them, would be an aspect of gameplay which wasn't there before. New enemies were added. Some repurposed. Some marked for possible scrappage.

I also decided to give May two abilities which compliment the idea of enemy-avoidance. This adds depth to the gameplay, and player agency, but more challenges for me, too. Giving May/the player more options means enemies need to be re-balanced around those options, so the game doesn't become too easy.

So May now has two abilities, but how to train the player to use them? The four-screen starting area is too small to do that effectively. Combine this with the detached-NPC problem above, and it felt clear that the map needed to be overhauled, and in all likelihood made larger. But not too much.

So, the current plan is to work more on the game's lore and improving the quests, expand and make mockups of all maps, including enemy placement, and see how it goes. ^^

Here's an updated, post-overhaul dungeon brainstorming. Looks a bit more thoughtful, imo.

Games I've Played this Month

OneShot - Solstice Ending - Me, leave Niko hanging? Pffft. Naw. This was a nice little bow of an ending for a wonderful little game. Programmers especially can relate to it. :D Although, honestly. I don't think I'll ever play OneShot again. To be clear, it's an excellent game. However, the final moments of the ending wrapped things up so nicely, that to play it again...just wouldn't be the same. Niko is home now. My Niko is home now. To summon another, different Niko just wouldn't feel right. How could I play it again?

Mega Man X - A GOAT game for my favorite games console (the SNES), which is so good at teaching its mechanics through gameplay that it is used in game development courses. So why did it take a SNES lover and gamedev like me so long to play it? Weeellll.... because Mega Man 2 kicked my butt years ago. Very painfully. But in X, the difficulty is the point. It's part of the story. You're supposed to feel weak and incompetent. Suddenly, the main character is very relatable, which made the game more enjoyable. It really is a great game.

A Highland Song - A side-scroller hill-running mountain-climbing game filled with Scotland locations, characters, history, and folklore. Highly recommended!

Spyro the Dragon - It's cool to finally experience the PSone era of 3D platformers. It's a bit on the easy side, but sometimes that's all you really want. Makes 100%ing it much more enjoyable too.