Inking with pixels

GMTK Game Jam judging has kicked off. Everyone needs to play and rate games. I need to play and rate games. I haven't done so yet because I have a policy of getting a good night's sleep between making a game for a jam and judging games for jams. But I've gotten my good night's sleep. So I'm just going to write this real quick, and then dive in.

But wait! My game's been out for two whole hours. I don't know how it will do in the rankings. I don't know how it will be generally received. How can I do a post-mortem?

Well, I think everyone who enters a jam hopes to win the jam. That seems natural and right. And I think everyone who makes a game hopes people will enjoy it, for sure. But I find what motivates me to finish a jam is if I have a third goal. If I think to myself, "man, I'd like to do a game jam this week," and enter one, usually some life event proves serious enough to pull me out. But if I'm tinkering with game development and I think to myself, "hey, maybe I should do this. But I don't have a specific project to test it in." That's when the stars align.

So, in terms of how the game is doing... it's doing okay. People like the art, which you'll soon see is a huge good sign. People like the music, which is not my doing, but the excellent work of Driann. Reviews of the gameplay are mixed. About a third of the comments say it's too hard, the controls are too slippery, etc. Another third say the gameplay is great, I wish there were more. I don't know how this ratio will hold out over time, but it certainly makes sense. The Princess of Royal Pain controls, to quote a review of Super Mario Bros, like a fat man on roller skates. This is not 100% intentional. I like the sort of momentum-based controls that lead to fat man on roller skates platforming. But if I had had more time, odds are good I would have fine-tuned it to feel less slippery.

I don't know that I will fix it now. I mean, obviously, I can't until the judging period ends. But if I were to tweak it afterwards, there's a good chance I'd have to redo the level design, which is carefully balanced around the character's current physics. And that's not a bad thing to do. But the game has already accomplished what I set out to accomplish.

The Goal

I make children's books and sometimes comics. It's a great gig. It makes zero money, so I need to have a day job besides, but I'm not worried about it. It took Dr. Seuss 10 years to get off the ground. And besides, while it would be great to be paid for my stories, if I knew for a fact I would never see a dime for them, I'd probably still tell them.

But my first love was animation, and my second love was video games. And while video games and linear storytelling aren't the best of friends, they aren't bad friends either. And I think more people would buy my stories for two dollars on itch.io than for twenty dollars for the paper version on Amazon.

So a big question is, can I, as one guy, take the sorts of stories I want to tell, and make them into short, fun games that I'd be proud to make and people would be happy to buy?

I've tinkered with this over the years, and produced many prototypes and tests, and last year or the year before, I hit upon a specific art style. A 2D pixel style that took cues from the way I like ink drawings I make by hand.

I went from this sort of a look:

To this sort of a look:

But I hadn't made a proper game with it. Hat Trick: Prelude to Nightmare is on my itch library, and you know that the in-game art style is very gameboy Zelda. I wanted to take a side-scrolling perspective and make graphics like this, that have a sort of pixel art feel, yes, but also a sort of hand-drawn feel.

People nowadays will think of Pizza Tower, but at the time the obvious comparison was the Scott Pilgrim game.

At one point, I even made a test of a shooter that used larger-than tile-size tiles to get some of the zany, hand-made angles and proportions into the background, and while the game never went anywhere, I liked how it looked.

So that was the DNA going into the jam. I wanted to actually build a platformer or a JRPG with a side-scrolling perspective using this art style. I limited it to my rainboy palette to make sure I wouldn't spend too much time on the art.

The Process

So, first thing's first. If I'm using pixel art, I'm starting with a low resolution and blowing it up. I have a weekly webcomic where some kids get sucked into a gameboy world, and I set the gameboy world's resolution to 256x144, because that's sort of in the neighborhood of an imaginary widescreen gameboy. It is also, conveniently, just large enough to make a 16x9 grid of 16x16 tiles.

But I've been finding the resolution far too cramped. Certainly, it's too small for the "hand drawn pixel art" aesthetic I wanted to test.

So I did some napkin math, checked out the recommendations on the internet for what size games should be on itch.io, and figured out that doubling my comic's resolution to 512x288 would do nicely. Upscaling that by 2x gives you 1024x578, which is just under itch's max recommended size of 1200x600, and upscaling it 3x gets you 1920x1280.

Now, I've been doing hand drawn-style HD sprites for a while, but I've been feeling a bit loathe to try and make a comic or a game with them because it takes too long for me to put something together.

But because of this, I've put together a helpful scale screen that lets me tune my sprites to common proportions of screen height based on games I like.

So my first step (after brainstorming a game concept and designing the player character) was to scale this picture down to 512x288, and then draw the princess for Royal Pain on that screen. I threw in a pre-existing "pixel ink" character just to see what I thought. And a guy from my web comic.

So, good news and bad news. Bad news: my existing character was too small. I can't reuse her if I adopt this style and scale to make story games or comics. Good news: it looks pretty good. I like it. Let's do this. Bad news: those 16x16 tiles are too small. I was planning on making all-new tiles for the jam anyway, but it looks like if I want to draw characters in this style and scale for future comics and games, the background work I've done for my web comic is largely going to go out the window. Good news: the piqha (that's the guy from the comic) is only slightly larger than a piqha ought to be. It's close enough for me to ignore the scale difference and just keep on using those characters.

I put together a quick set of 32x32 tiles, albeit with tiles drawn outside their borders, like in the dragon game. And...

I like the look, but those tiles are definitely too big. It's too bad pyxel edit, my tile-drawing program of choice, can't do maps with tiles that are bigger than the tile size, or I could have caught that before I got them in engine. But, let's split the difference with 24x24 tiles and...

That'll do.

Making the Game

All of this was very long-winded, but was something I was doing kind of automatically. Sure, it was the point. It was half the reason I entered the jam. But it didn't need to be my focus. Any game jam, any type of game, would have done to test it.

The other half the reason was I wanted to make a tiny game that told a little bit of a story in 48 hours to see if I could. My game jam entries can be, sometimes have been, much grander in scope when I join a team and have a dedicated code guy or two, and I just focus on animations, (see  Jam on Toast: the Art of Toasty,) but I'm evaluating this art style as a story-telling tool. Can I make the gaming version of a short story? To do that, I need to do everything except the music.

Music would be nice, too, but I don't have the skills for that yet. So I did look for a music guy, and the excellent Driann stepped up and contributed all the tunes and 2/3rds of the sounds.

We had a nice stack of ideas to fit the theme, Role Reversal. The obvious ones are you play as the level, or you play as the enemy. Mark Brown mentioned both of those in his theme announcement. But I wanted to step outside the obvious.

"You play as the princess," is not an uncommon role reversal. It's not only been done a lot by game devs parodying Mario out of love or spite, but the Mario franchise itself has done it more than once. Frankly, badass action princesses are so common these days that having an actual damsel in distress would be more subversive. But it was my third instinct for this game jam, rather than the first or second instinct. That was the first reason I went with it. And it meant animating a dress, which sounded fun.

My preferred idea, contributed by Driann, was "you take control of enemies." Thus would make the Role Reversal a game mechanic rather than a game premise. So that's what I aimed to make. But if you have a hero who takes control of enemies, you still need a hero design, and it might as well be the princess.

Driann also suggested the idea of avoiding powerups, and when I realized it made perfect sense that you would want to avoid gold in the hall of a sleeping dragon, I added that to the stack. And because it was the simplest, it was the first thing I implemented after running and jumping.

And because game jams are short, it was the only thing I implemented after running and jumping.

The result is.. not perfect. I wish I'd fine-tuned the platforming more. Usually, I would want to tell stories in which the player can hit things with a sword or a gun. I'm that kind of a guy. But there was no time.

But it exists. There is a story there. Some people seem to like the gameplay, many people seem to like the story, and most people seem to like the art. So while the question of "is this a good game" remains open, and the question of "will this do well in GMTK 2023" is anybody's guess, the question I set out to answer has been answered.

Is this a way I can tell my stories and be content with the result?

Resoundingly: yes.