Meet Tess!
Hello! I’ve been ill for the last couple of weeks and although it’s looking like I’ll be better soon, I haven’t been able to do much work other than drawing a few sprites. On the bright side, I’m really happy with those sprites!
I don’t want to bury the lede so here’s Tess, my game’s main character:
I love her! I think she’s adorable and I hope you do too.
When I first set out to design how she looked, my only real plan was that I liked the idea of making a purple or pink bunny girl with glasses. But after talking about the character and my ideas for the game’s plot with my friend NomnomNami (go play her games!) she surprised me by drawing this:
I love everything about how she looks and I cannot overstate how grateful I am to NomnomNami for designing her. Thank you Nami!
I’d like to think I did her original design justice when squishing her down into chunky chibi pixel art proportions. She gained brown eyes and blue glasses in the process thanks to a suggestion from Chunderfins (go play his game!), and I couldn’t help but sneak a couple of self-insert features of my own by making her left-handed* (like me) and naming her Tess (like my middle name). I couldn’t be happier with the final result!
*yes I know she’s right-handed in the gif at the top of the post, but her horizontal-facing idle animation gets flipped depending on which way she’s facing. She’ll always be left-handed in her other animations!
I’m still working on the rest of her animations but I’m happy with what I have so far. Hopefully by the time I write the next newsletter she’ll be fully animated and working in the game!
What about the ducks?
I love this new character but I love my ducks too! I'll find a way to fit the hammer duck into this game somewhere so they won't be gone forever. But it does raise a question: why didn't I just keep the main character as a duck? Don't I make games about ducks, after all?
Personally I think that funny bipedal animals like those ducks are the perfect fit for some types of games, including top-down action-puzzle games like Chessplosion (see the arcade game Pengo) and silly physics-y games like Ducky's Delivery Service. Something about those genres makes me yearn to control a funny little creature. Whereas for an action-adventure game about hitting things with a hammer, I yearn to control a chunky little humanoid character.
Despite this, I considered using ducks for all of my games anyway. After all, Chessplosion was pretty much the first time I drew anything since I was a young child, so I hadn't learned how to draw anything other than blob-shaped animal characters. Now that I have enough pixel art experience to draw people, and enough experience expressing myself through my appearance (since coming out as trans during the development of Ducky's Delivery Service), I'm feeling much more comfortable drawing humanoid characters for my games where it makes sense to do so.
So even though this game is about a bunny girl and some of my future games will inevitably be about humanoid characters, the ducks shall return! I feel good about this mixture of characters going forward and I hope you don't mind either. I'm genuinely sorry if you were just here for the ducks!
Hey I drew another sprite too
A couple of weeks ago I was working on a boss fight that’s all about whacking moles. They attack by charging up projectiles that explode in eight directions like the Queen bombs in Chessplosion, so I needed to give them a sprite that catches your attention and lets you know they’re charging up something powerful. Here it is!
That’s all I’ve done. I wish I’d done more work on the game’s soundtrack too, but it’s hard to compose music with a sinus headache so I’m taking things slowly. Hopefully I can speed up again soon!
Anything else?
I managed to clear The Punisher on its hardest difficulty last night! It’s a fun game and a great entry point to arcade beat em ups, especially if you’ve already played other genres of arcade games. It still feels like I don't really know what I'm doing in some parts of the game (mostly the second half of stages 4, 5 and 6) so I'll learn those when I'm feeling better, then I'll go for a no death clear and write a game journal post about the game and the genre. Learning to play beat em ups has been interesting, and they're both simpler and more complex than I previously thought they were!
Speaking of beat em ups, boghog wrote a great post about beat em up pacing! I put a lot of effort into keeping up the pace in my own game's arcade mode by spawning the second enemy wave in a room while a few enemies from the first wave are still alive, letting players quickly clear out groups of enemies by stacking them up or launching them, and making boss fights shorter. I cut a few features that slowed things down too, such as enemies who took more than two hits to defeat (either by having a larger health pool or by having armor that took two consecutive hits to break) and items that enemies dropped and the player had to manually pick up. It's interesting to see the similarities and differences between the problems I had to solve and the ones that beat em ups deal with!
Finally, while watching Proxy stream some old Game Boy games this week I stumbled upon the Japanese box art for the game Amazing Penguin. He looks just like the long-lost cousin of my streaming model or Bean (the artist duck from Ducky's Delivery Service) except even cuter! I love him.
Aside from that, I've just been getting as much rest as I can. Hopefully I'll feel better soon, I hope you have a great couple of weeks and I'll see you next time!