(cover photo by laia_papaiaa)
This is a (mostly) spoiler-free devlog, but I recommend that you play the OIOPOLIS demo first, if you haven’t already! It’s short (20/30 minutes long) and can be played for free directly from the browser, even from a phone. You’ll find it here. Thanks for playing and for reading!
Hey! I’m pingudroid, one of the members of Mini Hamster Productions! Want to hear the story of how we designed, created and published a demo of a Game Boy game, from almost nothing, in less than three months? Read on!
The story begins as follows:
One day, back in June, I was talking to my teammate and dear friend, Moni Hamster, about Indie Dev Day. In case you don’t know, Indie Dev Day, or IDD, is an indie videogame convention that’s held in Barcelona every year and has become quite the phenomenon in the South-European game scene. We both belong to a Spanish gamedev association, and we were discussing the option of bringing the games of some fellow association members to IDD.
That is, until my teammate said: what if WE bring a game to the convention?!
Of course, there’s a little problem with that: we had been working on a certain RPG game for more than a year, but we still weren’t close to finishing the demo (it’s a long, ambitious project, and we’re still missing some key components and don’t want to rush them). So what game were we going to bring?
That’s when they suggested creating a short game over the summer, and doing so in a limited, compact environment… a game for the Game Boy, using GB Studio! I thought it was an amazing idea and immediately agreed. Sure, why not? We had been working on a longer project for a while, and I thought that taking a break and making something shorter (and actually finishing it!) would be a good change of pace and bring us some visibility and a feeling of accomplishment. Let’s do it, I said! And off we went.
I have talked about GB Studio before in this blog. It’s an incredible tool, open-source, made basically (as far as I know) by a single person, and it allows you to create a variety of games for the original Game Boy and Game Boy Color platforms in a visual environment and using block eventing/scripting. It’s an intuitive tool with a lot of potential and very easy to get into. I had been meaning to use GB Studio for a long, long time (as you may know if you’ve been following me for a while, I’m a huge Game Boy nerd and an RPG Maker user of many years, so this engine seems like it was tailor-made for me), but I had been putting it off because I wanted to be responsible for once and finish my current RPG Maker projects first. My friend’s suggestion came as a godsend. I could finally tinker in GB Studio and feel reasonable and responsible while doing it! Awesome!
Of course, we had a lot of work ahead of us. We had basically nothing at that point. What was the game going to be about? What about the genre and game mechanics? What vibe, what tone would we go for? We’re both RPG fans, and GB Studio is very well suited to top-down RPG-like experiences, so from the beginning it seemed very likely that we’d make that sort of game, but… what about the story, the true backbone of any RPG?
The truth is, I have collected many, many story ideas over the years: stuff that I’ve been meaning to do, or tried to do and failed. So many. After explaining the most important ones to my teammate, who fortunately has a lot more vision than myself, they chose a couple of them and we decided to go from there and create something new. And thus, after some more brainstorming and back-and-forth, OIOPOLIS was born!
Following my friend’s reasonable instructions, at first I focused mostly on writing the story and script. It took some tries to find the right formatting, since we had to take into consideration the (very small!) amount of text that can be shown on the Game Boy screen at once, and avoid over-exposition. But I think we found a nice balance in the end.
As I wrote the story, I sent it to them chapter by chapter, accompanied by lots of notes about the environment, and the characters, and the Greek origin of the names of the characters (I’ll write another devlog on that later down the line! Probably). And, as I did so, Moni built the game piece by piece: they set up the scenes, and created the world, and populated it with the characters and dialogues that I had written, and created some nice puzzles and obstacles to go with it all. They did so using placeholder tilesets and characters, which we later on replaced by pixel-art made entirely by me. Doing it this way was very useful, since then we knew exactly which graphics we needed so I just had to create those.
I very much recommend working in this order. If the placeholders are pretty enough (and the ones we used were!), the game will look nice even when the final graphics aren’t still done and you’ll retain your motivation all the way. Thank you very much, GibbonGL, Sodacoma and Teaceratops! Even if your work won’t be in the final game, it’s being very useful and inspiring to us in the making of OIOPOLIS.
Flash-forward to late July: the script was half-way done, the game was going along nicely, and the latest OST Composing Jam (a world-wide, online videogame soundtrack competition) was about to start! As we had planned, I took a break from the script for a week, and used the jam as the perfect excuse to create the entire OIOPOLIS soundtrack. I had to do some research first, since I had never created music for GB Studio before, and ended up with a somewhat convoluted workflow that included three different programs and a lot of tinkering, but I finally found a system that I felt comfortable with and which allowed me to compose the music using OpenMPT, a well-proven soundtracker that I have some experience with.
And so, while my teammate kept working on the game, I spent around 8 days making music nonstop. Around 20 tracks total, almost the entirety of the music needed for the final version of OIOPOLIS (we’ll just be missing a couple more tracks, I think), of which I chose 7 to submit as a jam entry, under the name “Ancient Civilisation RPG OST“. People seemed to like the music and I was pretty satisfied. Another job done! Yes!
After this, though, half of the script still had to be written and we still had a lot of work ahead of us. So I kept chipping away at the script, until I finished it on August 5th.
At that point, it seemed pretty obvious that we weren’t going to finish the full game for IDD, which was just over a month later, so we decided to focus on showcasing a demo of the game, and then finish the rest of it after the event.
My teammate kept designing and implementing all the levels and puzzles and everything, plus adding the music and sound effects; I helped when needed, and started replacing all the placeholders with the final graphics, and drew some concept art for the main characters (which we’ll be revealing further down the line). I was very tempted at that point to make digital illustrations of the characters: but again, fortunately, Moni kept me on track and told me to leave that for after the demo, that the sketches were good enough for now (and it’s good that they stopped me, because otherwise we wouldn’t have finished on time lol).
By that point, they also designed the game logo, which is amazing by the way, and I made a pixel version for the in-game titlescreen.
The demo was almost done! But you know what they say about gamedev… the final stretch is always longer and harder than you think. Fortunately, we had planned it well and still had time left. We did some playtesting and bug-catching, I went over all the dialogues in-game to fit them properly to the text boxes and add some extra flavor to the scenes, and finally I translated the demo into Catalan and English.
After that, it was only a matter of fixing up our itch.io page, writing some text and explanations and stuff (doesn’t the game page look nice? I think it looks very nice), and setting everything up! We released the demo over a week before IDD and there was quite some interest, particularly regarding the Catalan version, since sadly it’s very unusual for games to be released in Catalan.
During the final week pre-IDD, we put the game on different cartridges, prepared a Game Boy for the event and I even set up a retro laptop to emulate the game on (I wrote an entire very nerdy, very wordy blog post about that!). It went wonderfully and I even took a lot of useful notes while watching people play the demo (seriously, do this: let people play, don’t intervene at all, just look. It’s very enlightening). And now we’re working on fixing some stuff from the demo and finishing the final version of the game. Yay! Wish us luck.
Even if OIOPOLIS has ended up being a bit more involved than we expected, we believe that the extra time spent is worth it, since we’ll get a much more polished result than we would have otherwise. The game’s still short and manageable (I don’t believe it will be that long in the end… less than two hours of gameplay for sure) and we expect to finish it in a reasonable timeframe, in just a few months probably. So I still believe it’s been a great idea to stop our other project to finish this one first, and I’m very satisfied with what we’ve achieved so far.
If you want to stay tuned to the game’s development, you can follow us on itch.io, Twitter and Instagram!
Thanks for reading and until the next time,
pingudroid
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