I played through I think all 15 levels. It was soo polished its crazy to think you achieved this in a week (especially when I consider how long it took us to get our dumpster fire of a game barely running haha). Music in the later levels was hype af. Art was really nostalgic. How did you make these realistic but super pixilized backgrounds? Are they real images with a filter or straight up drawn by hand pixel by pixel? Writing was very charming and I laughed at the Australia experience (for someone who plays chess and lives in sydney this connected with me haha). I gave you 5 stars in every category. Well deserved!
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Wow its hard to say how much we appreciate this comment, thanks for playing it all the way and for the fantastic review! The whole team spent basically every hour outside work just in discord developing so it was just a ton of hard work and the talent of all my teammates that really made it possible to get it this far. And yes, Gabe, our musician, did a really great job with the sound track and that breakcore beat so I'm glad you liked it.
But for the background, it took me a while to get the right workflow, but I ended up grabbing images from wikimedia commons scaling them down to like 400x220 ish then running a custom quantize filter then palettes swapped them to the game's palette so everything looked consistent. I originally wanted to do them by hand, but there was just so much art in this project, with all the hand animations, lore, boards, pieces, tables, etc. that I didn't have the time. Though I felt that the hands being realistic actual did a really good job at tying the aesthetic together between background and foreground art, and I was really happy how it ended up.
Also I'm glad the Australia stage is aussie approved! That's probably my favorite too, I still laugh when I load it up.