It's been just over a week since I released Cheese Escape, my first game on itch: https://retsyn.itch.io/cheese-escape
The design is bizarre, and I'll explain how that happened!
I work in CG by day, I'm a character rigging TD/CFX TD. I don't have a whole lot of time to spend on gameDev, but I always dream of making things. I poked around a few engines before Godot.
One thing I learned is that since many gameDev dreams are forced to die, you should never take up trying to make your dream game first, until you understand your tools, and can work without the hiccups that come from research or tech problems. You should "shake down" a tool set first.
So I decided that in my 2D platformer experiment, I should not fall in love with my design. Well, it didn't work out that way, not in the end.
When I began this project, I had two rules.
Rule #1 was: This will be a "vertical slice" above all else. A fully rounded out experience with opening menus, pause menus, and end credits-- those things that take it from a "half done" thing that languishes on the hard drive and is never seen.
Rule #2 was: No design bible-- code first, results first... design second. I didn't want to engage in a long phase of dreaming up a cool game, and pre-designing everything. This was an engine "shake down", I mustn't make anything that I love, because this first revving of the engine wasn't going to make the quality that a more careful design would deserve.
So with those two rules in mind, you should end up with a boring, but complete game. Completed things is something I don't show the world enough of. Not since Super Poulet Poulet.
I followed Rule #2 to the letter, just building and implementing and testing things. If I needed some animated characters, I had to pop into Aseprite and bang them out, without much though as to how it fit or what it was. This made it become a "stream of consciousness" type game. I'd just draw things, hoping to never pause to think, so that I'd have content for my shakedown.
I drew a sprite with the likeness of my friend as a joke a year earlier-- I cleaned it up and made it the protagonist. I drew a circle with a face... it suddenly had a beret. I can't explain why, but just go with it. Maybe all the enemies have hats? Maybe they are all just weird faces in particular hats. Pope hat? Hair net? Both in the game.
Meanwhile, my pal Chris, who's pixelled likeness you control saw my early builds, and thought "What if I was a high 90's 'tude mascot character? Like Bubsy?" I thought this was a brilliant way to envision what Cheese Escape was becoming. So he recorded down-sampled clips of him shouting the most cringey 90s catch-phrases he could. "All that, and a bag of chips!"
Also a giant help was Aliandro Rodriguez, my CG student, who happens to be a brilliant composer. He had some tunes that were unused floating around, things he also made as one-off jokes. He donated these tunes as they were, in his mind, labelled as unusable curiosities. I think I speak for us all when I say they are entirely usable and really catchy, if not the greatest part of the game. It is a fact though that Aliandro's music (so much of which is unpublished anywhere!) is often much more involved than this. I see a future in game OSTs brewing for him. Here a bit more from him here: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCFSJQKFRuI_DVzHAMNFL0lA
At this point I broke my "don't care about the design" rule, and started to love how bloody nonsensical that was. That's right about when I decided on the second and third tilemap designs-- the Toyland levels are reminiscent of the "Mr. Happy" multiplayer textures in Turok 2 on the N64, and the final stages are somewhere between later Contra levels and Norfair from Metroid. Why would Chris be there murdering the hat wearing monsters? I don't much care.
I met my goal of closing the loop-- Cheese Escape is a game you can download, play, beat, and read the credits. My first foray onto Itch. I'm really pleased to join you all here. I'm really grateful for the attention it's gotta so far. It's made me make a promise to myself to make developing games a part of my life! And so you'll hear from me again!