Princess Poffin and the Spider Invasion - postmortem (Patreon)

i made a gb studio game in a week! here's the why and how of it all (strap in, i wrote a lot!!)

poffin finally takes the spotlight

this is a jam i did completely on a whim! some of the other jams i've done this year, i had planned to participate in ahead of time... like i knew from the start of the year that i wanted to do NaNoRenO again. and i know i want to do Y*ri Jam whenever that comes up (usually in the fall!). but this one i had just seen a post about it on cohost--it's a jam hosted by the same person who ran Strawberry Jam, which i made Sex Advice Succubus for! it's the 7th one they've done, but i've always been too busy to participate before... so i'm glad i could join in this time!!

on the jam page it says "If you need a theme, well, it's June!  Which is moth season!  Make a moth game." ...so, of course, i knew if i was going to make a game for this it had to be about poffin.

i had also been longing to work in gb studio, an engine that i had checked out a few years ago, but wasn't able to finish anything substantial for--especially since i would've had to learn how to make music with tracker programs that i'm not used to. so i gave up on it... until i learned they added a ton of new features, including a MUSIC TOOL!!! with piano roll, like i use for the songs i make in fl studio!!!!! so my one major barrier to entry was finally down, and it felt actually possible for me to make a gb studio game!

having it be a tiny gameboy game also fit really well with the timeframe for the jam. when making games, i have to consider translations as part of the development effort, even if those generally happen after the game is out... there's a very limited number of characters you can use in your font (which is just a png), and i wanted the game to be a free play-in-browser type thing. so i decided to say no to translations for now... i don't know how i would even get a word count from this program so i could calculate how much to pay people. anyway i wanted to mention this because it was definitely a factor in deciding whether or not i wanted to go ahead with the project.

it was really nice not having to think about so much of the extra stuff (porting to mobile, future updates, etc) and just like, make a thing in a week and put it up. very creatively fulfilling!! thank you for being so simple, poffin!!!!

world + characters

there wasn't a lot of new stuff i needed to come up with for this game, since i could draw on pre-established things from spooky soiree or another piece of candy. i love drawing new characters, but it's definitely a lot to think about! so it was nice only having one new girl this time... (sorry that i haven't named her yet...!)

poffin is one of my earliest OCs that i still draw today. according to the dates on my files, she was first drawn in august of 2014...! i made her because i wanted a mascot-type character, but treat ended up stealing that position... anyway, here's her little ref sheet from back then:

i draw her stubbier now... my art in general has gotten rounder since the old days, just because i think it's cuter. i think she was originally more regal, too... she's much sillier in how i write her these days, just because it's more fun to have a little bug girl with 2 brain cells. she's a simple creature!

when i made spooky soiree, it was basically a collection of old character designs that i'd drawn once, but they didn't have their own story. i've been coming up with excuses to turn them into main characters since then (namely periwinkle!!!). poffin has gotten to cameo in a few places (she's planned for syrup 2 as well!) but it's nice that she has her own game i can point people to, rather than just making them play spooky soiree haha.

the rest of the moths were designed during spooky soiree's production! (2016) and they've all shown up in another piece of candy, but i wanted to share their concept art too:

it was hard to translate the details into tiny gameboy sprites... like, i had to make the mom's bow black otherwise it would blend in with her skin or hair. her face sprite looked too similar to poffin's, so i gave her more prominent eyelashes too. the servants were convenient because they could all look the same! i love that poffin has her own little legion of girls who adore her...

because i had a lot of time i wasn't at my computer last week (more on that later) the spider princess was drawn on paper! rare traditional art from me:

i got to write in a bit of lore too, like the "nursery" which i just called "spawn point" in the game--in contract demon it was established that demons are born differently from everyone else. they need to bring in souls from other worlds, which causes eggs to appear in certain places (like baezel's attic) and new demons come out of those. i guess this is getting off track for a postmortem... i just wanted to explain how demons are kind of freaks. none of them are really blood relatives because there's no bloodline...

ok ok i'm rambling!! my point is that it was fun to write everything!!!! sorry that we didn't get to see more spider people, there was only so much i had time for hahaha

the strict limitations of being on gameboy

so i mentioned earlier how i would've had to learn trackers to do the music in this game before... that's because the gameboy only has 4 audio channels: duty 1 and 2 (for the main melody), noise for fake drums, and wav for any extra thing you want. each channel only gets to play one sound at a time, but you have some freedom for what sound you put on each channel, and you can add effects to them with the magic wand at the bottom (like cutting off the note on a certain beat, or adding arpeggio).

this is what the spider's song looks like (the greyed out notes are on other channels)

fl studio can't export to a format that would work in this game... so this is technically the first "real" chiptune i've done! it was a little finicky to work with, but i'm satisfied with the songs i made, and kinda want to make more with this tool just because i love how they sound!! i'm not sure how to export wav/mp3 from here though... i might have to download another tracker program to do that... which is why i didn't post a soundtrack this time. but maybe i can add it if i figure out how to do that! or i'll remake them in fl studio for an "arrange" soundtrack i guess... hahah who knows, they're very simple songs so i'm not sure if there's that much interest.

anyway, the music had a small learning curve, but it was pretty fun to make! the graphics felt that way for me too--i was drawing in aseprite instead of clip studio, because aseprite holds on to the limited palette data in the png that is required for it to load... the colors need to be indexed, because they can be colorized and replaced with other colors in the engine! (at least i think that's how it works...) anyway, everything was drawn in the signature gameboy green, then color palettes were added in-engine.

to make sure this game could run on the actual hardware, the images couldn't have more than a specific number of unique tiles (and actors in the scene!), so i had to find ways to work around that, especially with the main area of the attic

luckily, since i was using aseprite, there's a grid display setting! so i could block in the large areas and then fill the tiles to make sure they were getting reused wherever possible. the wallpaper took up a lot of unique tiles, but it was too cute not to keep... so i cut back in other places, like finding ways for the drawers in the dresser to tile a little bit better.

the illustrations in the game are very simple because of this. it's easiest to leave areas as big blocks of a single color, rather than add a lot of shading. i probably could've had a little bit more details, but i was running out of time...

the first version of the title screen included poffin, but it went over the tile limit. so i left it simple, and made sure to add the illustration of her eating a sock at the beginning, so people new to my games would know what she looks like beyond the tiny sprite.

the only way to render text in the engine is through dialogue boxes as far as i know. so even though it would've been cool to do a working UI for the game menu, i wasn't able to figure that out. the text on the title screen is baked into the image--i copypasted the letters from the font by hand, which was a little tedious but i like the look of it. if i find a way to load fonts from png into aseprite so i could just type it, i would've done more... this was the major reason i couldn't add patron credits to this game. i did think about it though! sorry guys... there was no way they would've fit...!

accidentally tight schedule

i purposefully made the story as short i could while still being a satisfying little adventure... because i wanted to give myself time to learn the engine and what i could even do in it, and i knew i only had a week. i planned for a small enough game that i knew i could finish it by the deadline, but i was getting pretty nervous about it by the last couple days!

i spent the first half of the week drawing assets that i knew i'd need to be able to script events, like the backgrounds and character sprites. after that, i spent a while setting everything up and making the game actually playable. the first test build was ready by june 1st i think? i only sent it to one person to try out... it had the first part of the story, plus npc interactions, though it stopped before you could talk to the prince.

music took a while to figure out (as previously mentioned), but poffin already had a theme song so i just had to adapt it for gameboy! my first attempt was going to be used as the main bgm, but it was too distracting, and wasn't coming out quite right. so i made a simpler version that ended up being the main song. luckily, i got to reuse the first version as the ending song since it fit really well!! but it took a couple days to get to that point.. before then, i was worried i wasted my time...!

i actually spent a lot of the week hanging out with my partner playing the new zelda... which is why i ended up drawing on paper to design stuff! it gave me time to plan out what i wanted to do with the events and interaction, so whenever we took a break from the game i would be back at my computer knowing exactly what i needed to do. this is the main reason i had to rush a bit in the end... plus some unforeseen business emails i had to take time responding to ;) (more details soon..!) i ended up having a packed schedule, but i was still able to finish when GDQ (and thus the jam) ended!

all in all... the jam was a success!

i'd love to do another game in this engine at some point. i initially thought i might be able to include baezel somewhere, but didn't have time... so maybe the next one can be a poffin and baezel story. i actually formatted the title the way i did so that poffin could go on all sorts of adventures if i wanted :)

i'm really happy i've gotten to do so many jams this year! planning on at least a few more, and then i'll likely take a break from them in 2024 so i can focus on my big projects again (namely treat!). it's been really invigorating getting to release so many things, so i hope you all had fun with this one~

thanks for reading! <3