ski butters, up to now.

my name is bennett. i discovered gbstudio last summer, and i wanted to make a game all by myself. i've always been attracted to pixel art, and i've always been more successful with it than with other mediums. i wanted to make a turn based combat game, because i have never really played any to a large extent, and i wanted to, but i don't like the format of a lot of turn based games. most of all, i don't really like party systems. i normally get attached to single characters in shows and games, so having to split myself between multiple characters was always difficult. so i started with that.

i worked really well with the limitations of GB studio. i made a lot of progress, and made a lot of areas of the game in a short time.

the limitations of gbstudio were obnoxious, but i worked with them, and it was a fun challenge. 

this was the first draft of the main character of my game, ski butters.

i thought about making a game about a cat, and i wanted the cat to have a silly name. so i came up with ski butters.

this is ski butters.

this world was populated with aliens (that were really just animals that could talk?) after a mystery accident. it had a lot of jokes and silly dialogue. i wanted to create a setting where there were implications. why are animals suddenly taking the place of humans? it gives me the opportunity to introduce humanitarian themes.

but there was another kind of monster in this first iteration of ski butters.

some sort of strange anti-matter beings. my idea for these was that these were the real enemies of the game, and their goal was to make the world better again by getting rid of humans. i had just finished reading JoJo, and i thought the themes of Stone Ocean could have been expanded on more, so i wanted to do something similar for myself. i could add in questions of if the bad monsters were really doing the right thing, all while concealing their origin and true natures.

the first iteration of ski butters started off in the town that the player lived in.

the player would wander around town for a bit, discover the animal aliens, discover the bad monsters, and then go into the cave pictured above into the first dungeon.

it would be a kind of swampy cave with a frog theme. different rooms in the dungeon would look like parts of a frog.

a frog leg! and so on.

when i started putting together the boss of this first dungeon, the raven pictured above, i wanted to start trying to make music for the game. i think the music limitations were what made me decide to make my own game in my own engine. the new themes i decided on were a lot more dreadful than a world with silly animal aliens would allow, so i tried to make a different iteration of the entire game.

the new ski butters would be a lot more focused on world building. i would make a post apocalyptic world filled with dread. and atmosphere!

the first area would be a massive city. i wanted this because i imagined as the game would progress, the areas would become closer to nature.

here is the map i made of the city area. a parking garage, fire station, apartments, train station, department store, etc. the end of the area would be at the park at the top section, and would have a lot of trees and water sections. you would plunge into the well, and perhaps go into the cave section that i made earlier, though i would probably consider relaxing the frog theme. i really like the art i made for the frog dungeon. the water falls, lily pads, all just. *chefs kiss*

i started thinking about the details of the battle system too. just a plain turn based game would be boring, so i came up with a new system.

moods. your character would experience moods based on what was going on in the game world and what was going on immediately in battle. moods would change the stats of your character, and you would have to play around it. this is the essence of the combat of the game.

to expand the options i had to play with moods, i wanted to introduce skills, which you could equip 8 or 9 of at any time outside of battle after you unlocked them from leveling up.

there would be melee weapons in the game, as well as ranged weapons. the skills i may have put in here would have augmented the players abilities to use these items, and the mood the player had may have as well, and the skills would have to account for that.

this is the first idea i got for the battle screen. also left is the second draft for the main character.

just added a hat. i think they're neat

later i changed the combat format to this:

which i thought showed off my god like landscape artistry, and better fit the emerging style of the game. above is the skills. when the player wanted to use a skill, the camera would pan up, and you could select which skill you wanted to use

but all the limitations i was working with got to me. i wanted to make better music than i would be allowed, i wanted to make idle animations for my characters, i wanted to do more things at once. through this the original values of my mission became clear. i wanted to make a game using free resources, that would help show the potential of the single person.

i want the fact that i made this game to be a lesson that anyone could have.

so i picked up python, and pygame as my starter library. i would start to make my own game engine.

i wanted to stick with the 4 color scheme, because i liked it. i chose gray scale so i could change it later (perhaps through filters) but also because using the same colors over again felt wrong, and the grays felt more gloomy anyways. 

above is an idea i had for the player apartment. i liked that it obeyed Euclidean geometry (not a lot of top downs from gameboy era do that) but implementing these rooms in the same scene became difficult. i would continue to attempt to make things in the same way, but it would become less important.

also changing to my own engine introduced the opportunity to make massive unified scenes.

this is a unified version of the city from before, which i still want to use.

programming my own engine has been really difficult. without limits, i don't know when to stop working on a single concept. progress is slow. in terms of the game, anyways. my game engine is actually massive. and i've learned a lot too. i don't hate that progress is slow. i am going at my own pace.

so we are pretty much caught up to now. i will show what i have.

i don't have much in terms of game world. i want the player to start in the same place, a big city, and before that their apartment. removing the limits to the tile size, i started making complicated shapes for objects, the appearances of which don't necessarily align to the 8x8 grid. sometimes, of course, it's nice to have an anchor point though.

this is the newest rendition of the player, too.

my character, unnamed as of now, is agender. their pronouns are they and them. that's just the way i want it to be.

i've recently been working on enemy design again. my characters are no longer limited to 16x16 pixels, so i am really stretching my legs here.

now you might notice something: these are all disgusting! these were all made very close to each other, and i used the same skull motif across all of them. it's not final of course, but i'm not opposed to it.

i think the next best step is to describe the capabilities of the engine now, as it is. right now the game is made up of difference scenes, which could be a room or a big area. scenes are basically just things that i want a transition between. scenes have actors, which can be the player, a moving monster, a blinking cursor, a static image, or also a step trigger or invisible road block (not used conventionally, lol, just a capability). there is a camera object, which follows an actor focus (usually the player, could also be another actor or an invisible actor for panning). a filter class handles scene transitions, but likely more in the future. like rain! there is a scene background and a scene overlay, which is placed above all actors. i just think that allows for a more engaging world. text can appear on the screen. it appears over time, and can last for more than one text panel for long dialogues. it's very crude however, and i'm still trying to work on a system that makes text formatting easy. a system to handle key pressed. pygame does this, but i don't really understand it. i've just made my own system. it's very succinct. a button object has a current state, but also the state of the last frame. from this i can track if a button is first being pressed, or being released. some primitive inventory and battle systems. the way scenes and events are handled isn't very sure, so i'm having difficulty with those now. menus, however are no problem i have a title screen, new game screen, file select, and from there it takes you into the game. i have just recently implemented a save file system using .txt files. you can save your game, close it, and when you open up that same save, you will be in the same spot. it's great! i only have 3 save files available. this is of course no limit, but it's just easy right now. i have been the type of person to only have one save file in my games, so i don't think it will be a problem for me personally. i'm opening to changing it, but not now.

now you are caught up. welcome to my project! i'm happy to have you!