P2: RECURSED

RECURSED

Team Bandicoot Members: 

Elline Harrison, Jay Li, Kevin Nguyen, Kalu Obasi, Shuci Zhang

Artist’s Statement:

RECURSED is a single-player 2D platformer where you traverse the stars in search of a new home. The year is 4077, and Earth is slowly being rendered uninhabitable. You have been tasked with scouring the known universe for a new planet that can support life for Earth’s citizens. Unfortunately, such planets are few and far between, and your team of intergalactic explorers is running out of options.

Suddenly, everything changes when your radars pick up a mysterious transmission:

You trace the message to the remote star system Gerbloff, and though the warning gives you significant trepidation, you travel there to investigate its capabilities to support life. Though the planets you explore have very beautiful landscapes, they reveal strange properties upon further examination, and they all seem connected to something larger… perhaps something beyond your comprehension.

Designed for the Playdate handheld video game console (which is very much like a Nintendo GameBoy with a crank attached), the aesthetics of RECURSED are an homage to the “retro gaming” era of the late 1980s and early 1990s, complete with pixel-art visuals and chiptune music. Our game’s target audience is anyone with a Playdate console, particularly those who enjoy 2D platformers like Super Mario Land or Celeste. (We expect that anyone willing to spend money on this console would have significant prior experience with video games; still, we wanted to make it somewhat approachable.) This slice is intended to deliver a tight but rewarding gaming experience through challenging level designs, novel platforming mechanics, and an embedded narrative that unfolds slowly as players pick up items, gain abilities, and uncover the secrets of Gerbloff.

Concept Map:

(Concept map external link)

Initial Decisions and Formal Elements:

When we first came together as a team, we started off with a small set of ideas. Some of us just wanted to create a game with an authentic “8-bit” or “retro” style, complete with pixelated visuals and chiptune music. Others came with very deep intentions about a complex game narrative and writing. We each came into the project with different skills and experiences, but also with different understandings of what the final game could or should look like. However, as a group of five, we were in agreement on one sentiment (spawned from a suggestion from Butch, thanks Butch!)… indeed, a unifying core belief that became the solid foundation for many of the initial decisions in our development process:

“The Playdate seems pretty cool!”

Though we found the idea intriguing, we did have some initial reservations about building a game for the Playdate. We were informed that nobody in the class had ever developed a Playdate game before, making us the “guinea pigs” for this system and engine. After spending some time with the console and seeing what other developers were able to do, we became more and more excited to take on the challenge for ourselves.

Given the nature of the Playdate as a gaming tool, we decided to keep the gameplay, music, and visuals very simple. We felt that a 2D platform game would work well within the Playdate’s inherent software and hardware limitations while still providing players with sufficient Fun as Challenge. Platformers also have a relatively well-defined set of conventions for rules and resources, which took some of the pressure off of us to come up with our own from scratch.

At first, we thought about targeting our game to a wide variety of gamers: especially casual players with a heavy interest in storytelling and a light interest in platforming mechanics. However, our target audience changed in some subtle ways as we continued development. In particular, many of our “non-gamer” playtesters found that the platforming levels were more challenging than we had anticipated. Still, many of those same playtesters reported having a lot of fun in those same levels. In light of this, we decided to narrow our target audience to accommodate those whose interest in challenging platforming perhaps matched (or even exceeded) their interest in compelling narratives.

By limiting the scope of our core gameplay loop, we were also able to turn more of our attention to the complexity of everything surrounding it: most notably, the story. Though our game would focus heavily on exploring different environments, we wanted that exploration to be situated in a high-stakes context. From there came our initial ideas for the game’s central narrative conflict (a species and society on the brink of extinction), as well as the protagonist’s role and objective within it (a researcher searching for a new home in unfamiliar, dangerous territory). To complement the Fun as Challenge in the platforming mechanics, we wanted our players to experience Fun as Narrative as they navigate each level and unlock the hidden details about Gerbloff’s history.

One last initial decision worth noting concerned the Playdate’s unique crank controller. The crank lends itself to many rotational gameplay mechanics unlikely to be found in other games on other platforms. After seeing how it worked in games like Fulcrum Defender and Diora, finding compelling ways to use the crank in our game became an important priority for us. Many of our early playtesters cited the crank as a particular source of Fun as Sensation, which further incentivized us to find more creative uses for it as a creative storytelling and mechanical device.

Scope:

Early on in our development process, we reasoned that our P2 submission should be a “really big playable slice” of the full RECURSED game. We envisioned the full game as consisting of four planets total, each with its own set of environments that explore the fractal theme in different ways. Our P2 submission, then, would be a fully-fleshed-out version of the beginning of the game: everything from the introductory “title sequence” to the end of the first planet. Given our game’s emphasis on platforming and ability progression, we decided that “3 sub-levels with sound mechanics and concrete designs” would be a more satisfying end product than “12 sub-levels with surface-level mechanics and bare-bones designs.” Ideally, it would allow players to get a deep sense of what all of the levels past the first planet might look like (in terms of puzzle variety, difficulty curves, and so on), rather than a shallow sense of how all of the levels and planets might change.

Testing and Iteration History:

Iteration 0: Storyboards & Basic Ideas

Funnily enough, Gerbloff isn’t exactly native to RECURSED. It was actually the setting of the game that some of us had worked on for the first game design project, named Rock-it! (P1). However, we all expressed some level of interest in “outer space exploration” as a gameplay environment, so we kept going with the “Gerbloff” motif. We also wanted our game’s visual and aesthetic elements to be “spooky”: not explicitly horrific to a mature extent, but somewhat tense, in the way that one might naturally find the idea of exploring a potentially hostile alien planet somewhat tense.

After a storyboarding session between Jay and Shuci, we decided to incorporate themes of geometry and fractals into our game as well, inspired in part by Uzumaki (a manga in which people are haunted by visions of spirals and lose their minds) and Look Outside (another game about fractal entities). Combining this new idea with our previous intentions gave us our first really solid gameplay concept: a game where a space explorer can visit different planets infested with some sort of entity that manifests itself through fractals and recursive imagery. Our full game’s narrative would take the player through many different “variations on this theme,” from naturally occurring fractals (lightning, tree branches, et cetera) to the recursive, sometimes intrusive process of the human mind. Our slice would be of just the first planet, but we decided to try to gently foreshadow this progression through various forms of recursion through the game’s environments and interactions.

Iteration 1: Analog & Verbal Concepts

We began our iterations by simply trying to get a concept map down on paper. Writing it out helped us resolve some of the natural conflicts that come from the early stages of brainstorming. For instance, initially, we were debating between a game with a 3/4 “bird’s eye” perspective and one with a fully two-dimensional “side-scrolling” perspective. In the end, we settled on a side-scroller with distinct rooms that connect to one another to form longer levels. We chose this analog approach specifically so that we could float our ideas to students in the class and members of the teaching team with low commitment.

Throughout this process, we were also researching the developer capabilities of the Playdate and looking for game designs that would most easily translate onto the console. Since none of us had experience working with a Playdate before, and we wanted to make the learning process as smooth as possible, it was important for us to find other Playdate games to use as references and inspiration for our own ongoing work.

We pitched our work in this iteration to others in the class, branding it as a spooky game with just a sprinkle of “cutesy-ness” (the pixel art, the music, et cetera). Many people seemed really interested in the concept for our game, which was encouraging. In particular, we got really great feedback on these ideas from Team Bathyurus. They were the first to suggest that we use the crank mechanic to actually “zoom in” on the collectible items with fractal patterns in them, combining Fun as Sensation (the actual act of “cranking”) with Fun as Fantasy (the act of learning more about this odd, geometric setting). We jumped on this idea with great haste, and it soon became one of the most crucial moments of the game—and one of the most delightful, if our playtest videos are any indication.

Iteration 2: Brainstorming & Mapping

Our next step was to hammer out the finer details of the scope and timeline for this project. While this brainstorming session didn’t result in any “playtest-able” media, it was still an important component of putting our game together on time. In the first brainstorming session of this iteration, we started by drawing out a map of what each of the game levels might look like. This early map design is shown below, with the first level going to the right (in typical 2D platformer fashion), level 2 going upward, and level 3 going downward. We stayed pretty true to these designs throughout the development process.

Then, we tried to narrow down our set of ideas for mechanics to a core subset that we felt would be ideal to implement. We were limited by the minimal buttons on the Playdate console, so we spent a lot of time weighing different options for mechanics and, in particular, deciding which buttons could be associated with them. Based on the decisions made here, we crafted a game plan (haha) to properly outline which tasks would be accomplished by each checkpoint submission.

 

 

 

 

Iteration 3: Playtests 1-3

Since no one on our team had experience developing for the Playdate, we needed to get some technical experience with the console right out of the gate. After some further research into which tools were available for the Playdate and which of those tools were the most well-documented and well-supported, we settled on a small handful of resources: Lua for the primary codebase, LDtk for the level designs, and BeepBox for the music and sound effects.

For our first playable iteration, we only had the basic movement controls of walking and jumping, a few small environments (the home base and the shoreline), one item (the seashell), and the zoom-in mechanic with the crank. These components covered the basic gameplay loop of leaving the base, exploring a level, finding an item, and returning to the base to investigate the item. As such, we felt that their inclusion would help us check that we were, in the broadest sense, heading in the right direction. They also gave us a small idea of what our much larger “loop-arc-loop sandwich” might look like in future iterations, as players would explore more environments and find more items (the loop) to uncover the greater story of Gerbloff (the arc).

We began playtesting with a few students in the class who regularly play platformer games. The primary takeaway from these early playtests was that certain mechanics actively hindered the gameplay experience we were going for. The main example of this was mapping the Up arrow to an instant “return to the home base” function. We thought this would be a convenient action for players to have as they explored the levels, but many of them kept accidentally hitting the Up arrow while playing, which interrupted their gameplay in mildly annoying ways. Based on the feedback we got from our playtesters about this, we learned that we needed to either remove this affordance entirely or make it more intuitive to the player. In addition, many playtesters were unsure how to interact with objects, since we had not yet implemented a real “tutorial” for the game. We made sure to be more mindful of that onboarding process in future iterations.

On a more positive note, the players did seem to really enjoy the “fractal” themes of the game, as well as the zoom-in mechanic. Most players were really excited when they first used the crank to interact with the seashell (“OOOOHHH SHII-”, “This is really cool”, “Wooooahhhhh, woahhhh…”). Overall, we felt that we were generally heading in the right direction, but we definitely needed to re-evaluate the game’s early mechanics and the ways that players learn about and use them.

Iteration 4: Playtests 4-5

For this iteration, we tried to identify where we had gone too far in the previous version and scale it down where possible. We started by significantly simplifying the design of the home base. There were a lot of unnecessary sprites and visual assets in the earlier version (top), and it made the right action really unobvious. By creating a simpler version of this environment (bottom), we were able to curate the vibe we wanted to curate more accurately while still maintaining a sense of environmental storytelling. Another way we made the right action obvious was by adding the world’s largest “EXIT” sign to the game. It was a bit over-the-top, but it was important for us that players knew where to go at the start of the game.

Thanks in part to that “EXIT” sign, our playtester for this iteration did have a much easier time knowing where to go and what to do, but we felt we had perhaps simplified the home base a bit too much. Our environmental storytelling was also still fairly off; at first, our player thought they were in a supermarket rather than a space station of any kind.

After this playtest, we each began work on different parts of the game that would hopefully come together smoothly in future playtests. Kalu focused on designing levels and writing music; Kevin and Shuci focused on fixing technical bugs and changing button mechanics; and Elline and Jay focused on making visual assets.

Iteration 5: Playtests… sigh… 6-7

At this point in the game’s development, our priority was to make sure that our playtesters had a very solid understanding of what to do when they started the game. As such, we finally introduced our first attempt at a true tutorial. The main mechanics we wanted players to grasp after the tutorial were (a) grabbing objects from each level and (b) inspecting those objects using the info table in the home base. We got the sense from earlier playtests that the inspection / examination segments were the most novel and compelling parts of the game thus far, so we wanted to teach players about them early on. To craft this tutorial, we took a lot of advice from the video we sketch-noted about onboarding in Plants vs. Zombies (blending the tutorial into the gameplay, having players do an action just once, keeping the dialogue prompts unobtrusive, et cetera).

At this point, two of our levels were pretty much fully fleshed out. This allowed us to see playtesters navigate through a larger portion of the game and to figure out the best ways of building its difficulty progression. The most common complaints from this iteration’s playtesters had to do with the way the levels were designed. Ladders were somewhat unwieldy to use and often resulted in frustrating setbacks; backtracking through each level after getting the key item was annoying; and seeing certain interactable items was difficult due to a lack of contrast between the background and the foreground. We quickly drafted solutions for each of these complaints: changing ladder mechanics, removing the need for backtracking by having players simply teleport back to the base after getting an item, and changing the level background art to create greater contrast with the platforms, items, et cetera. Ladders in particular proved to be a rather difficult problem to fix. At this stage, we were only able to come with the temporary solution of changing the behavior of the spawn points in each level such players would not respawn on top of ladders upon death (which, previously, would often result in them falling all the way down the ladder and having to climb back up).

Iteration 6: Playtests 8-11

At this point, our game was starting to really come together. The overall “loop” of our slice finally became playable, complete with more fully realized narrative and aesthetic elements. In anticipation of this playtesting session, we had designed three fleshed-out levels, implemented teleportation back to the home base after picking up key items, polished the introductory narrative comic and tutorial, given the home base a complete ✨makeover ✨, and added some more interesting platforming mechanics (moving platforms, bounce pads, and crank-controlled platforms).

Additionally, we noticed that some of our playtesters in past editions of the game had missed the item examination segments until prompted (by one of us, usually) to use the info table in the home base. This was unfortunate, as the players who did investigate items actively (particularly the fractal-esque ones with the crank-operated zooming) often got a lot of enjoyment out of doing so. To gently encourage players to prioritize item examination, we refactored the ways in which level progression and ability progression operated. In this version of the game, the second and third levels could only be accessed via certain movement abilities (double-jumping and dashing, respectively), and those abilities could only be unlocked by examining the key items at the home base’s info table. We felt that this approach to game architecture felt like a natural progression that would, in ideal circumstances, no longer require much handholding from us as playtest moderators or notetakers.

We got a lot of great notes on all of these elements from our playtesters, with one in particular having this to say upon discovering our newly implemented crank-controlled platforms in the game’s third level: “I love this. I love this. I love this. I love this. I love this. I love this. I love this.”

While our game’s narrative was more or less solidified at this point, we still wanted to consider the feedback that we got from playtesters about it. One playtester paid very close attention to the introductory crank comic and pointed out quite a lot of subtle but serious plot holes. As a result, Jay spent three hours the next day diligently revamping the introductory comic to patch up these inconsistencies. 

We also got more general comments about incorporating narrative elements more frequently throughout the game. This presented us with a bit of a problem. We wanted the narrative of the slice to be compelling enough to keep players engaged, but since our slice was only the first planet in a series of four, we also wanted to leave ample room for further development of the narrative at later points in the game. In order to strike a balance between these two conflicting desires, we incorporated more narrative hints in the item descriptions and implemented a second scrolling comic at the end of the slice, wrapping up the arc of the first planet and setting up the game’s further progression.

We ended up being really pleased with our refactoring of level progression and ability progression, as it seemed to encourage players to more readily investigate the items they had collected. To our surprise and amusement, we also discovered some interesting bugs that arose from the collision detection for moving platforms. After testing these bugs a bit in the next iteration, we found that they only served to speed up the player’s progress through the levels and didn’t “break the game” in any meaningful way. As such, we thought it would be fun to leave them in as a speedrunning strategy (henceforth named the “Butch” strat, after the person who discovered it ;D). In fact, there may or may not be an Easter egg left in our game that can only be accessed using a specific moving-platform bug in a specific level…

Iteration 7: Playtest 12 (The Final Frontier)

Before our final playtest, we spent ample time ironing out the remaining wrinkles we discovered from our previous iteration. Ladders presented the greatest and most persistent obstacle, despite several attempts to change the aspects of them that earlier playtesters found frustrating. Miraculously, mere hours before our final playtest, we found an implementation that actually worked: an additional LDtk entity, placed on top of each ladder, that acted as a one-way platform of sorts. This allowed the player to stand on top of ladders without falling straight through them, but still ascend and descend them as normal. Thus, the ladders finally behaved in the way we wanted them to.

After refining the ladders and slightly tweaking some of the backgrounds and sound effects, we were ready at last to have someone playtest the completed slice. As the playtest went on, we were very pleased to see that our hard work, both on this most recent iteration and throughout the project’s history, had paid off in a massive way. Our playtester gave us a wealth of positive feedback on many of our game’s core aspects. In particular, they seemed to really enjoy the careful attention to artistic and visual detail, the intentional onboarding that took place within the level design, and the novelty of using the crank for platforming and storytelling.

Given this overwhelmingly positive experience, we were satisfied to call this the true “final” version of our RECURSED slice; as such, we spent the remainder of our time on preparing the game for deployment on itch.io and resolving our own personal nitpicks (sound effects that didn’t sound quite right, levels that could do with adding or subtracting one block, and so on). Overall, we’re very happy with the end result, and proud of how far we’ve come through the process!

Link to Game Download:

Link to itch.io 

Final Playtest Video (FULL):

Extra – Accessibility:

The Playdate’s black-and-white color scheme gave us some notable obstacles in visual design; naturally, we weren’t able to represent colors, textures, or intricate patterns as well as we could with a different system. Despite this, we did our best to create sufficient contrast between the background elements (generally darker) and the foreground elements (generally lighter), such as to incorporate some level of colorblindness accommodation despite the limited hardware.

In addition, while our game is intended for players with notable experience with platformers, we still wanted it to be accessible to people who are newer to the genre. This inspired us to create an information guide for the game. Upon pressing the Menu button, players can see a screen with a small “infographic” for all of the game’s controls, letting new players familiarize themselves with the mechanics without having to replay the tutorial. This menu also has a “reset zone” option that brings players back to the start of an area: a helpful affordance for places where players might get stuck and become frustrated.

Extra – Extended Narrative and Game Design:

While this slice of RECURSED is complete, the full game is certainly not over. This planet is only the first of four, where the story of the fractal entity and its influence over the Gerbloff system is slowly revealed. The overarching structure of RECURSED’s fractal theme goes from the external manifestations of fractals to the internal, in parallel showcasing the fractal god’s gradual takeover of the player themselves over time. 

We start in this first planet about fractals in nature, looking at natural occurrences such as snowflakes, the shorelines (look up the coastline paradox!), and trees, and subtly finding fractals in them. At this point in the game, the word fractal is also never explicitly mentioned, and the essence of some kind of unknown disturbance with shape and geometry is simply referenced throughout the item descriptions, and particularly the 3 special “crank animation” items. These 3 items are interesting in particular because they each display how further time spent with the fractals allows the fractal god to imbue itself into your own body, thus giving you abilities such as double jump and dash as you interact with the objects and begin to be consumed by the fractal. 

The second planet then moves into the structures that beings create that embody fractals as well, we call this the “architecture planet.” We anticipate that this planet will involve more lore about the actual planets and previous inhabitants of Gerbloff, explaining lore about who lived there before through the decaying ruins of the buildings they’ve left behind. Gameplay wise, this level will also include the space around you physically shifting and moving (as the fractilization of road and city systems also decays and expands). Thus, there will be more cognitive puzzle solving during platforming, trying to remember different paths and figure out how the world is shifting. 

The third planet moves from the worlds we create, and into the worlds of our own body—this is the “body horror” planet. This is inspired by the fractals found within our own body, such as the spirals on our finger pads, or the fractaling paths of our nervous and circulatory systems. In this level, the player will start to get pushed between their physical reality of their body shifting affecting their movement abilities, and their internal world where they navigate through their own bodily systems. The player can interact and change things in both the external and internal worlds to change the other side, and will find their way through figuring out how to interact with the two different worlds to create the right path. 

Finally, the last planet moves into the fractalizing, spiraling nature of the thoughts in our own minds, moving to the most internal state possible of the subconscious. In this last level, the fractal god will make itself clear, and we anticipate a Lovecraftian scale of the horror, similar to the final reveal in Uzamaki of the scale of the spiral. This level will be the most abstract art-wise, and also feel the most eerie and explicitly horror. Amidst harder platforming, the player will have to interact with the fractal god themselves and try to see if they can find some way to escape the god’s influence over their own body and mind. 

Ethical Implications:

While the story might at first seem to be an exploration of this idea of the shapes of fractals and the ways they manifest in the physical and mental worlds, there are actually metaphors and ethical implications that we are designing into this theme. In particular, the fractal is related to a metaphor of climate change and climate disaster within our story. This is in-part inspired by the philosophical concept of the Hyperobject by Timothy Morton, who describes how massive, incomprehensible phenomena such as climate change and evolution are beyond the comprehensibility of any one individual within the grand scheme of the phenomenon itself, and thus challenge our understandings of reality. 

In many ways, this idea of the hyperobject is reflected in the nature of the fractal. Any time you try to understand one part of it, you can see that there is more to it beyond what meets the eye. In this way, the destruction of Gerbloff through an unknown, unending, and unstoppable fractal entity calls to question whether we have let the scale of climate change spiral into something that is similarly uncontrollable, or whether we will be able to stop this fractalizing phenomenon before it gets too late. 

Thus, we hope that players who go about the eventual final game with a keen eye and pay attention to the lore beyond just the platforming will start to understand the takeaways about how the massive scale of the fractal itself leading to the destruction of Gerbloff runs in parallel to Earth’s own unexplained destruction in 4077 within the universe. In the world of RECURSED, this eventually becomes revealed to be because of irreversible damage to the planet of Earth itself, which is why the main character seeks to find another beautiful planet that can replicate Earth’s prior conditions instead. And yet Gerbloff shines in its difference—it has no more inhabitants to destroy it; they have all been destroyed by the scale of the fractal itself, leaving the planets to return to a previous era of balance. In its place, will the fractal power take control of our player as well? If the player wins instead, what will end up happening to Gerbloff in turn? 

Overall, the ideas and execution of RECURSED have much more to be explored, and many of us are very excited to continue working on this game together over the summer, through independent studies and within our personal time!

Extra – Jay’s Notes on Design:

Before even starting this game, I knew I wanted to learn more skills for doing pixel art. It turns out that the Playdate ended up being the perfect tool to do just that! Through some beginner tutorials, I quickly learned of a tool called LibreSprite (a free, open source version of Aesprite that I’d highly recommend now for beginners), which became my main tool for doing all the original art for this game.

These tools became really useful when designing the identity and display type fonts for the comics and art, which were all self-designed and hand-drawn (with some inspiration listed in credits) by me. These helped with the eerie mood required in the comics and messaging from Gerbloff, as well as the technological/space mood for the other messaging in the comics that are from the player’s perspective. 

The nature of the Playdate console and the black and white limitations to pixels on a 400 x 240 size also led to an initial challenge, but later an interesting ability to specifically use something called “dithering tools.” Dithering is a shading technique where through using only two colors in differing patterns, you can create the illusion of intermediary hues. It works perfectly for the Playdate’s black and white, and is what creates the illusion of greys in the art. We used two specific tools (PlayDither and Tooooools.app, linked in the credits), and were able to play with the tools to adjust lighting, grain, dark/light values, etc. on inputted background photos to get our final results. 

The Playdate still had its fair share of challenges though. One in particular was trying to clarify foreground/background through using only black and white. As referenced earlier, we eventually settled on using black for background, and white for foreground. However, maintaining a somewhat visible artistic background in the back while keeping it mostly white in the areas the player was moving led to some changes. For example, changing the original beach background image (which made the character and objects that were white in the center of the screen barely visible), to a more abstract, stylized dithered image that both improved the eerie mood of the game, and made items/player more visible in the center. 

 

Testing different character sprite designs was another large part of the challenge. The 16×16 pixel size was extremely limiting, and made it hard to add a lot of dimension to any “tall,” “humanoid” character. I ended up taking the original rounder character from the tutorial video we watched and adapting it to the astronaut theme with the face mask (credits linked at the end). Interestingly enough, the “helmet” of the character also made it easier to not have to implement any facial expressions—a perk that is used in a lot of pixel-art games for their small character designs! Overall, I really enjoyed the specific challenges that came with creating art for the Playdate, as the black and white and small pixel nature of it really forced me to understand some of the basics of pixel art such as value, dithering, and conveying information with a very small amount of room. 

 

Extra – Kalu’s Music Notes (pun most certainly intended):

The Playdate goes to great lengths to provide a simple, retro-esque gaming experience. The device’s auditory capabilities reflect this; it only supports 4-channel audio mixing, lending itself most clearly toward the “8-bit” sounds of the Nintendo GameBoy and similar handheld systems of the 1980s and 1990s. 

To recreate this retro aesthetic most faithfully in RECURSED, I chose to compose all of the game’s music and sound effects in BeepBox, a basic online tool for creating instrumental music. BeepBox has a relatively small selection of instruments and effects to choose from, lacking much of the extensive functionality that modern-day DAWs (digital audio workstations) like FL Studio and Ableton have. This limited scope is what made it perfect for this project.

As the game got larger and we added more levels and settings, I challenged myself to create all of the auditory effects using only the sound channels that the GameBoy used: two “pulse” channels for melodies and harmonies, one “wave” channel for bass lines, and one “noise” channel for drums and other percussion. BeepBox’s simple yet intuitive interface allowed me to make the very most of these design constraints.

I did cheat a little bit in some places (BeepBox does allow for certain “perks” like reverb, echo, and so on), but the end result is a score that, more or less, could have been used in a game for the GameBoy or the Nintendo Entertainment System. The full soundtrack is available here.

Extra – Playtest Logs on Notable Quotes:

(External link to Notable Quotes on Google Docs)

Credits:

Tutorials:

• Basics for development for Playdate (Link)
• Scrolling comic for the Playdate (Link) 
• Crank animations for Playdate (Link)
• Platformer for Playdate tutorial (Link)
• Sprites for Playdate tutorial (Link)
• Making pixel art tilesets (Link)
• Intro pixel art tutorial (Link)
• Music tutorial (Link)

Tools

• Dithering tool 1, PlayDither (Link)
• Dithering tool 2, Tooooools.app (Link)
• LibreSprite for pixel art (Link)
• LDtk for level design (Link)
• BeepBox for music (Link)
• Playdate SDK (Link)

Images/GIFs

• Succulent (Link)
• Pinecone (Link)
• Slime Mold (Link)
• Broccoli (Link)
• Crystal (Link)
• Lightning (Link)
• Flower (Link)
• Pineapple (Link)
• Beach (Link)
• Mountains (Link)
• Forest (Link)
• Broccoli GIF (Link)
• Shell GIF (Link)
• Snowflake GIF (Link)
• Fonts (Link)
• Character sprite template (Link)

AI Disclosure:

The game was entirely ideated and created by team members, with the only exception being the use of AI tools to help with issues we ran into while coding. All art, music, storyline, level design, and more were done by members of the team.