Beyond The Cutter
(Negotiated Program of Study Part 2)
This final semester we were tasked with making one last longform project to display at the final exhibition at the end of the year. It had to be relatively large scale and involve using the skills we have learned over the course of our time here at Cartoon and Comic arts. I decided it would be interesting to look into making a game that could be played at the final exhibition due to my interest in pixel art, previous job offers I had received by indie game devs which would make a project like this a good portfolio piece, and the opportunity this gave me to practice not just making a story but a product that could have a surrounding brand.
Research/Ideas
When first coming up with this concept, I decided to research and practice pixel art, as well as try out a few games since I don't play very many. I got a basic look at games when creating my Visual Novel but wanted to know a little more. I looked at the work of Brandon James Greer on Youtube for my basis in pixel art as he has many videos outlining how pixel art is done and how style is influenced by size, pallet and line choice. I also looked at Saltoons and Pixel Architect.
I watched a ton of game dev logs from people who do GameJams and make playable games within short periods of time, Vimlark was especially interesting as he makes many games throughout the year and is always trying new engines.
I also made a point to practice over the summer running up to my final year, I made a bunch of pixel art vignettes as a way to participate in ArtFight 2021 and also make enough pieces to eventually map and code a short game, this let me practice all the baisics of making a game, although I dropped the RPG style and ended up coming up with a concept for a platformer in the end.
The concept I settled on was inspired by games such as cookie run, mario and flappybird, I wanted a cute and approachable game with a bakery theme that was an easy to play platformer. I loved how in many games the size of the player relative to their world is taken advantage of to make unique puzzles for the player to solve. Remembering information I had gained on baking and conventions over my time growing up as well as here at university, I put together the idea for a game that was set in a convention hall for bakers, with the tables acting as the levels and the convention guide acting as the game map. I also remembered a challenge my mother had done icing cookies 'incorrectly' for their cutter and decided it would be a nice opportunity to create unique and merchandisable characters and it bacame the baisis for the story themes going forward.
First Pitch Presentation
First Semester of this year we were all asked to come up with 6 pitches for projects. I came up with a fair few but the game pitch was one I was very excited about as I had been researching how I wanted to go about it. I made my presentation and it scored very well with the class and the panel alongside the comic I was due to make last semester. I chose this one over the other high-scoring option due to how well suited to an exhibition the game concept was and my desire to practice making merch for the project as pixel characters are simple and easy to reproduce on products. You can see my very early concept art which would be the basis for the project's overall look.
Start of Semester 2 Presentation
Once semester 2 started we had the real work, it was time to present my idea in full to a panel of people, some would know the idea from the previous semester and some were fully new additions and I was very invested in making my concept clear and selling it to them. I worked on not only making a solid presentation which included my concept art, a full potential story for the game, and merchandise ideas, but also on using the actual look of the presentation to establish a mood and artstyle. This ended up going very well, the panel enjoyed my pixel style and also really enjoyed my looser style I had used on my animatic and the matching character design art I did for the bakers who were each the basis for one of the game levels and would be present in the companion zine I wanted to make. I also took the base example platformer in Gdevelop and essentially reskinned it to look like the kind of game I wanted to make and recorded some demo gameplay footage as a way to get my concept across. I later scrapped this iteration since I felt it was important to code my game myself for better or worse.
The pitching process was honestly a great catalyst for coming up with ideas and I ended up putting many ideas in the presentation to look for guidance on which ones would be a good idea and which ones were a little weaker that I could maybe scrap. What I ended up receiving was even more ideas, it was nice how much fun the panel seemed to be having with the concept but later led to me having to really prioritize completing the concepts I most wanted finished.
Progression
During the time between presentations my priority was to come up with gameplay concepts and to make sure I would have the right knowledge to make my game as well as getting my base movement code out of the way.
The first step was finding somebody who actually knew about games to ask for advice. My initial idea was to reach out to the games department, I sent out emails to department heads asking if they could get the word out that I was looking for somebody to advise on my project and was willing to trade by helping them with assets for their projects. I didn’t hear back so I decided a good step would be to attend the Staffs media mixer, this event is for students looking for people from other courses to collaborate on projects. While I did make some connections there for the other module this semester, I sadly didn’t manage to find a single games student.
However, a classmate of mine was attending the mixer and he happened to have a roommate who was studying games and was willing to ask him and give me his discord handle. We got to talking and he suggested some game programs for me to use but sadly my computer was not compatible with either of them and he didn’t know much about the program that actually fit on my 10 year old laptop. I would later find somebody else to go to for advice, but it was still a good experience to talk to somebody and at least gain some awareness for how weird a program I had downloaded and it made me seriously search out every good resource and forum I could find for the program which ended up very helpful in the long run.
I set to work getting the base game set out, I made a quick image in pixel sizing to get my layout so I could set the exact sizing of the game up and worked just using coloured squares to represent the player and enemies and platforms while I coded in movement and a points system and death parameters. I messed around with making double jumps possible too but it made you able to simply fly the character over obstacles and while I wanted my game to be easy, this seemed like it would be boring. Camera tracking of the player was also an important aspect at this time.
Up to now I had been using either a block or my concept pixel art of a butterfly character as my player stand-in and while I didn’t dislike it I thought it was important to come up with other options. So I gathered a bunch of common cookie cutter shapes and got to work twisting them around and seeing how I’d fit characters in them, this led to a very cute frog design where the paw pad could become the head of the frog. This ended up being iterated into the final player design after I sent the practice sprite out to my classmates, friends and siblings along with a few other deigns and universally got back that the frog was the favourite.
After this I got to designing the first few obstacles and checking all the code and moved on to looking at merch. Now that I had a sprite, I liked I tried out converting it into a custom printed cookie cutter since I was very interested in making a set people could buy with a custom cutter, a set of instructions and some specially mixed little bags of icing and a recipe card in the back. The game’s aesthetic and difficulty level lend well to it being a kids game and I wanted to carry that through in making an item I could see a child enjoying as it gives them a chance to make something and eat sweet food, while also making the kind of item a collector would really enjoy. I used a website my brother-in-law sent me to do the mock-up.
Progress Presentation
The progress presentation came along very quickly. I used the same template as my last presentation and showed my progress so far, I included examples of what I stated above and attempted to include a video of the game in that current state but sadly the video didn't load into the presentation so they didn't get to see it. But I did have a demo of the game in an early phase available on itch.io and put another slightly later recording in this copy of the presentation for you.
Password for the sample game is Gingerbread
Asset and Level Design
Once the main code existed, the next step was creating challenges in the environment for the player as well as creating the assets. A lot of the visuals went through a few drafts and I also struggled quite a lot with the enemy design. If I were to start over in a new program I think I'd want to allocate more time to interesting enemies which could have multiple hitboxes but the time and technology constraints made that not worth the effort. Instead, I spent time in my sketchbook drawing up obstacle and layout ideas to bring into the game and would make assets and then test them in the game and send pictures to classmates and friends to get input on what looked good and what didn't.
By this point, my focus was very heavily on making a demo that would best work within the constraints of the exhibition so my goal was to make something short and to the point so people would not have to live through wait times when somebody else was playing. This meant I made each main obstacle an opportunity to show the mechanic of the game and added multiple characters and checkpoints so the player could easily retry any obstacle right away and could get advice if they were stuck.
There was also the issue of sound effects and music. I decided to use an online 8-bit music editor I'd used for making the music for my practice game to write the songs for the game proper. I wrote a few test tracks keeping in mind the tone of the music and watching a few tutorials and videos of people writing music in short amounts of time and once I had some that sounded good I sent them off to my teachers, my classmates and my friends asking what kind of tone the tracks conveyed as well as which they liked most. I ended up with a few varients of each track, some of which saw use in the title screen of the game and some which I ended up saving for a potential playlist I could sell online. Thje sound effects were pretty low effort, I'd seen another game maker make sound effects by recording his voice and then editing it after the fact and decided to try this myself. The only exception being a free horse noise I had on my computer from the other year which I simply sped up to be the enemy death sound because I thought it was funny.
Sound design
Bug fixes and putting the game together
One of the biggest obsticles while building the game was actually bugs. Both inherrent errors in the game engine and also messing up my code meant a lot of the time when I coded something in I would then have to spend the day testing and troubleshooting it. At first this meant a lot of looking through forums and videos on how to make things work or finding workarounds to even out flaws in the code. One rather amusing issue I tried to film was when I attempted to make a zone of 'vision' for an enemy sprite but once the player entered it, every itteration of the enemy in the level would all rush to dogpile the player all at once leaving the rest of the level empty and often killing the player. It led to me scrapping a lot of the more complex things I wanted to do.
I also encountered an issue that I had to get outside help with. The menu screens would break after a single use meaning that people who wanted to play after the previous person was finished would have ended up with a glitching game that skipped their end screen. This would have been unplayable but luckily I had made some contacts within a new discord server I was introduced to while attending a class for autistic comic creators in Manchester. We went on call and tested some things out to find it was an inherrent bug in the game engine and found that creating a 'portal' system would let the game properly register the end of each transition which would prevent the game from breaking after multiple playthroughs. It was very cool to get to speak with an actual programmer and see how they thought up solutions I wasn't able to. After that I also tried to limit unnecesary button presses.
With the code done, the new most important thing was putting all my assets into place, replacing the ones I didn't like in previous trials, desigining the extra screens and making some playable tests of the game. I also revised the points system a few times since initially it was going to subtract the number of points you earned in game from your time and the lowest score would be the best one, this seemed hard to understand so I changed the equation to make you get more points the faster you are.
Game Testing
I had wanted to test the game with some kids, while my game is meant to definately still appeal to adults, I wanted it to be something a 12-14 year old could happily play. Unfortunately my younger cousins were not available to playtest and I struggled to find anybody else to do it. I regret not being able to make it physically to one of Gareth's classes where he was teaching some young people about comic art as it could have been nice to help teach and also an oppertunity to ask them about what they'd like to see. If I were to try and sell this game I would want to properly check which demographics enjoyed it and I plan to try and get some feedback from my target audience during the exhibition if at all possible.
However, I did manage to show it periodically during development to teachers and classmates, the response was pretty positive though I made sure when I saw Adrien struggling with the controls to try and increase the margin of error with the controls as I wanted the game to be as easy to play as possible. I also coded the game to work with an Xbox controller for during the exhibition as it went with the display a lot better and is more intuative than the arrow keys.
Merchandising
Merchandise was also an important part of this project for me. This in part was because I knew I was being encouraged to make some sort of comic work to go with the main game to portray the story better but was also because I wanted to practice building a brand. Near the start of the semester I asked my step-brother for help making a 3d model he later printed for me of cookie cutters which I then made recipie backing cards for. I also workshopped some print ideas and contacted my mother who is a baker and have sent her several designs for a set of custom cookies based on the game that I can sell at exhibition. I even got my food safety certification to make sure I would be allowed to vend food at the event.
My only gap was when it came to clothing, had I had more funds I would have liked to create some simple graphic shirts to go with the game as I think the final colour pallette would have looked very good as clothing. I did however sketch a few concepts, I personally like the colourblock shirt idea as I think it would be very wearable which is something I look for in my designs in general. I also have looked into itch.io and bandcamp as potential places to sell both computer copies of the game as well as the soundtrack once it's finished. I think the game would have to be at least £5 to be worth the effort of having completed it but the soundtrack would be on a pay what you like baisis as I think it would encourage people to check it out.
The Companion Zine
Going into this semester I had two ideas for companion zines to sell alongside my game at the exhibition. The first idea which I was the most excited about was a small recipe book of the bakers from the animatic teaching the reader how to make and use different types of decorative icing. I liked this because I have a lot of interest in comics as an educational tool and have been playing with the idea of a comic cookbook for university first years for a while.
The second idea was proposed by my tutors after presentations of a 6-page zine portraying the story of the game as a more traditional comic book. In the end, despite how much I liked the first idea, the second made more sense to focus on as it more directly made sense as companion material and the script was practically already written.
The first step was to write my script which I then took and sketched out the first two pages. I had made a small proof of concept for the style I was going to draw the comic in based on the panel having enjoyed my more loose style I used in my concept illustrations. I made two pages in this style before, while working on the game assets, I took one of the pages and pixilated it and changed the palette. I instantly saw the beginnings of a very unique style that I really liked and decided to show a comparison of the two to some of my classmates.
The new pixel art style was pretty universally preferred and so from then on I put in the work to convert the first two pages into the new style, make a new pixel font for the comic, and started making all new pages as pixel art.
This had an interesting side effect of meaning the original scale versions of each page were compatible with the GameboyAdvance Display which a person in an artists discord pointed out to me and offered to take some photos of my art on their CRT display. This means I could in theory sell my companion zine as a program for the GBA which is pretty interesting.
The art style was very time-consuming but I am very satisfied with the way the zine looks and have scaled it so the final prints can be displayed in a small version of my arcade cabinet display at the final exhibition.
The Exhibition
The final part of this project was, of course, the exhibition. I was fortunate enough to be able to work very closely with my teachers for this part as Adrien and Jason came up with a wonderful idea for my game to be displayed in a fake arcade cabinet at the exhibition. They took care of a lot of the actual logistics which I was very grateful for but I took the time to think about what else I wanted to bring to the exhibition and how I wanted to lay everything out, as well as how to decorate the finished cabinet.
I also had a backup plan to display the game on a computer or laptop if the whole thing fell through. However, I didn't need to worry at all, once the prototype was built I saw it was perfect for holding comics and adjusted my zine plans around that as I had applied to sell at the artist alley style tables we are installing in the room the 2nd years usually use during the exhibition.
For the planning, I drew out my space and where I wanted prints of my concept work and a shelf to display merchandise and business cards. I also planned the colour scheme here that ended up being the one used for the zine and the opening and end cards of the game. I drew inspiration from the old Ms Pacman arcade cabinets when designing as I really like that look and wanted the whole thing to look a very clean blend of modern and retro.
The final designs were made to the measurements of the cabinet and printed as large vinyl stickers that were placed with help from Jason on the large cabinet that was painted white and varnished to make it very sleek.
We also wanted to install a light up top to the display with a lamp and some pink perspex and a sticker on top that conducted light. Unfortunately, the peelable sticker was miscut and due to me not knowing white ink couldn't go on transparent stickers the other print didn't look very good over the perspex and dulled the colour a lot. However, we decided to try for a reprint and to stick the currently existing logo to the front of the console since it fit pretty well.
I also selected a shelf that fit and sent off for large prints of my concept art to hang beside my cabinet to complete the look of the area. I decided against printing the zine early as it's not going in the official display area but I have designed and printed off the recipe cards for the sample cookie cutters and have decided to use a clear film and some ribbon to display them. I also designed a custom business card for the event but didn't end up having time to print it beforehand in, I'm hoping to stock my shelf with them a little each day so I can make sure they don't all get taken.
Conclusion
Overall, I think this project was a success. I completed the main exhibition piece to an extent where I think it will make sense to viewers and be visually appealing and I think it is one I'd like to complete post-graduation so I can try selling it on a game platform such as itch.io or steam and the process taught me a lot about game making and merchandising. If I were to do this again I would want to have the physical energy and health to reach out to more people, especially the target demographic for help, and would have loved to have collaborated with somebody who could actually code well so I could have focused my energy on the art a little more and finished all the connected pieces. I certainly was very ambitious this semester and it has led to me having to drop or shorten elements but I still think the overall result shows a lot of good work that could be the groundwork for a decent product.
I think this project has really confirmed for me that while I am capable of many different parts of my trade, playing a smaller role and doing it very well would be preferable in a future career and when I look for jobs I think I would like to be part of a larger pipeline. Indie creators often do everything by themself the way I have this semester and while it is impressive, it also leads to having to pair back your expectations due to limits in time and ability which become less of a problem if you can specialize. In a similar vein, I did not really tell a solid story this semester due to not really being a writer and this has confirmed for me that I don't believe scripting is a field I'd like to go into as I much prefer the visual aspect of art.