Hello everyone! We have released the first episode of our logic platformer in the retro style of 16-bit Amiga and Sega. The first episode is 10 levels out of 40 so far. We want to share our experience in creating even this episode.

It all started with a simple mockup of our artist, who for some reason took an Amiga palette and made a pixel-art sketch of an astronaut on a lonely rocky planet with another giant planet in the background in evening colors. This drawing immediately plunged into the 90's era, when it was fashionable to fantasize about how different everything happening around in other worlds could be from our usual life on Earth. Apparently, the artist himself has not launched games for a long time, so his imagination decided to spew all the nostalgia into such a drawing.

On the one hand, the idea is not new: unknown planets, a lonely astronaut - Metroid comes to mind immediately. On the other hand, the artist did not remember Metroid at all and did not take it as a basis. Most likely, subconsciously the whole formed artistic experience was influenced by all retro games on space theme (and not only), which he had to play - late Space Quest, any games, where the hero explores planets in spacesuit, probably quests like Discworld, even games like modern Amiga novelties, such as Absolute Zero and Power Glove, in general, the collection of games will have to remember for a long time.

The artist just wanted to cheer himself up by drawing another ridiculous character, who won't suffer from life, won't resemble any human (for which he hid his face), won't be an all-powerful space pirate with a nice style of clothes, etc. Here, he's an unknown character dressed in some kind of sack with an equally uncomfortable cap on his head, and he's not at all worried about leaving any meaningful mark on history.

Taking the mockup as a basis, we made a tileset of earth rocks, which in its initial form turned out to be very ugly in our opinion. But it was already possible to work with it. This tileset was made according to the classic 47 rules template, and did not allow combining diagonal tiles.

Later this tileset was redrawn to the most complex combination of 512 rules! Although this required more effort to draw each variant, the current version now also takes diagonal intersections into account, so that the gridiness of the map is no longer so obvious half the time.

Basic movement mechanics have been programmed for the character, so far without any special features.

The root concept of the game is adventure and puzzles. We wanted the player to relax more and not be required to react fast and tense. Tension they already get so often in real life. It would seem that for this purpose it is enough to run "match 3", but no, we knew that full casual is not our choice and there may be people who would like to "walk a live character" in unknown worlds, exercising their brains a little. It turned out that we wanted the same combination of genres as the old Amiga games had: a platformer with a live character, with the help of which logical tasks are solved. Enemies are only a hindrance, and shooting with them is not the basis.

According to the game concept for the first episode, we planned to create 3 types of enemies. The first of the encounters we made a metal bouncing ball, which uses jumps to move. A robot whose functionalities are still unknown. Perhaps it's just a courier with a container hidden inside for some samples, etc.

Why a ball? "Didn't have enough imagination?" - you ask. Yes and no. As we said, the goal of the game is to provide the player with an adventure, not a class struggle against unjust aggressors. Which means that to reduce tension artistically it should be emphasized by more rounded forms with a minimum number of sharp corners. And the first rounded enemy that came to mind was the ball. But to diversify it somehow, we cut it into metal rings, making it a jumping feature.

Despite their roundness, all the robots on this planet obey a central computer somewhere in the depths of the planet, so they've all malfunctioned and can give an electric shock.

Since all enemies here will be robots, we decided to make electric shocks one of the visual features of the game. A defeated robot is immobilized and short-circuited. And sparks fly off from collisions with plasma. In general, so that the player could almost smell fresh welding... We don't think so.

Having defined the platforming part, we started to create the root mechanics - working with weight. Most likely, this is the wrong order of programming, because the basis of the game is not in shooting, but in weight. But we knew for sure that we would definitely make inventory, weight items, etc., so we decided to deal with the most unpleasant things first. Especially, the unpleasant things are done first - an unspoken rule in any work.

In general, at this point we've made a number of objects with weight that can be picked up and put into inventory.

A little later we finalized the inventory. Now it shows information about the weight of each picked up item. And the main thing is that the weight of the selected item now affects the character's jump height.

As we said, this is a planet of the Chubrick civilization, which according to the original mockup was just asking for a weak "lunar" gravity. So we decided to make it a feature of the game. Any developer can guess such mechanics, so we guessed it too. Now the player must know that he can't just take the weight and run with it to the exit: it will affect the height of his jump, which means that somewhere he won't be able to jump and will have to find a way around or temporarily throw away part of the weight.

It's time to end this story, because we've written so much already, and we hope we've given you some food for thought... At least a little bit. But we'll be sure to continue the story later.

In the meantime, you can download episode 1 and try it out. It will definitely still be finalized and filled with events, but we'll talk about it all later.