Subject of Peril - a GB Studio Art Cart Project
** Trumpets of Victory sound **
Really excited to release Subject of Peril. I wanted to talk a little bit about making the project and the motivations behind the work.
100(+) Days Workshop with the London Writer’s Salon
The instigating moment for this project to come to life was from London' Writer’s Salon’s 100 days workshop. I love this workshop (you can participate for free!!) and this is my second year joining. The idea is that as writers we work better with deadlines. Instead of setting an immeasurable resolution at the start of the year, what can we accomplish or dig into before the year runs out. As a writer, I feel this approach also lends itself to the season. We’re hunkered down, we’re cozying up, we are naturally self reflective, so what better time to commit more time to the work.
Personally, I was dealing with a lot of rejection creatively and professionally and really didn’t want to set a goal for myself that would perpetuate those feelings. I wanted to CREATE. I’d looked at GB Studio before but am not a developer and wouldn’t (until this moment) know what I would build. GB Studio does market itself as a “drag and drop editor”, how difficult could it be… (you know where this going).
We Dive off the Deep End
I’ll start by tampering expectations here and say the final version of the project is four poems, with both an interactive aspect as well as a text display. Four poems was a feat. I’m delivering this project 150-ish days after I started.
The core motivation for the project was to explore new ways for a reader to engage with poetry. Poetry is often this weird subcategory of literature that gets added as a flourish or can be treated as an appetizer. The majority of the friends I have aren’t reading poetry. But experiencing poetry, hearing a reading, sharing a poem, being gifted the notes of someone else in the margins of a poetry collection, that connection is what cements poetry in my mind. I think it’s the best part. So how could I create an opportunity for people to engage with poetry in a new way.
Version 1: 10 poems about my childhood home.
I picked this theme because I have a scrappy doc of a bunch of home poems and thought I could focus on those so I could worry more about programming and less about writing. This image took me probably three days to make and I quickly realized ten poems was out of the question. Here’s the short list of what I didn’t think of because I would rather jump off the deep end and get to work:
Learning Photoshop
Didn’t think about Animation
Sound and Music selection
How to use GB Studio (and what plug-ins I might need)
In general, how Game Boy code works and the limitations of 1980’s programming when trying to bring what sounds like a simple idea to life!
Not Designed with Text in Mind
No one was building the Game Boy for text heavy screens. So much so that in order to display text what the Game Boy effectively does, outside of dialogue boxes, is write the characters on the background of the scene. Imagine painting every line of a poem on a wall one after another. The overlap and alignment has to match perfectly or the line before it will be visible.
I also figured out that I had to operate with a very short line length or suffer some confusing breaks. Text on the Game Boy is missing a simple luxury of modern in life in that it doesn’t wrap your text, you need to manually return at the end of each line, like a typewriter. The time consumed finding out I was one character too long or that my punctuation was 2 pixels too wide for a box was a lot. Formatting is so crucial to how a poem is presented and while I love working within restrictions of form, the boundaries of the system really put me to the test.
Designed with Design in Mind
The Game Boy Color, while super colorful, is actually only colored in four shades of green and only three shades for any sprite/actor/character you might use. Those shades are then matched against a color palette, which is always organized light to dark. So, you know, not really how I think about color in the world.
Providing an exciting experience meant things had to be interesting to look at. At the very least exist with a contrast that didn’t burn your eyes out. Finding ways to maximize my colors and build palettes that made sense was very time consuming. I became a master of swapping shades of green in photoshop.
The final limitation that almost made my mind break is in the number of 8px x 8px squares usable in a background image is limited to 192. Admittedly, that sounds like so many tiles but I hit that limit frequently and had to compromise and redesign repeatedly to get a scene to a state that would load.
Call the Police, Drag and Drop is a Lie
I appreciate the sentiment of “this program is easy to use!”. The goal here is not to discourage anyone from jumping in and trying out GB Studio but there’s almost no dragging and not a ton of dropping going on in this editor. The initial learning curve is steep but there are a lot of prebuilt functions in the programing prompts. It is so wonderful that those exist and saved me some immeasurable amount of time. Ultimately, if you want to do anything beyond the most basic of game mechanics, you will need to dive into the world of community built plug-ins, tile swapping, and custom code.
Thankfully the community around GB Studio is outstanding, this wouldn’t be finished without them. The discord is popping. Having access to people who knew what they were doing solved my scripting and design issues in a matter of hours. I have not stepped into a community and felt excitement like I did when joining the GB Studio discord.
I probably would have given up back at the start of December when every time I loaded a scene every character turned invisible, or when I added a cloud and my dialogue boxes stopped working, or when for some reason one star was pink but only if I approached it from the right not the left, had it not been for the help I received from the community.
Kill Screen Achieved
I think like learning anything new, the more time I spent learning the system the better my understanding became of how the system could be a vehicle for my poems. What I knew when building the first poem compared to the last is vastly different. With that understanding you can feel more alignment in the final poem with the medium. Ultimately, a lot of my effort was spent on learning the system and less on the writing than I would have liked but I am thrilled to release this project. High score achieved, kill screen accomplished, thank you reading, and enjoy.