coverart by 'BrolyNG'!
HELLO!
Hello everyone! Happy last day of November! Most of you won’t know this but November is my favorite month! I love thanksgiving food and it’s also my birthday month. I turned 24 on the 16th of this month, and I was 22 when I started this! Likely, I’ll be 25 when this game release! How the years fly by!
Anyways, i'm gonna try and keep it brief today. I’ll be talking about stage gimmicks, features, and My game design philosophy! Let's get roight into it!
Good art, Bad art, Rules, and Balancing
Something that a lot of indie platformers struggle with is variety. Now I'm not saying that indie platformers don’t have cool stage gimmicks and neat ideas, they do! But I feel that they can sometimes play it too safe when it comes to what they implement.
I believe this comes from a place of hyper-focusing on game design principles and rules, a problem that doesn't sound like a problem, but is plaguing almost ALL games now adays. For big AAA games, this comes from the fact that there is a committee calling the shots on what goes into a game, and no one persons' ideas or thoughts are implemented into these games. Rather, each idea is ran through about 50+ people, most of which are people who do not and will not play the games they are making or have no desire or care for games as a form of media, let alone a piece of art. For indie developers, these restrictions are heavily reduced, but are instead replaced with what YouTube game design essayists and armchair game critics describe as “core game design principles”
I don’t want this to come off as rude and mean-spirited because I truly believe the people making these claims are coming from a place of genuine love for games! But if you boil down entire genres into a few basic key components, you are giving game designers the recipe for making bland experiences. All forms of art has there key principles, planning, and designs that can allow for a better-experience subconsciously, but a flat, concrete foundation does not constitute as a house.
This all comes with experience, all of what I am critiquing is what I believed only a few years ago when I first started out. “Good games come from following good game rules” I thought, and at the core it’s true, my early works are technically fair and have a decent hook disguised as fun, but most lack any sense of flair, true real tangible flair! With time, you will realize that when it comes to games and any form of art, flair and meaning take more importance than following any sort of rules, since any rules to make great are all made up! I imagine for a lot of more talented designers than myself, this came quicker, for me it did not and that is why this game is being made!
Freedom, Style, and Fun!
With all that being said, Gappy's main design philosophy is fun and style over all! My main inspiration when making this game is to try not to just mimic the style and vibe of old platformers of the 80s and 90s but try and evoke that same sense of magic, adventure and wonder those games had. Games like Super Mario World and Kirby's adventure just have such a way of capturing beauty and excitement in ways modern games struggle with today, even with improved ideas of game design and better hardware. It's a very specific vibe that can only be captured if you treat areas in a game less like levels and more like a canvas. It sounds pretentious I know, but art is supposed to be!
How to pull this off is another story, I feel like a lot of heavy lifting comes from my attempt to make every stage feel WILDLY different from each other, even if the levels are found in the same world. Obviously still trying to keep with the worlds overall theme. Basically just avoiding 3 levels all looking and feeling the same for the sake of it making sense in the context of the "world" you're in.
All of these levels are found in world 1. although they do share a lot of similarities they also do wildly different things with colors, moods and overall aesthetics. Every world does this and does it increasingly more as the game goes on. It comes naturally as I want to make as many set-pieces as possible in worlds that only have 4 levels, it makes for a fun art challenge!
But it's also not just the visuals obviously, it's gameplay too. Something I mentioned way back in this game's early development is that I feel some game devs are too scared to both let players go completely free & also are scared to mix up the game they are playing. And I still feel that way. I think a lot of indie devs avoid these pitfalls due to being afraid of how much time they'll spend on a project or it possibly being expensive. For me, I don't really care that whole lot. Time is meant to spend and I want my game to have a certain edge or charm in not being afraid to do something silly in order to be entertaining. And my expectations for how well Gappy will do are on the floor, I work full time for this reason.
In level 1-3, at the final leg of the stage there is this section where you fly through spike traps on a spinning flower akin to battle toads. It only lasts maybe 30 seconds max and I find it very charming!
In level 3-1. you go start to finishing riding a minecart. This is kind of specifically a "level-defining" gimmick but this is also one of the shortest levels, in fact it almost acts more of an intro to the second level of the world than anything else. And even this is more akin to the traditional gameplay of Gappy as it is essentially an auto-scroller, but it does have a fun sense of momentum when using the slopes to there full advantage.
This one is a little smaller, as you have to go out of your way to interact with it, but in level 2-4 you can drive a little forklift around, breaking boxes and stacking ones on top of this bigger stack!
It's in these little moments of mixing up what the player expects from a platformer that really allow it to feel special! And all of these are allowed to simply exist, there isn't going to be 6+ levels of pushing the forklift to it's absolute gameplay limit because it would weaken the punch of it existing in this one little area. There are a few more I haven't shown and few more of those that are still in the planning phase, but these little moments really make video games feel special! I wish stuff like this was a bit more common-place.
ARTIST CORNER : BROLY
Yes, I did manage to get Broly from Dragonball to actually do art for Gappy, he seemed like a nice guy and his commission prices weren't bad. If I had watched more Dragonball I'd probably have more jokes to say but I don't sorry......
ANYWAYS, Broly on newgrounds is a real chill mf and a good friend of mine! He has worked on a ton of different NG animations collabs and is all around a real talented fella.
If you want to support him, I'd recommend checking out his ko-fi shop where he sells lovely little stickers, they are quite bee-you-tiful! :)
FINAL REMARKS
Again, this one was just a short update. A little preview into my creative process and to show signs of life on here that the game is still alive!
In all honesty, I've been going through a rough patch in my personal life, and it has pulled me away from working on Gappy as much as I'd like to. Realistically I won't be able to get back to working on Gappy like I was until the end of the holidays, which doesn't sound too bad but my game development has slowed to a crawl essentially since the end of October.
But, through all this I'm still trying to keep the Gappy dream alive! For those who follow me on twitter you may have noticed that I have been posting SUBSTANTIALLY more often! This has yielded a huge wave of Wishlist which is always amazing! For those on the discord server you may be seeing the exact opposite happen, the server is almost dead quite at all times. I'm hoping at the turn of the new year to turn that around as well, do some small community events and just generally try and be more active in the server, we'll see what I can do.
Anyways, I'll see you all next year! Ciao!~
-Levi