Hi, Cadence here again.
Making games is the easiest thing in the world when you don’t care about art, and unfortunately, art matters a lot.
Pronoun Palace was developed on the heels of a previous failed game that attempted to blend a visual novel with turn-based combat. At the time I was experimenting with large scale enemy sprites in a similar style to The Binding of Isaac, and a painterly approach to backgrounds that I would downscale with dithering.
When Hazel suggested to me that I should make my own word game (after bemoaning there were no good ones), the idea for the game’s premise—the government stealing your pronouns—arrived fully formed. I had been using “Pronoun Palace” as a jokey codename for the aforementioned previous project, and it made too much sense in the context of a word game. I loved the idea of pronouns having an exaggerated 1984-level dominion over reality, where the words someone has filed away under their name is what determines their literal stage of transition.
As my friend put it, “word crimes beget words game plot.”
1984 and classic dystopia/science fiction formed the backbone of the game’s artistic themes. Pronoun Palace is split into three acts, progressing the player from decrepit suburbs full of blank-faced proles to the surreal brutalist landscape of the bureaucrat class to the palace itself.
The actual process of drawing the game’s sprites varies. Several enemy spritesheets were hastily scribbled in Aseprite and later cleaned up directly in Paint.NET (Aseprite is great for many things, but basic UX is not one of them). But for the most part, sprites were first drawn digitally in SAI, then downscaled and cleaned up as pixel art; generally, the more detailed or anatomical a sprite is, the easier it is for me to draw it digitally first.
Drawing pixel art at this scale is intensive, so animations are made up of keyframes with squash and stretch. Scaling and rotation can look bad with spritework (mitigated somewhat by the size of sprites), so the animations generally avoid resting on frames that are squashed or rotated for long enough for the pixel inconsistency to stand out. I was honestly expecting people to roll their eyes at this style of animation, but a lot of the people who playtested the game specifically said they liked it.
Speaking of pixel art crimes, you may have noticed that we use non-pixel fonts in our game. This is because 1) it would be essentially impossible to draw every letter in both cases in multiple font sizes to accommodate bigrams and trigrams and have them look good and legible on tiles, and 2) because it looks nice.
Certainly, some people will still complain about pixel consistency, but the game looks good and besides, the only other alternatives are to pay me one million dollars to spend years of my life drawing inbetweens, or have a full-blown GMTK-style mental breakdown and remake every asset in the game as a vector graphic.
To cap this newsletter off, let’s talk about the design process behind two specific enemies—New Cop, and Snowball.
Pronoun Palace, with all of its dystopian world building, would obviously not be complete without a police officer enemy. Anthology of the Killer was still fresh on my mind a year ago, and I liked that the police in that game were sort of abstract caricatures, blue people with no differentiation between their body and uniform. My initial attempts at a police enemy were to cobble together shapes and body parts that resembled a police officer, but none of these were very satisfying. Eventually I landed on the idea of a cop-shaped pooltoy, mostly as a joke, and then realized was perfect.
The pooltoy design worked on many levels. It’s a symbol of a police officer standing in for the real thing, it’s kind of surreal, and also a little perverted. I was also thinking about the transhumanist themes of the Combine Overwatch from Half-Life 2 and the adjacency between transformation horror and porn; New Cops are people who have been transformed in some horrific way, but they’re also cute and become big and round as a defense mechanism, and they puke their guts out when brought to low health before aiming a killing blow in retaliation.
Also, the inflation valve face was inspired by the Inkies from de Blob, which is very delightful to me.
The second enemy I wanted to touch on is more brief. Snowball is a bastard Evrart-faced cocaine ghost, but his design was also basically lifted from a boss concept a friend drew for Fiend Folio, a Binding of Isaac mod. I asked Cometz if they were okay with me fully stealing their design, and they said yes, and that’s it. Really, I just wanted to bring up that Pronoun Palace couldn’t have existed without Fiend Folio—given that it’s how I met Hazel and Ren everyone who has helped with this project—or all the bits and pieces of inspiration taken from my friends.
I’ll send this newsletter off by saying you may also recognize Ren as the RENREN, who made the amazing music for Fiend Folio and Excelsior (among many other things). The soundtrack they’ve put together for Pronoun Palace is really incredible, and I’m very excited to show it off in the next newsletter!