Valerie - Game Development Blog

Last week I attended Game Anglia Festival, an event where indie developers, studios and students could submit their games to be played by the public. I submitted it by giving them a download of the game and a gameplay video (in case they weren't able to play it for whatever reason), and they thankfully let me showcase it at the event! In this post I'll briefly go over what that experience was like - the equipment and materials I brought, prior play-testing, what I learnt from watching people play, and my overall takeaways from it. The Setup I had 3 setups available for people to play on - a laptop, a PC, and a Steamdeck. The monitor at the top acted as a nice little poster with some gameplay in the background. Having 3 setups meant that people were less pressured for time and could get immersed in the game, while still having a decent number of people playing over the whole 4 hour event. This worked even better than I expected, with most people getting 20-30 minutes into ...

This is going to be a short post in which I'll talk about a new game mechanic that I've added. Or rather, a mechanic that I've made changes to. It's been over a month since I've started this blog about my game, and I'm happy with the 3 little articles I've been able to put out. So far they've only been about things I've already made, but I wanted to write about something new! The Boost The boost mechanic is something that's been present in the game for a while, but I've recently felt it's not quite right. Previously all it did was change your momentum in the air to match the direction held. For instance, if you held to the right while pressing the boost button, your momentum would immediately switch to that direction. It felt nice and snappy, but it added a level of freedom that took away from the potential depth of it a little bit - the fastest way to get along the ground was always to jump and boost immediately, and there was little mot...

In this post I want to talk about some of my thought processes and inspirations for Valerie's sprite design. She's the player character of a 2D platformer game, so there were several things I needed to consider before committing to it. I'm no professional, so take any of this advice with a teaspoon of salt! Let's get into it. Colours   This is her bouncy little idle animation in the game.   One of the first things you might notice is the limited palette. Each colour only has two tones - light and shade, which limits the level of detail and gives a slightly cartoony look. It does however give the very valuable bonus of efficiency!   I want to be efficient, but one shade per colour is a bit much...   I'm only one person, and I knew from the start that the main character would have lots of animations (she has 687 frames at the moment). Making these animations is one of my favourite bits, but the more colours you use, the more time-consuming it will be to make each sp...

Game developers have come up with lots of creative ways of making objects in video games behave similarly to the real world. All of the falling, bumping and bouncing that they do needs to be simulated in a strict way that a computer can process. In this post I'll discuss several methods for this in the context of 2D platformers, and then how I ended up doing it in my game Valerie . In the early days, this would pretty much always be done using a tiled system. Everything was based around tiles, bec ause it's a really efficient way of sorting out graphics and information into chunks. [1] In the original Super Mario Bros, all of the game's graphics are stored in this pattern table. You can only see four colours here, but the palette can be changed for each tile. If you want your game to involve slopes, this can get very complicated as every tile needs to represent a different kind of slope. Slightly later games were able to pull it off, the most famous of which being the Son...