Sunday, March 3, 2024

The Nays Origins Devlog 8: The Final Game

I finished my Game Boy game, The Nays Origins! Though I know it was technically done during the previous dev log, I tied off loose ends and actually finished it up this time.

🎮 Download and play the game here:

Here are a few final screenshots:





Now I'll get into the final dev log progress.

To start off, my friend Jinny playtested the game and only ran into one game-breaking bug. It was one that would randomly happen so I haven't tracked down why that is. But she was able to restart and progress. While she was playtested, I watched and took some notes. I was able to fix up all of the notes and nothing major had to be implemented.

So at that point, I did a final export and put it on the Game Boy cartridge for the last time. I also made a web build of the game and tested that so it can be played in the browser on itchio. I made the itchio page and created some custom assets to brand the page as well.

Then I printed out the final versions of all of the physical parts. I went to FedEx and had the instruction manual, box art, and sticker all printed. I wanted to make sure it looked polished and the printer in my apartment just wasn't doing it. So Jinny helped me cut out the pieces while we were there and then I was able to fit the final box art into the case!

I also printed a bunch of versions of the sticker page and landed on one that I liked the most. I stuck it onto the EZ Flash Junior cartridge and fit it into the case. It's starting to look official!

Then I put the instruction manual together. At first I was having trouble figuring out how to staple it properly so it wouldn't be bound too unevenly. Eventually I found this video that helped me figure out the method I needed to use. I used a push pin to poke holes where the staples would go, then I took apart two staples to fit them in, and pushed them back into place with an eraser. And then the book was bound together and finished! And it fits perfectly into the case.

And from there, everything was finished and ready to go! I uploaded the instruction manual online here.

Then I took a bunch of photos and then wrapped it up to give to my brother for Christmas.

So overall this was a really fun project and I feel very accomplished. I learned a lot and am excited for what's next. I plan to make a dev log video at some point to talk about my entire process all in one video, to summarize and show it all. This has been a fun journey talking about my process through blog posts though! I hope you enjoyed reading these.

Sunday, February 25, 2024

The Nays Origins Devlog 7: Playtesting and Physical Assets

The game is officially done! I have a few more things I want to go back and polish up, but those are mostly wishlist and if they don’t get into the final version, it’s not a big deal. But took a couple of months off after some of this and then came back to finish up after I finished some other projects.



So I started out by finishing up playtesting. I was able to get through the game from start to finish with only some minor bugs throughout! I did some intensive debugging to iron out some of the parts that were having weird issues but weren’t technically game-breaking. So overall A LOT OF TESTING. Though I was taking notes and it was played throughout the day, I’d say it takes about 3 hours to complete the game from start to finish. So it ended up being a lot longer than I thought it would be! No wonder testing has been taking so long. This might be the longest game I’ve ever developed.

So I ended up fixing all of the bugs I ran into, including some of the music-related ones too. And everything is pretty much good to go. I would like to go back and add color if I have time, but we’ll see if I end up getting to that. I also was looking into the Super Game Boy borders for a bit. I’m not sure I’ll put a lot of time into fixing colors for the SGB, but making the border won’t take long. I started by doing some sketches for what it might be. I was leaning towards one of the more candle-like ones.

So I took a very short side trip to try and implement a Super GameBoy border because I thought it’d be cool. But then I discovered from some research that SGBs don’t play well with EZ Flash Jrs and my game is technically a GameBoy Color game to bypass some limitations, so it probably wouldn’t work on one anyway. I at least didn’t spend too much time on it, but was an interesting thought.

Then I did some sketches to figure out the cartridge and case artwork. I was also thinking about coming up with a more detailed logo and seeing how I can incorporate it into the existing title screen as well. One idea I came up with was that I’m going to add a QR code to the back that takes you to the itchio page instead of a bar code.

Then I looked at some instruction manuals. I was mostly inspired by Pokemon Red/Blue and Donkey Kong Country 2, since those were ones I remember fondly looking through a lot when I was a kid. I wanted to create fun themed ones like those ones were. So I started to sketch out some ideas and wrote up a Google Doc with some of the text/rough ideas for what all I want in there.

So then I took all of the sketches I drew on paper and brought them into Photoshop. I was mostly working on the whole instruction manual. I resized them and then used this Figma template to lay out all of my pages.

Unfortunately it ended up being not the actual print size so I had to remake them and recreate the roughs in Photoshop. But it at least helped me with lining things up and I used a few of those.

I spent a lot of time doing printing tests. When I was first starting, I was going downstairs to the printer pretty much every day to try something new. I haven’t printed a book on my own before, so this is pretty new. I’ve only printed on Blurb where they did the actual printing for me, so this has been a learning experience.

I started with figuring out the pages and which ones I needed to print together. There was a PDF booklet setting but it didn’t print at the size I wanted, so I ended up manually pairing the ones I needed together. I cut out little pieces of paper and wrote numbers on them to get a feel for how many pages I needed and which ones paired together. This was actually really helpful as a reference!

I did some different size tests and eventually got a ruler to really measure everything precisely. I ended up with 4x4 for the instruction manual. So I ripped out papers to fit the sizes so I could test and make sure before completely resizing everything.

So as mentioned earlier, I got these exact sizes down in Photoshop with my templates. Then I proceeded to work on the case art. Luckily the instruction manual cover, box art cover, and cartridge sticker all use the same art, so I just had to design it for the largest one, the case, and then that art was good to go for all of them.

I designed the entire box art to include the GB side (and I reprinted it to make sure it was sized correctly and the logo was facing the correct direction). I also made the back cover with the QR code like I mentioned earlier.

I was going to print a test print before the final, but unfortunately the printer didn’t have any color ink. So I just had to use the black and white for my first test. I got a final black and white test print and learned that I probably made the colors a bit too dark for the print, so I learned that at least. I also made sure it fit into the box exactly as I wanted, so that was great to see!

Then once the color printer had ink, I was able to print a final version of the box art. I still want to reprint it a little bigger so it can fit better, but it was a good first color print!

And then I proceeded to work on the final art for the instruction manual! I was heavily inspired by the early Pokemon watercolor concepts, so I tried to emulate that style and used some of the same color palettes.

After I finished the art, I did a final test print of everything and then had a few things I wanted to change, so I made some changes and need to reprint. One of those being that I printed them on the wrong sides so when I compiled it, it didn’t line up with the pages in order. But it was good to test printing all the way through with the front and backs. I also needed to fix some of the pages that didn’t quite line up.

And then I got some feedback from my friend Jinny on making the logo bigger and so it stands out more. So that was really helpful!

That’s it for this time! Like I said, I took a quick break and then came back to this project, so it’ll all be wrapped up next time. Though when this is posted it’ll be next time, back in CUPdate time, I paused a couple of months. But the next devlog will be finalizing and wrapping up the game! I’m just going to ask my friend Jinny to playtest it for me, then I’ll be good to try the final version on the hardware and in the browser. I’m hoping to have all of the final prints of the physical aspects at that point as well.

Sunday, February 18, 2024

The Nays Origins Devlog 6: Playtesting, Collisions, and Menus

So I ended up combining two posts into one for this devlog because I’ve been out of town and pretty busy during the past few presentations. I’m really winding down and getting to the end of my development here, so it’s mostly stress testing and tying up loose ends to get this game ready for completion!


I started by mostly just playtesting and making sure the art and event positions were all working properly with the game. I ran into a few bugs and have been documenting them as I go, and fixing anything game-breaking as I test. I still need to figure out some of the sprite limitations that I’m running into with some graphical glitches, but that’ll be one of the big things I tackle next. I at least figured out some of the weirdness of them changing into other sprites for the most part.



Then I added all of the collisions to the scenes! I mostly just focused on getting collisions set up for the outer areas of the scenes so the player can’t walk anywhere (as all of the objects already had them). It took a while to test those to make sure everything is still beatable since I kept running into small areas where I would make collisions too close to each other, and then I would go through and fix other various small bugs, so it took me a few days to actually fully test from start to finish on it.

After more research on my sprite limitations, I couldn’t really find any ways to be more efficient than I already was, so I decided to just remove some characters from some of the scenes to see if I could cut down that way. When there were characters that I would originally change the player sprite into, I ended up just making use of the Avatars feature for that instead. This way, it could still show their sprite on screen while they’re talking without dipping into my sprite/tile numbers. I also added a new feature to show these every time you use a character’s ability, but only for the first time per scene.


After that, I did more playtesting and debugging. I’ve been continuing to document bugs as I find them, and fix them if they’re quick to fix right away. As I play through it, I have a Notion database that I’m jotting down notes in to make sure I don’t miss anything.


I would periodically take a break from playtesting and debugging to make various sprites. So I made some of the Biggert City character sprites and a few effects animation between testing.



Then I started to concept the title screen. I started by thumbnailing some ideas in my sketchbook. I ended up liking some of the more simplistic ones that didn’t have as many characters or details.

I decided to go with one of the first concepts I made. I had trouble getting it down to 192 tiles, but I did it with one tile to spare! This one was done entirely in Photoshop and not Tiled, so that’s why I ended up running up to the limits.


And then I made the logo screen, which had no limitations because it’s set to a logo screen. And good thing, because I was at 246 tiles, so it would have been over. For this one, I decided to mostly Game Boy-ify The Nays logo.


Then I worked on the menus. I finalized the look of the Origins Menu (First Generation Nays) first, and also got some functionality in there. I figured out an efficient way to show the current characters you have unlocked on this screen without needing to use multiple scenes! And I made use of animations to show which one you have selected.


And from there, I used that as a starting point for the R Nays and Worlds menus and finished those as well.


Then I decided to work on getting some of my music into the game. I discovered this cool itchio page that lets you convert MIDIs to MODs without needing to worry about importing them into OpenMPT. It made some of my songs sound a little weird though so I didn’t really end up using it for the final versions. So I searched the GB Studio Discord server to see if anyone had asked any questions already about MOD files sounding kinda off. I found a post where someone mentioned that if you have chords/multiple notes playing at the same time on different channels, that can be what causes that. So I went through my existing music files and updated them to remove extra notes on different channels and it seemed to fix my issue mostly! So I went ahead and converted my other MIDIs and imported them all into the game. I also found some sound effects and added those to the game as well.



Then I continued to playtest and debug my game, finding bugs as I went and fixing them up. I got myself an EZ Flash Omega Definitive Edition, and I have to say that it’s not as good as the EZ Flash Junior. The SD card slot is really finicky and it took me about 20 minutes of taking it out and trying to put it back in before I got it to work properly. I decided I wanted to have a cartridge for myself after I gift the EZ Flash Junior, so it’s a good thing I’m keeping the finicky one for myself and not giving that as a gift.


I ended up making some updates to some of the art and scenes that I had on my list. And I did some testing on my GBA. It was good to actually test the game on the console since I had mostly been doing testing in the engine for the past few weeks. I also was able to make use of saving so I could playtest more casually between doing other things. I kept some notes for myself in a Discord thread while I was away from my computer for this.



Then I finally started to add all of the dialogue! It’s taking a while, but I’m excited to have the story finally connect more than just the one-liners I had been testing the game with. I was running into some limits with my objects being too long because of it though, so I found a way to cheat it by making multiple scripts for strings of dialogue so those could be imported into the event that you interact with, to trick it into thinking the objects are smaller. I hope it doesn’t cause any issues down the line, because this is much easier than splitting my scenes into multiple scenes in the middle of a part.



I finally finished adding all of the dialogue! So overall I got a lot of work done on my game! I’m hoping to really just polish it up and finish it for next time. All that’s left is to do some final playtesting and wishlist stuff. Next time the game will be done, and then I’ll just be working on the physical aspects! I’m excited to see this all come together.