I finally came back to this project after about a month and a half. It's been awhile, but I'm getting back onto this project! I ordered the EZ Flash hardware and I'm planning to get one of my old GBAs from my parents' house when I visit next week so I can start to do some hardware testing. But for now, I worked on the writing, level designs, and made some music discoveries.
So to start out, I was looking at my plans and where I left off. During that time, I did do some planning though. On a plane ride that I took, I planned out the entire backstory of The Worlds, including information about Malik, Sagun, and Jesper (formerly known as The Man Who Does Not Speak). I also came up with CourtNay, and was able to bring her in to play a major role in the intro to the story for this game. I talked a little bit about this on my CUPdate post here.
After that, I decided to actually flesh out the story a bit more. I updated my sequence of events script page and put some of the notes I had in there. Because my notes were kind of all over the place, I organized them into that page so I could better figure out how all of those ideas fit into the storyline.
And because I was coming up with story, I was about ready to start writing. But before that, I had to find some music. I can't write without music to set the mood, so I decided to take a sidetrack and find GB Studio-compatible music. So I did what I would normally do with an Eventure, and wrote some key story moments in a Notepad txt file and started to listen through GB Studio community assets (found here) to figure out what would fit with each scene.
I ended up being able to find music for most moments, but there were a few moments that just didn't sound right. For example, the Timeless Abyss. I've always associated the Timeless Abyss with Gymnopedie, so I found a midi of it online. The song is public domain, so the good news is that it can be used in The Nays media officially.
I discovered that midi files can be converted to mod files (thanks to this video!), which can be used in GB Studio. This was great news, and I felt a bit more hopeful that I could find more songs (or even make my own?) that I could use, outside of the community assets that most people are probably using in their GB Studio games. The process is pretty manual, so I ended up writing my own steps (here) so I could remember them more easily for next time.
So I ended up converting the Gymnopedie midi to a mod file and was able to get it working in GB Studio! I have to change the music format to use mod files, which means I can't use the built-in UGE editor, but it'll be worth it if I can use all of the external resources that I found. I may even be able to find a midi music creator that I can learn to create my own if I end up doing that for any. Because of the conversion process though, some of the instruments and notes are a little off, so I do still have to play around with it at some point.
I also ended up learning more about how OpenMPT works. Previously I had only ever used this software to convert midi files to mp3s so that I could use them in my Twine stories. But now I understood the interface and how to edit songs. So I created an unsettling remix of Gymnopedie using that midi by playing the patterns in reverse order. This was made for an unsettling scene with CourtNay that I planned out. I might still mess around with it a bit more, but it gets the overall mood I was aiming for.
Then after I found the music, I was finally ready to start writing! I decided to do this where it feels most familiar: in mIRC! I spent the first night writing the whole intro (which includes 2 dungeons) and the first R Nay character's dungeon as well. So I made a lot of good progress!
Then I continued to write these parts throughout the week and ended up finishing the whole story. It ended up being pretty long (~12,500 words), so I'm hoping I can actually fit all of this into the game!
I also did a lot of quick doodles for ideas of the levels for the whole game. I made these really quick prototype layouts in my sketchbook just to get the basics on where things are located. This helped me stay really loose and only show the MVP, which was really helpful to know the bare minimum on what's there. I designed every map that I'm planning on having in the game, which actually comes out to quite a lot (~90).
With all of the story written and levels designed, I also made an asset list. There are a lot of assets, but I'm hoping since these are tiny GB sprites that it'll be a lot quicker to make a lot of these. I can also reuse in a lot of places.
And that's all for this devlog! With the story and level designs in a good spot, next I'll likely work on starting to create some blank scenes using the story and sequence of events as a guide. I also may start working on some art from my asset list, but if I don't get to that until next month, I'll still be working on it according to schedule.
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