The Nays Origins Devlog 3: Music, Game Progression, and Placeholder Art

I made a lot of progress on my game this time! I started with music, then worked on some game progression, and got some placeholder art assets in there to help with the progression and testing.

So I started out by proofreading the script and sorting some parts of it. So the script is officially ready to go!

Then I actually decided to make some music, because there were a few parts that just didn’t sound right with the songs I had. I found this free online MIDI site that has a basic piano roll (https://signal.vercel.app/). It ended up being really useful! I made three of the songs that I wanted to make. I might come back and edit them later, but for now they’re good to go. 

The first one I made was Rotle’s "private times" song. This was based on a song I used to hum as a kid when playing with toys. I started with this one:

I didn’t really like how it came out, so I tried again. I used my MIDI keyboard to make a basic melody and then cleaned it up a bit and it improved.

I also ended up converting this into a MOD with Open MPT to use in GB Studio! I made some discoveries about the template.mod file. It was adding all of these weird sound effects, and I found out if I delete the noise instruments from the template, those aren’t added to the final GB Studio version, which is good. So I just edited the template that I use for converting. I still need to play around with them a bit more because my MOD files are sounding weird in GB Studio still in some ways.

I also made a few other songs. One was for when Rotle meets The Gek.

And then the other one is for some of the parts involving Pearl.

I made all of the base image files that I'll need (copying template files) for all of the backgrounds and character art. That way I can add the templates in and then just replace the art files to upload them. With that, I can start to prototype more quickly without needing to worry about the art yet.

So with that, I laid out every scene in GB Studio! I used my script and sketchbook layouts as a guide for where to place them so it would make sense with where they connect.

And then I started to actually create the events in GB Studio! I’m basically just connecting all of the scenes and putting them in order so that they can transition, using my script and sequence of events as a guide. This is so I can start putting together my MVP. I was able to get the whole game progression done so I can play through the whole game from start to finish, in terms of progressing through scenes at least.

While I was laying out the levels and the MVP, I realized it was a little hard to test the progression through the puzzles with the default backgrounds. So I decided to translate my sketchbook layouts into very rough placeholder digital art that I could use as backgrounds during my tests. This way I could lay out the triggers in the scenes a little better. I still have some work to do on layouts and figuring out the size of them, but the placeholders have been helpful for this stage. 

Some of them have too many unique 8x8 pixels because I haven't optimized them yet, and some are actually just too big, so when I've been testing, they do turn into some weird glitches, but that'll be fixed when I have the actual art in there.

I have been trying to resize some of the maps though to fit better with how the player travels around them. I’m mostly cropping some of the bigger ones and making them smaller, especially for some of the flashbacks that the player doesn’t move on. That way I can simplify them a bit. I’m also measuring how big sprites will be in them so parts of the backgrounds aren’t overly huge.

To do this, I made a template that has a border around it that I can drag on the maps. I also have a default textbox in there to see what areas will be covered during the dialogue, and a 16x16 square to know how big the character sprites will look on there.

I also got my old GBA from my parents' house so I finally got to try out the EZ Flash Junior. It was pretty easy to set up and I was able to actually get my demo project working on the physical GBA! It was exciting to see, even if I am still in the rough stages with default sprites.

So overall I made a lot of progress this month! There’s still a lot to do, but I’ve also come a long way and I have enjoyed seeing things come together.