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.