I have wanted to make video games for a long time – probably twenty-four years now. It started after I read an article in Electronic Gaming Monthly about jobs in the video game industry. The article gave shape to the vague concept of the work behind making games, behind writing about games, etc. It was interesting enough that I immediately wanted to do something.
This isn’t the only time this has ever happened to me, of course. The list of creative works I’ve attempted far exceeds the ones I’ve ever finished. I started conceiving video game ideas right out the gate after reading that article, certain that it was possible if I just planned it, it could be done. This was, of course, foolish. I was an idiot with a notebook, same as I have always been. My creative ambitions have always warped around whatever my interests are. I was writing my first stories at that time as well, and eventually got into making music. If you are here, you know which of these creative outlets have sprouted the most fruit.
Anyway, it’s 2024 now. I’ve tried several middleware engines out with the idea of making something over the last twenty years. I even downloaded GB Studio on two previous occasions. Game Maker Studio, Unity, Godot, Unreal, whatever the PlayStation Vita dev environment was called…the itch has always been there, but it was GB Studio that gave me a space that I could make sense of and start building in. I made a bit of progress on a project back in June that actually formed into a something I could open and move a character around in. It wasn’t particularly pretty, but it was on the way to being a functional prototype of something complex and interesting.
In other words, it was easily too complicated for my skillset at the time. It’s probably still out of my reach after everything I’ve done in the last five months.
And on the Saturday before Father’s Day, something happened.
I took my daughter out that morning. We went to breakfast before going to see Inside Out 2 at the theater. We were talking, joking, having a great time, and I asked her what I thought was going to be a hypothetical question.
“If I were to make a game for you, what kind of game would you want it to be?”
She would go on to talk to me about this for the next two weeks. And with that, development began.
No, I Didn’t Expect Her to Make a Design Document
Stripe Breaks Out is, like any video game that has ever been produced, a compromise. My daughter wanted a game where she could play as a cat and save other cats. She wanted a game with keys and bugs. She wanted a game that didn’t have boss fights. She wanted a game where the cat could get its hair done, similar to a Barbie themed game she sometimes plays on the Switch. She wanted something easy that she couldn’t lose at. None of the animals could be killed or hurt. Finally, it had to have exactly ten levels. As I started figuring this out, she still wasn’t reading fluidly (she’s getting better every day) so it couldn’t be heavy on narrative.
After talking about the idea with her further, we came to the agreement that it would be a platformer with some adventure game elements, like item swapping and overworld exploration. The prototype I was working on before slid into the rearview the more she asked me about it. Stripe Breaks Out became my key project over the summer.
My daughter gave me a drawing of the “levels” she had in mind. And I pulled from it what I could to put into the finished game. A spider in the tutorial level is pulled entirely from the drawing she gave me – a friendly spider, per her request.
She loved the prototype stages I put together, happy to see the little bits and pieces she talked about on the screen. She wanted the whole game all at once. That was in early July. I suggested that the player character should be based on her favorite plush, Stripe, a little grey and white cat she’s loved on hard for the last few years.
I’m writing this in the first week of September, before the release of the game online. She’s still persistently asking when the game will be completely finished, asking if she can test the game out, etc. Her excitement has driven my desire to finish the game, motivated me to stick with the project every step of the way.
But, as you could easily assume, making video games is difficult.
A Game Without Failure
Video games can be any number of things. However, given the limitations of the scope of Stripe Breaks Out, I didn’t allow myself many options. Narrative had to be limited, and the game had to be built entirely out of platforming skill checks and maze like level design. I had to make something easy throughout.
I don’t think I’m qualified to comment on the challenges of designing video games beyond the simple fact that it’s extremely hard to make games. I’m not going to posit that I’ve made something great. I shot for “good” when working on this project, and I hope I’ve reached that.
Development proceeded based on the ideas I put together in the prototype. I made new art assets almost every time I sat down to work on the game, from household objects, cats, new enemy sprites, more cats, and obsessing over the shape of trees (they’re fine?). The last three months have been an ongoing reminder that I am not an artist. Pixel art can be gorgeous. Mine is functional enough.
I think.
My adorable little producer likes it, and she’s the only critic I will answer to.
House levels started out with a goal of verisimilitude and breakable vases to acquire the flower collectibles described in the drawing I was given. Limitations in GB Studio collided with my programing ineptitudes as I realized that twenty actors went fast when adding enemies, switches, and collectibles.
A wiser me would have taken this moment to cut my stages into smaller pieces, akin to how games I played this year work. Something like Tiny Toon Adventures 2: Montana’s Movie Madness divides each larger level into individual stages with only a transitional break at the end of each segment. That’s what I should have done to the whole game.
Instead, I just made each house level its own series of progressively complicated challenges, introducing four keys that had to be collected by the end of the game to drive light exploration. It was a solution, but probably not the only one I should have strived for. Again, more spacious levels would have been more interesting and given the game a bit more length than it ended up having.
But, time was a pressing factor, and we all wanted to play a finished game.
I did eventually try larger stages spread across multiple scenes, and I want to believe that it made for a more interesting game in the second half than in the first. Time will tell of course.
The introduction of the keys as progression items had me include our housecats as characters in the game. The goal became not just to save some cats, but our cats – Jones, Dax, Hux, and Pumpkin.
The inclusion of dogs as foes came about as a result of the larger stages and need for new challenges. The idea was to have the dogs charge after Stripe once the player entered their range. Scripting this was far more complicated than I expected. This was the first time I went to the GB Studio reddit for help. The script that I assembled for this, even with their help, caused the game to chug. But I put up with it at the time. It was passible enough for that point in development.
This roadblock probably contributed to the fact that there are only two enemy types in the entire game. An oversight, perhaps, but also something that should have hit me a lot sooner. Given that this is the first game I’ve ever made, I’ll allow myself some grace.
I’m glossing over a lot of the process simply because it’s not interesting to outline the step-by-step grind of making pieces of a platformer and testing them to make sure the jumps are possible, that the game can be read well, etc.
The best night in the project came in late July. My daughter has a tendency to delay her bedtime as much as she can each night. The latest method she’d picked up was that when she jumps in bed she will ask to play Rock Paper Scissors ten times. After two weeks of doing this, I decided to bake it into her game. I spent an entire session making a Rock Paper Scissors minigame from scratch, drawing cat paws, and scripting the minigame. I haven’t had to make any changes to that portion of the game after adding it. I’m still thrilled that it even came together. Look for Rock Paper Claw early in the game and in the forest before the end of the game.
As the level design became more complicated, I kept adding concepts that were outside of the scope of the GB Studio engine. It was when I added switches and gates to the game that I discovered how limited the collision states were in the basic program. I added the Platformer Plus plugin at this time, solving some issues and creating entirely new ones from my personal ineptitudes as a programmer.
July ended, and August saw me reaching the last stages of building the game. I finished writing the soundtrack and added it in throughout the game. I’m pretty happy with the score for the game. I get a few of the pieces stuck in my head on occasion. It was around this time that I also switched the game to being a GBC only game. The slowdown in several stages of the game was just too intense to deal with, so I let the extra processing speed of the GBC cover the fact that I wrote poor script.
Glitch fixes started entering my to-do lists. Gremlins persisted even up to the last two days as I added in i-frames to damage states and completely broke the game. Nothing has broken my motivation quite as effectively as hitting serious glitches like what happened with the switch gates and adding i-frames.
However, thanks to the help of people in the GB Studio reddit and discord, my friends who have watched the progress of my work, played builds, etc…it’s done.
And Now For the Part Where You Get to Play
If you’re reading this, the game is out and available to download or play over on Itch. The soundtrack has been up over on bandcamp for a couple of weeks. I wrote this to give context to the experience, to put a pin in everything that I’ve spent the last few months chipping away on. Thank you to everyone who has encouraged me as I’ve worked on this thing. Thank you Jo for putting up with me as I’ve worked on it, listened to me ramble about scripting problems or the clips of music that I’ve bounced around to like an idiot. You are an amazing wife.
And to my daughter, should you ever read this…thank you for being you, for being the best kid I could have ever asked for, and thank you for asking for this game for four months straight. I hope you enjoyed it.
Stripe Breaks Out is available at:
https://wbhwrites.itch.io/stripe-breaks-out
Trailer:
The soundtrack is available at:
WordsThing 