Nick Gravelyn

My latest game ‘Pixel Man‘ has been out since last Saturday and has been doing pretty well on the marketplace. I figured now that it’s done, I’ll go into various parts of  the development and code for the game to try and help other developers out. I don’t feel like doing one gigantic post mortem, so I’m going to split it up. This first post is mainly about inspiration, design, and scope. So let’s do this.

Inspiration

Pixel Man has a funny, to me at least, beginning. I was sitting around my apartment, waiting for Comcast to show up to install my cable and internet and just decided to start dinking around with Paint.NET. I’ve always loved pixel art and hope to be not as terrible some day so I figured a little practice wouldn’t hurt. After a little bit of messing around, this was what I had on my canvas:

(Enlarged 2000%)

And there he was: Pixel Man. Once I had him I decided the next challenge was to figure out how I would animate him to look like he was running. So I did that next and wound up with this sprite sheet:

(Again, enlarged 2000%)

So now I have this little guy and a little animation for him. I clearly need a game for him. From inspiration to…

Design and Scope

I decided that my Pixel Man needed something minimalist for him to fit in, but since I’m not that great of an artist (even of the pixel variety) I decided to go further simplified with the world than even he is. And I decided I wanted to do some sort of platformer.

From there I decided to lay out my ground rules for the project. I wanted it to be quick; no multi-month development and as little extra help needed from anyone, even my brothers. So I quickly decided on a very restrictive, yet fun, scope:

1. The game would use fixed screens instead of a smooth scrolling.
2. There would be binary movement controls instead of analog.
3. There would be only moving and jumping, with a single goal to reach.
4. There would only be static blocks that can harm the player; nothing else.
5. The player would have infinite lives, but no saving, in which to play the game.

By setting such terms, it really made the development much easier. I never had to worry about feature creep because I had very clearly defined what I would allow myself to put into the game.

I highly recommend this for small projects and beginner developers as a way to really allow yourself to make something fun without turning it into some gigantic game. As a form of measure, I wrote 95% of the Pixel Man code and had created about 8 levels in the span of 6 hours that one day. The rest of the game probably took an additional 4-6 hours of coding, level design, and testing. Not too bad considering the fun result.

In my next post, I’ll go into my “level editor” as well as some of the code I used to get the game written as fast as possible.