this was not a game that I expected to make, but I love it so very dearly. as we developed it, it has climbed up to the top of the list of my favourite games I’ve ever made.   which is a hard label to give, because i love everything that I’ve made and all the games I’ve made are so very different, so it is hard to actually compare them. (and surprisingly, (well to me at least), I actually have a decent number of games that I’ve made!) but every time I launch the tower again, I remember just how much I love it. are all so very different that it is hard to compare them, other than the fact that they all came from me in some capacity.

of all my collab games with pancelor, this one definitely feels the most balanced in terms of workload. in the past he’s done all the code and I’ve done some art and game design, but the code had always been the substantial part of the game in terms of time spent. for this game, the amount of art work I did and the amount of code work he did actually felt pretty similar in terms of time commitment, which is kind of crazy to think about. tbh he did a lot of wizardry to get it all to fit into one cart which i don’t understand at all, and so maybe that ended being more after the fact. but for the jam period at least, I think it was pretty close. i did a lot of damn drawing for this game and it was so much fun to create the tower’s world!!

I literally did not plan to do anything for gmtk jam. I did not actually know what gmtk stood for before that weekend. then paradise was talking about it and I thought hey that could be fun, but I don’t have ideas and I don’t have the time. then I sat down and sketched out (on actual paper, as most of my game ideas start) an idea for a small bitsy game which was sort of like a maze game, having to find the right exit among a set in various rooms. I showed it to pance and he was like hmm what if we did it like this, and after some more discussion, the tower was born.

the original conception of the tower, colourized, 2022.

I love what the tower did for me in terms of pixel art. last year (sept 2021) pance gave me aseprite for my birthday, which i was thrilled about, but i didn’t really end up using it for many months. this project is what ended up kick starting me into learning more about the program and its full functionality (spoiler: it’s an amazing program) I discovered the tile set option, which made the work flow of this game sooo much easier/faster. basically you can create a library of tiles and pick and choose to draw them in, like your list of tiles are actually a list of little 8x8 brushes. i started mostly with tile sets that i got from the big itch bundles, realizing hey I need to create a *lot* of rooms, and having some sort of foundation to start with would be super helpful. maybe i shouldn’t start from scratch. eventually as i got into the flow, my own tiles (and pance’s own tiles) came in to play as we had visions of what sorts of rooms there should be. I noticed a tendency for me to go for clean lines, straight edges, symmetry. whereas pance would draw something chaotic and blobuous. by drawing the tower’s rooms i learned little things about pixel art especially in a limited palette, such as:

- things don’t have to be totally parsable for them to make sense, and dialog can give really important context clues

- humanoids can vary in shape and size and this is good actually, it adds interest, rather than everyone being the Default Bitsy Sprite

- negative pixels (little bits of space) can be really strong in creating a shape

there was a point where the idea of making all these rooms seemed so overwhelming. I got a decent chunk of them done during the gmtk jam weekend, but after that effort I was pretty burned out of making rooms. understandably. but with a bit of space (a week or so I think) I found myself coming back to making rooms, missing the rhythm of it, the structured creativity of it. I think having the set parameters (staircases, screen size, palette) really helped set my scope to practice drawing little things without feeling overwhelmed with the size of it all. the tiles helped wth that, too. before this, anything that was bigger than like, 16x16 seemed so huge. now it feels a lot more approachable which is fun.

when it came to the end, and no more rooms needed to be made, I was actually sad, which seems so funny when I look back and think how daunting the initial feat seemed. I’d gotten into such a rhythm of creating these little snippets, these little worlds, full of their unique charm. so who knows, maybe I’ll keep on making rooms. I’m definitely going to keep making pixel art and bitsy games.