Life’s Too Short (Playdate)
Getting into development & influences
2022's "New year's resolution" has been to learn how to make games...
When I was a lot younger, I spent a lot of time making projects on RPG Maker but found my patience and passion got lost over time. I wanted to get this back!
It's a bit difficult to know where to start to be honest...Firstly, I did some exploration into Unity & GameMaker, completing guided tutorials on YouTube in order to start to understand the basics. This makes sense and I'll definitely continue down this road at some stage but it started to become "Now, write this code...Now, write that code..." and just following along until something happened without really understanding why.
Having been a follower of the Playdate phenomenon since the start, the prospect of releasing something for this little console was really appealing (Even if I'm probably still waiting until June for mine) so I started looking at Pulp as another side project to learn how to create games. About the same time, SquidGodDev (www.youtube.com/c/squidgoddev) started to do tutorials for Pulp which, whilst they sometimes felt like writing out code I didn't fully understand, meant that because they were on a smaller scale, I could start to better get my head around logic! (I am forever grateful to SquidGodDev for helping me get started).
For Life's Too Short, I first started to draw a haunted house, beginning with the entrance hall, adding doors and then drawing out rooms to connect to those doors. Once I had a working structure of a building, I could then start looking at adding characters into each room (Ticking off horror tropes) and thinking about simple connecting puzzles in the same vein as a point and click adventure or escape room. I had to make sure there was a meaningful story connecting everything together and then spent a lot of time making it all work!
[I plan to write another blog about some of the design choice/accidents and little Easter eggs soon]
I've realised after the fact that the game is massively influenced by some of the games I was playing when I was a kid. Namely, Hugo's House of Horrors (I'm really showing my age) and point and click games such as Simon The Sorcerer & Discworld all in terms of the puzzles, settings and sarcastic British humour!
Playdate and Pulp have allowed me to finish and release a product in around three months which has been very fulfilling and exciting! I love keeping an eye on the feedback and seeing people enjoy Life's Too Short. I plan to kick off my next project in a few weeks' time and look forward to sharing more soon!
Thanks for reading :)
Comments
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Amazing work! I took a look at the project with the Pulp editor. How did you make all the interconnecting tiles??? Like, even just the title card.
Is there a way to edit multiple tiles in Pulp? Or did you use an external application? I'd love to know how to use multiple tiles to make such detailed scenes and characters!
Thanks for the feedback!
Honestly, I did it the hard way most of the time…I made a lot of the rooms in a very plain design and then started slowly adding detail to different sections but literally one tile at a time.
For the title card I did a draft in Paint and then used a solution to import it (Search the Playdate dev forums for the latest solution to that) and then cleaned it all up.
But mostly it just took a while of doodling around in the editor. One tip, I didn’t realise the tile picker tool was available (like a colour dropper icon) which would have made a lot of the process much faster!)
Ohhhh, that makes so much sense now. If you drop the tile into a room, the room itself is sort of like a canvas layer in a paint app.
Thanks for the reply. The game is super inspiring. I wish my Playdate was shipped so I could play it properly :)
Thanks very much! Yes I wish mine would ship too :-D I'm group 2 so haven't even held a Playdate yet...
I'm reading this after writing my little review on the game page. The influence was seen, but this game stands on it's own. It was a ton of fun to play with really simple fun puzzles. I've been toying with the idea of making games with the Playdate as well, so I'll be digging into these videos as well!
Thanks for the kind words! And it’s great that you spotted the Hugo’s House of Horrors influence! To be honest I didn’t realise I’d been so influenced until after I was finished (I haven’t played those games in like 20 years!). Glad you enjoyed the game 🙂