Hello everyone!

More people are liking and sharing this devlog entries! Thank you for the support and again: feel free to ask anything around it, I’ll try my best to answer ASAP.

I’m really excited to share this because I really had a lot of hopes for the prototype I’m about to talk about. I worked a lot on it, draw some stuff and planned many different things on it but it was starting to become a really complex and big project. I’m sure I’ll give a second look on it in the future because it was a lot of fun working on it. The next prototype I worked before Glory Hunters was called: “The Blind Rabbit”.

May 2021

I had some grasp of how GB studio worked by now, like the basics. I even exported a rom and try it out on my cellphone (using a free emulator) and it blew my mind! Ha ha ha. To play your game on your cellphone in less than 5 minutes was huge for me, and I fell in love with the software. I thought to myself: “I need to make a game for this thing, a full game”.

Tiled become a thing around this date too. I started using it to create maps and see how its tools worked. I always had (until this day) Tiled opened alongside Aseprite and GB studio. The triforce of power to create Game Boy games if you will ha ha ha.

I spent some more time figuring out the “actors” and the limits of GB studio within past prototypes I made. I found out that there were a maximum animated sprites I could use, some of them would disappear if I arranged them one next to another (duh, it was intended to run on a console made 30 years ago! Ha ha ha). While I got more experienced with the software, new challenges surrounding the “limits” of the game boy started to rise.

Around half this month I started to sketch what kind or characters and mood I would want to use within the game. And the idea of having a blind rabbit as a main character sound pretty cool to everyone I shared what I was doing at the time.

It had to be someone blind because of the mechanic I started to play with, in which you had to help the rabbit by making some noise around the screen. You could say it was a puzzle of some sort.

The puzzle idea was keeping me away from the fact that I wanted to do an RPG, to interact with characters and fight dark creatures. I thought I would just keep on sketching and see what would fit in the game.

The more I draw, the clearer a story came to my mind:

The Blind Rabbit was going to be some kind of “curse” that a boy had to deal with while the bunny completed a mission. This rabbit would be like a mercenary in search for spirits or demons or “sins” that ended in our world somehow but weren’t supposed to be there. The lore around it would involve "eating" words with its ears.

The player was going to be his guide because the rabbit was going to be some kind of ghost, and I wanted this curse to follow the player along this quest while no other could see it. I started sketching beans with feelings (lol) that then turned to maggots. These would serve as minor enemies within the game.

The game had to look something like Pokémon Yellow version in how this rabbit followed you and a bit of Earthbound on the “looks” of it.

The whole game was going to take place in a small town and I wanted to use familiar places around that to change scenery and types of mobs.

 I starter recycling sprites from the past prototypes such as the lamps and the NPC base design. Also you can see a first take on what would become the main character in Glory Hunters although some work was made around it later on.

While I started building the prototype I played a lot with switches and variables because this game needed a lot of text and interactions to make it feel alive. While doing it I came with an Idea that fit perfectly around the character:

People could only speak to you a determined number of times because the blind rabbit would eat their words and ultimately kill them.

The concept started to evolve until I ended up having 3 different days in which you could trigger butterfly effects by killing people with the blind rabbit and hearing the NPCs dialogue. Depending who the blind rabbit killed on the first day, different events would take place on the second day and so on (Majora’s Mask anyone? Yeah… but a lot grimmer… ha ha ha). And that was going to be how you could seek this lost “sins” within the town.

A mayor problem arose in gameplay: The game turned into a walking simulator. Sure it was “entertaining” watching events and making the white rabbit kill people by talking to them, but it was not fun. More character designs were made at this point. The base of them would be remade for Glory Hunters later on because they were not animated and didn't cast any shadows, they just turned to face you when you talked to them and it looked awesome but I scratched that idea for Glory Hunters because they took a lot of animation sprites and I liked them more to move in an idle position.

I thought it would be best to include random encounters (you know, like a true classic RPG like the Mother series, Dragon Quest, Final Fantasy etc. ha ha ha). I continued designing small enemies (like the maggots) and some bosses. I Played with the scripting of basic RPG mechanics like leveling up and making your attacks stronger.

Three and a half months passed away.

July 2021

All of this was starting to become confusing and there was a lot of data both in my head and on a spreadsheet: attacks, variables for each NPC killed and how it changed the future, character build, etc. etc. etc.

The game wasn’t playable per se.

I become overwhelmed and lost in what became a monster of a game (at least for me). I had a 2 year old son running around all day like a comet, my wife’s belly was growing and needed more attention. On top of that I had some bureaucratic problems with taxes that drained whole days of my attention and we were remodeling our house’s kitchen. I was burned out, but time still ticking. I needed a working prototype and needed it fast but I was getting nowhere with the blind rabbit.

While taking a break of all this, I was browsing YouTube in search of other homebrew examples and I came across on something that would change everything and give birth to Glory Hunters. A video that showed the fact that you could do “Zelda Style Combat” within GB Studio by no other than Robert Doman.

That’s it for now. I’m having a lot of fun writing this devlog entries and I hope you enjoy them as well. I’m sorry if I missed some kind of information in between these lines and for more technical inquiries feel free to leave a comment and I’ll try to explain or point you at the right direction.

Thank you for reading until the end and keep in touch so you don’t miss Part 3: “The search for glory”. Cya!

-César Arminio