A Love Letter to GB Studio and Rapid Iteration
The Year After was made with GB Studio, described as “a quick and easy to use drag and drop retro game creator for your favourite handheld video game system.” The interface is so simple and intuitive that it almost feels like cheating.
With ease-of-use come limitations. We may not be able to customize our game exactly as we’d like. If we don’t put in extra work, some things can feel cookie-cutter. But we have a different kind of freedom. We can implement and test quickly. Interactivity is the language of the medium and we need to make something playable before we understand what we have. Pages of character designs, environments, story and lore and descriptions of mechanics don’t cut it.
A potential danger with using more advanced tools or programming from scratch is a greater investment in time and effort to reach the point of having something playable. After we sink in a significant amount of time and effort, we feel obligated to keep whatever we have. “It's a good idea. It will succeed because I’ve already spent so much time on it,” we say to ourselves when it may be a mediocre idea at best. GB studio mitigates this tendency because things can easily be added or dropped on the fly. It’s easier to kill our darlings when they have a quick and painless birth. Then the better ideas surface.
GB Studio is even great for prototyping games to be built with more complex tools later. A simplified version of our game allows us to get a sense of how our ideas and story beats play out in a simple, explorable environment. We can shift the structure and choices easily. When the core experience works, we move on to creating our masterpiece stuffed full of voice-acting, 3d graphics, motion-capture, particle effects, ray tracing and the rest of the kitchen sink.
Drag-and-drop tools like GB Studio can be our moleskine sketchbooks. Our post-it notes. The napkins we doodle on. Or the final block of marble we carve into.
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Awesome game looks great.
That's an amazing art development. It looks so good!!!