Secrets & Behind the Scenes: Story, Concept Art, and Dev Notes
[Page under development]
THE HAWK’S STORY:
I had decided the shape of this area when designing the overall map in pencil, and had just the night before finished doing the background art. So I knew what this room looked like and that it had this deep U shape.
But as I was booting up Unity that day to start designing the platforming aspects of this area, I was thinking about the size and shape of this zone - and since zero platforms were in it, it just felt like this chasm - and I was just really having trouble getting a feel for the size/perspective of the geography and what it would be like to move around in that space.
I could see the room was, I dont know, say 12 ghosts tall, but how to account for jumping? How "tall" was it really? There was a tactility I was craving to understand the space experientially and I was again just sitting down to a new day of work and I got this idea...
I thought * “I should give myself unlimited jumps” * and spend some time just bopping/flying through the space to get a feel for it. I was thinking about how to do that - Could I simply remove the one line of code that checks if you've jumped already or was there something else needed that I hadn’t yet thought of? Would unlimited jumps really provide me tactility or would it be an inaccurate substitute? Etc. I never opened any code I never did anything, I was just sort of entranced daydreaming, thinking about the pros & cons of unlimited jumps and I caught myself having spent 15 minutes thinking about it but acting on nothing and felt like I had wasted enough time and let me just go back to the level design method I had been using all along - placing a few key platforms based on breaking up the space visually and building from there.
So I start doing that and place a few platforms, play the scene and jump around a little bit, repeat, baby steps building the level - all the while I have this giant U shaped chasm below me kind of intimidating me and * suddenly * I noticed something weird. Did I just double jump? Oh what the heck? I jump again. and again. and again. I suddenly had unlimited jumps.
I jump all around, have the experience I had been envisioning 20 mins or so earlier. I bounce all through that U shape, up and down, then I go over by where the falcon is and suddenly I fall to the floor - I only have 1 jump again. So I go back in the U-shape and I have unlimited jumps. Come out, unlimited jumps are gone.
I was fairly quickly able to figure out what was causing it, like from a practical bug fixing pov, but the fact that this very specific and new "error" had caused the very thing I had been thinking of creating for myself - and that error was there the whole time I was staring at the screen thinking about it, that error was there and unknown to me, and it was so specific in what the effect of the error was and what specific area of the screen it was affecting - it was just, it felt very special and significant in the way deeply felt personal synchronicities always are.
I don’t know if that experience translates from one person to another or if it was one of those very personal 'you had to be there' moments lol but that's the story
👇 Highlight SPOILER text below for coordinates of hidden items and secret spaces 👇
Waterfall X 14 Y -2 || False Wall X 25 Y -13 || Cave X 13 Y-11 or X 7 Y -10 || Rat in a Maze X 5 Y -13 || Secret Sheep X 8 Y -15
☝️ Highlight SPOILER text above for coordinates of hidden items and secret spaces ☝️
FABRIC AND FLOAT
My original inspiration was "Little Ghost Fashions" drawn by * LEAF on Twitter *
The different dress designs, the ghost as almost fabric, I could sense movement and it came to life for me.
After contacting LEAF, I learned that the face she had first drawn for "Little Ghost Fashons" was styled after Napstablook from Undertale (for the record I had played Undertale but didn’t recognize this as fanart, I could only see the fabric). Since it was LEAF's ghost-as-dress concept that I really loved, and which was very much her own, I asked if she'd be willing to draw a new original face to solve that problem and I'm so happy with the result!
LEAF is also creating more artwork for the game including all Ghost Sprites, the Snail NPC, and the Unicorn Boss. With more to come!
Spot the modified Little Ghost Fashions poster in the game.
Going back to before I even spoke to Leaf, I would just look at the fashions poster and imagine the game. Something about that shade of pink and the skirts, I found myself thinking of Princess Peach from SuperMario2, who was one of my favorite characters to play as, in any game before or after. I just loved the controls and movement of that character.
I imagined a detailed Metroidvania platformer where the challenges and gameplay are designed around that Princess Peach style floating jump as the main mechanic.
The game begins as the drawing of the little ghost first awakens on a sketchbook page that visually pays tribute to the first Metroid starting point.
Other retro gaming inspirations can be seen in certain character movements.
