#i've done this pixel art style on and off for a few years now but i hadn't seriously done any in the last year

[rnoonsetter]

you ever make something so good it scares you? like yeah i put a lot of work into this and i love it but it doesn't feel like i made it. or it's a fluke. it's /too/ good. i just. i was pretty easily able to tackle things i had struggled a LOT with in the past, with /some/ effort, but like, not nearly enough. i've done similar work in the past, and it never turned out half this good. i'm not even done with it yet. i'm scared to make the changes i want to make, in case i somehow fuck it up, even though it's digital art and i can easily undo it.

this isn't a humble brag, i swear, it's genuinely anxiety inducing, i just can't put my finger on why. maybe that it's that i'll never make something this good again.

[skysometric]

dev commentary time! every once in a while i am struck with a vision of a fully formed scene for a game, or a comic, or a video… and the vision feels so strong, looks so real, that i have to drop everything to bring it into reality. whether i have to learn new skills, or it pushes my abilities to their limits, it doesn't matter; the vision will not leave me until i have made it real. such is the nature of my adhd daydreaming curse.

most famously, if you've read all of the other dev commentaries so far, this is how the Red Coin Remixes were born – a vision of extra challenges for my silly little 12 level pack, turning it into 24 and then 32 levels as the vision iterated and grew. this was the central reason why Retrush took nine years to finish, and a cautionary tale on the dangers of scope creep.

so when i had another big vision, just two months before i intended to finally release Retrush… i was more than a little concerned!

the vision is almost exactly as you see it in the video: my oc Rivers congratulates the player at the end of a long journey, complimenting the player's confidence for having cleared every level, while a special song plays over a sunset beach scene matching the song's ambient waves. as it played and replayed in my head, it was so beautiful, so fitting… that i HAD to add it somehow. even though it was intimidating.

but why was it so intimidating? it was surely not the writing, as i knew exactly what i wanted to tell the player. nor was it the fear of overscoping myself, as i decided to limit myself to four extra secret coins. nor even was it the technical work of tracking and saving completion, a system that doesn't exist natively in Mari0 and had to be manually added via the game's event system…!

no, it was two very specific things that intimidated me most: the music, and the sprites of Rivers – both skills that i had tried and failed to cultivate in the past. but for each of these, i had a new blessing that i did not have before.

the song, Last Wave, plays at the end of OutRun, a Genesis-era arcade game with gorgeous FM synth music throughout. it's not an 8-bit NES song, though, and all of the other music in the level pack is in NES style. and no matter where i looked, no NES covers of it existed.

but i could hear it in my head…!

so my plan was twofold. worst case scenario, i could just drop the original song in – i doubt anyone would've cared too much about the style clash. but Plan A was to ask my musically talented partner @harmonyfriends to cover the song for me... in a style that she had never tried before.

and to both of our surprise, she pulled it off! she was able to split the original FM synth into its constituent parts, transcribe it in Famistudio, and arrange the song using the VRC6 expansion – the same expansion chip used by most of the other NES arrangements in Retrush. the results are absolutely incredible and they elevate the scene far beyond anything i could do on my own!

(i paid her for her work, of course~)

long story short, the first blessing i didn't have before… was my partner. long ago, when i wanted to add my own music to Retrush, i tried to do it all alone – and got just short of nowhere. now i'm not working alone anymore! i have help!

that brings us to my final magic trick: the sprites and animations for Rivers… which, by contrast, is art that i did all on my own.

see, the whole reason Retrush looks the way it does – made entirely of recolored and lightly edited tiles from the original SMB games – is that i've never really been a sprite artist. all of my level packs over the years have used existing assets from other games and artists; the most i've ever done is re-arrange them for use in Mari0's engine, or maybe edit a few pixels here and there to make them flow better or fit a specific scene. outside of that, i tried to avoid making sprites as much as possible; my few attempts at custom sprites always came out rather shoddy, in my eyes.

so when i saw the grand vision in my head… i instantly knew what the most intimidating part was. it was the prospect of making custom sprite work for Rivers.

by the time i launched the beta, i had just put together the outline for the secret ending. all the text and scripting was there, but Rivers… was not. in her place was a line of text saying "pretend that Rivers is standing here."

a little too goofy for the impact i was aiming for... though one of my playtesters said they still cried at the ending.

when my playtesters got back to me with feedback about the rest of the mappack, i got to work on tweaking the levels, adding new quality-of-life features, fixing bugs… everything other than making sprites for Rivers. i procrastinated until the last minute, as my fear very nearly got the better of me…

finally, on the last Friday before Retrush was set to release, i cleared my day and dedicated it solely to sprite work. i expected to hammer my head against the wall all day and night, only to chicken out at the last possible second, with a single, motionless, half-baked sprite of Rivers standing at the end.

instead, in three hours, i had all of this.

that's her!

see, even though it's "just" recolored SMB sprites, Retrush is the most that i've ever experimented with custom tiles and spritework. all of the animated tiles are still just heavily edited versions of existing SMB assets – but i got to experiment with different effects and styles. looking back, i can see a throughline of growth from the waterfalls in Pineapple Pipeline, to the train tracks in Toffee Tracks, up to the wave effect in Fillet Fjords… each of these is just an effect applied to an existing tile, but making these by hand helped me understand the composition of the tiles and why the effects worked to create the illusion of movement.

then, without me realizing it, my abilities grew. the Retrush logo was my first custom logo, and possibly the first custom sprite art that i ever finished and released. the custom eel sprites in Tilapia Trench were my first ever character animation. the bone fish in Vegetable Vat, while loosely based on the sprites from mario maker, are custom sprites – the first time i ever made rotated adaptations of existing sprites. my technical prowess grew without me ever noticing…

and, apparently, it was enough for me to bang out a character sheet in an afternoon.

now, that was far from the end. in fact, all the sprites above ended up going unused – because they all face right, and i need them to face left in the final. but it wasn't hard to flip the sprites, move the flower, add some more expressions…

you've seen this before, haven't you?

in doing so, i even got to attempt a full turnaround, which i used for looking towards and away from the horizon. but even this kind of technical work was more fun than frustrating, and it didn't take long for me to complete the rotation!

good day to fly a kite, by the looks of it...

also, because the wind effect only plays when facing the horizon, these front shots of the wind effect also go unused. but they were a GREAT base and a huge help for the rest of the sprite sheet…

still not 100% happy with the scrunched grin on this...? expressions in general were probably the hardest part.

one little detail i'm extra proud of is her little nervous foot shuffle. i've never animated anything like it before, and it looks great in motion!

"in celebration of the upcoming launch of Retrush, i made some Rivers sprites to use as my pfp! these turned out a lot better than my last attempt and i'm pretty proud of how far i've come as an artist 💙" — April 23rd, 2023 via Twitter.

finally, here's the promo tweet i made for using the Rivers art as my avatar… i almost didn't want to do this, i wanted Rivers to be a surprise! but i was so proud of the sprites that i wanted to share some of them early, and i'm glad i did – this my favorite avatar i've ever had, and the full animations ended up surprising most players anyway.

where did i suddenly get this skill? i asked myself at the time… but it wasn't sudden at all. the rest of Retrush taught me all the skills i needed. all i lacked was the courage to use them.

so if the first blessing that i didn't have before was my partner, then the second blessing i didn't have before… was confidence. the very same confidence that i wanted to impart to the player, right here at the finish line.

turns out, i needed that confidence just as much.

and i meant every word of it.

our work together – her music, and my sprites – are the last things we added to Retrush, the night before release. fitting that it would end this way, after nine years of ADHD workflows, procrastinating on challenging endeavors, pinballing between levels. the last completed piece was the finish line itself, and i'm so happy that i could properly greet players at the end, just as i had so strongly envisioned.

38 posts later, this is also the last developer commentary post… as much of an adhd mess it was to write and schedule these too. but the mess doesn't matter – because when my memories have faded in a year or two, these blog posts will be the journal pages that i cling to, the last vestiges of the development stories i can no longer remember. i hope you've enjoyed them too, that you found some insight and lessons to take with you on your own journey!

one day, when i get to make another game, we'll do this again! i'm sure i will have a lot to share, and i hope you'll be there for it too. for now, though, i am going to take a break from big projects and work on smaller things. nine years is a long time, and i think i need the space to rest and get my IRL in order before i tackle something big again.

but i'll still be writing, streaming, designing, creating… and maybe even spriting. i hope you enjoy my smaller things too, and i hope we keep sharing new things with each other for a long time.

until then, thank you for reading. 💙💜🩷

Secret Ending | Retrush

After clearing EVERYTHING in Retrush, we arrive at the end of the road… where I pour my heart out to the player. Whether you've unlocked this yourself or simply watched along, thank you for joining me on this journey 💖

(Note that the "perfect stars" you get for clearing the stages without dying are NOT REQUIRED to see this ending – you simply need to clear all 16 remixes and get all 4 secret coins, no matter how many deaths it takes.)

[frogsandfries]

Five year anniversary

I don't think I've ever done anything persistently for five years.

I give myself a lot of grace with this graphic novel though, I allow myself time to diamond paint and crochet. I might actually find myself in this graphic novel for at least five years.

I don't think often about things like holiday illustrations or stickers or pins--merch. But today, I was thinking about where the story will be in five years......... at the rate I'm able to go with coloring, it feels like probably nowhere. I'm already able to see, with the information I have, into issues two and three--I haven't finalized my lineworks yet, so I may add and move around frames between the start of issue two and completing the lineworks for it, but I can already see a few closings for issue two, and I'm even starting to look at more of issue three as I thumbnail into it. At the rate I'm going with coloring, who knows when I'll even be able to start coloring issue three.

I feel like it would be cheating to just release my lineworks as the art themselves, or robbing the reader of an experience of a sort. At the same time, it probably wouldn't kill me to strip the story back further, maybe only color select frames. It's my graphic novel. I'm publishing it on my own. It might be fun to practice my shading? I could always pop in some colored art, and I can't always work on my lineworks, but working on the color work as pixel art is something easily done on my phone, which is usually just sitting around wherever I am--on the bus, out for a walk, sitting between calls at this job right now. I'm sure I could easily boost views, especially on something like webtoons, with just my lineworks, which my partner likes just on their own, so it stands to reason that they probably do look good before color--I just think they look incredible after color.

So.....I got a couple frames digitized last night in just about an hour......I could sit down in a few afternoons, as long as I don't get hung up on anything else like I got hung up on that dream sky at the very beginning, and I'd probably finish issue one in just a couple weeks. In about six months, I could probably fill at least this one sketchbook. I mean, really there are only two things holding me back from just racing off on the linework: a) I get kind of easily fatigued drawing the lineworks, and b) I don't want to wildly outstrip myself on lineworks. I don't like feeling like I'm leaving a mountain of work behind for myself.

But the thing is, nobody wants to wait around to get interested in a graphic novel. If my style speaks for itself, the lineworks should be enough material for people to get invested in, and even better if there's quantity of material. Right?

So....... I'm going to give it a try. I'm thinking about making them ten frame strips for WebToon, and starting each page with a colored frame, as well as adding in colored frames when something maybe interesting is happening--so like, when I first introduce grandma and grandpa, and maybe for the drive to school.

[frogsandfries]

I had so much fun today

Of course, this too shall pass. I'll get like a week into this and just be like, this is dumb and I hate it.

I started writing the actual script for my graphic novel today. Yes, yes, I know: That's where I should have started. Technically, I did. I did start out with the original prose/creative writing. And that worked for me to make my frames from. But I would like to try to get an agent for this project. I did do some research on scripts. I guess there's still no exact industry standard, but I did look at one of my current favorites, Saga, and I also considered Dark Horse's standard format. So I'm kind of going back and forth sketchy style, the way I pencil, but for writing: I'm writing a script-ified version of what I see on the page, and doing that for a while, letting what's there rest, and then going back and tightening it up when I go back to format the writing.

I would like to get everything to one point, y'know? Where maybe the script is done--at this point, I'm already ahead in the script from where I am in the linework, but that's just the way it is. I had my partner take a second look. He suggested that maybe I should bring the script to a uniform point, describe the completed frames as equally as frames I've never sketched.

All I have to do is get to a point in the script where I am writing frames that I've never ever even sketched, which is not a point I'm at quite yet--right now I'm describing frames I roughed out several years ago, and trying to imagine my way through improving the overall narrative.

I was also thinking, this project really could be thousands or tens of thousands of frames. That's not really practical to organize with my current methods. I would like to be able to refer to them easily by number--first, I would like some kind of subtle code written into the frame where I could say, ah yes, this is frame X, without being so obvious. Second, I was thinking about actually breaking down the graphic novel into units. It would be cool to divide it by the day, but I don't want the story to be that level of involved. I definitely don't want to have to create all that filler. I think I would have more realistic, consistent results if I broke each week into a chapter or volume or whatever. I could also more easily refer to, like, week two, frame 158, than frame 3279.

I'm still straining my brain for an easy, subtle code for numbering frames inside the frame. It would probably be easier if the frames didn't have so few pixels......... While it really would be cool if my checkerboard blends didn't quite look so.......checky, it would probably force me to take my hunt for a more focused pixel art platform when the one I'm using works well enough for the purposes I want to put it to. Plus, I've already got a color palette.

Anyway, my partner wanted to get some writing done tomorrow, and for now, I don't have a keyboard for my tablet, plus he's taking some OT, and we have errands. I might be obligated to take weekends off from writing, or bounce between his laptop and my tablet. I feel like I should still keep balancing new final lineworks and moving forward my colorwork. Either way, I think it might be realistic that I could have this outline/script ready by the end of the year. Or maybe that's optimistic. Who knows. I want to be optimistic. I want to make something of this project.