A Little Backstory - My First Game

Hello everyone! 

First, I need to say I'm incredibly grateful to all the people who gave my little game a try, I hope the majority of you enjoyed it!

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I've been a gamer since I was 4 years old, I love everything retro style, and over the last 2 years I've been trying to finish a game. At first it was incredibly overwhelming.

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After two very time consuming failed attempts at trying to create a game, which ended in failure due to scope creep and loss of motivation, I decided to try GBStudio, and dial down on the scale of the game I was trying to create. I gave myself around 2 months to create a top down adventure game for the GameBoy. 

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A few years ago I started messing around with FLStudio, I composed a few simple music tracks, mainly inspired by videogame music, and one of them was called "Forest of Fallen Knights". It was a simple, sad, melancholic song. And from that piece of music (which, after being converted into beeps and boops, is now the overworld theme for the game), the idea for the game "Forest of Fallen Knights" came up. The goal was to create a small, but densely packed and atmospheric open world game, with many memorable landmarks and characters, that kind of fit that piece of music.

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Being a huge fan of the SoulsBorne series of games, I drew inspiration from the way those games tend to present their story and lore. I wanted people to piece together what happened to the game world. To meet interesting characters and explore interesting locales. In turn, the gameplay and the art are inspired by Zelda series, also one of my favorites ever. The pixel art was challenging, since I'm not much of an artist, but due to the simplicity of the GameBoy's graphics, it was a fun process and learning experience since it allowed me to keep it extremely simple, thus not getting overwhelmed by it. 

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Developing a game for the GameBoy also allowed one of my main motivation killers to not affect me as much, comparing myself to others. When you develop a game using Unity, or Godot for example, you automatically are gonna compare your game with other games made with those engines. And that can be dangerous, since you're only one person, and there's all these beautifully crafted indie games out there that will very likely look and play way better than yours. Whenever I was trying to create a Metroidvania (my first project), I was always comparing my game to these titans such as Hollow Knight, Metroid, Ori and the Blind Forest, and of course... I started losing motivation. My game would never be as good as those. 

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But, GBStudio allowed me to overcome that. I felt more confident that I could create a fun gaming experience, without the thought of "does my game look as good as Hollow Knight or Metroid?" always creeping up in my mind.

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Anyway, for now that's all I wanted to talk about. I hope this post can somehow help someone that might be going through the same hardships I've been through when it comes to developing games. I wanted to give some backstory has to how I got here, and how I finally managed to finish my first game! 

Anyone can do it, just keep things realistic, avoid excessive scope creep, and work hard on a project that you truly care for and love. 

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Massive thanks to Raquel Correia, my girlfriend, who listened to me rambling non-stop for months about my game and supported me throughout the development process, and to Luís Bento (check out his WIP game Corpus Edax, it's going to be seriously amazing) for helping me test the game and iron out a few annoying bugs.