Hi, Chloe here!

It's been over a week since Melanie and the Magic Forest launched, so I wanted to take time to thank everyone who played and share some fun behind the scenes game dev info. So...

THANK YOU! 

Thank you to everyone who played Melanie and the Magic Forest, left a kind comment and/or review, uploaded a playthrough vid, posted photos of the game on a Game Boy, provided feedback during public testing, boosted the game on social media, and made the launch so wonderful! I literally cried happy tears from your support.

Melanie and the Magic Forest was my first solo game, so I was honestly pretty nervous to share it with the world. 

A big thank you is due to Chris Maltby for creating GB Studio! I loved working in GB Studio and it still blows my mind that I made a game for one of my favorite game consoles of all time. This week actually marked one year since I first downloaded GB Studio and started working on the game that became Melanie and the Magic Forest.

I wouldn't have been able to make Melanie and the Magic Forest what it is now without the super helpful tutorials and tips from Robert Doman (YouTube), PixelPete/PeterMilko (YouTube), and the GB Studio Central team's articles.

Melanie and the Magic Forest Behind the Scenes:

Before I started development on Melanie, I was working on a much larger and longer game with the plans to develop it solo in Unity. I had been an artist, producer, and designer on past team projects, but I had very little experience with scripting (aside from a little bit of dabbling in RPG Maker) - which made developing a big game by myself even more daunting. I decided to take a break from that game and started looking into other engines I could use to make a smaller game. I had been practicing pixel art for a few months when I saw a post about GB Studio on Twitter. I was so excited and inspired that I immediately downloaded GB Studio, started watching tutorial videos for making Game Boy games, and practiced drawing 16 x 16 px characters.

I wanted the game to be quirky, random, chill and inspired by my favorite things. At the beginning of development, I gave myself a week to just sit down, pixel some things, and figure out what the characters and world would look like. By the end of that week, Melanie, Lil Treodore, Sprout Kid, Allie N, and Shroomie were born! All of my NPCs for the game were made up on the spot, except Brendan. I added  the other NPCs after I started fleshing out the world. Melanie went through a few iterations both in design and animations up until a month before the game launched.

My goal for Melanie and the Magic Forest was to make a free game that was at least 15 minutes long in 6 months by myself. Although the development of Melanie was spread throughout one year due to big life changes (moving, buying a house, home renovations), collectively it took me about 6 months of active development to finish the game. By the time I had opened up Melanie for public testing, I had realized that the game was almost 30 minutes long!

The game's mechanics developed as my confidence as a newbie to visual scripting and GB Studio grew. I struggled with making things work at first, but as time went on I started to slowly add more things to the game. I still remember how happy and relieved I was when the farming mechanic worked for the first time! It felt like the Harvest Moon gods were smiling down on me, patting my head, and saying "aw it's so cute and simple and smol, but you did it!"

Bits and pieces of the story for the game came together from me placing characters in the world, figuring out what I wanted them to do and how they interact with other NPCs and the Player, and the environments I created. For example, the Mavis and Mama Pup storyline continuously grew and changed throughout development. I took a lot of time figuring out their dynamic and writing dialogue for them that showed some conflict but was ultimately positive.

What went right?

I made a game! In 6 months! By myself! And the goal play time doubled in the last two months of development!

 Finishing Melanie gave me a confidence boost that has inspired me to move forward with other game projects and tackle bigger things. I wanted to prove to myself that I could make a game on my own, and I did!

I kept myself pretty organized while developing my game by using Hack n Plan. I didn't track the hours/days it took to work on something, but I made a habit of tracking the tasks I was working on or needed to work on and left comments after every change so future me could recall what I last did on a specific task.

What went wrong?

The game was going pretty smoothly once I started getting comfortable with scripting in GB Studio and understood the limitations of making a Game Boy game. One major change I did to the game was migrating it from GB Studio 1.0 to 3.0, which is always risky. Migrating in the middle of development always introduces bugs and breaks things! There was a lot of adjustments I had to make with the Actors and scripts after migrating. However, 3.0 offered a lot of wonderful new features that I was able to use for Melanie, so I think it was worth it.

There is one bug that remains in the game today thanks to an issue I was never able to resolve after migrating. In fact the bug is so persistent, we are now on a first name basis. All I had to do was mention one word, and my husband knew instantly which bug I was referring to whenever I asked him scripting questions.

What would you have done differently?

MADE IT BIGGER!

I really enjoyed working on Melanie and I continued to have bigger and better ideas for the game down to the week before launch, but with my 6 month deadline approaching and my aspirations for the aforementioned Unity game growing, I decided that it was time to finish Melanie and move on. If I knew back then what I know now, I could have added more fun stuff! C'est la vie.

The one thing I did not make in my game was the music. I used a song that was in the GB Studio Free Assets repository. I'm not a musician, and I'm only just now starting to learn music theory and keyboard, so I decided to use a good, already-made song rather than delay the game any longer spending months trying to figure out something. I did at least put effort into learning MilkyTracker and watching Game Boy music tutorials on YouTube! I do hope in the future I will understand enough about making music to be able to make some tracks or be able to clearly communicate what I am looking for with a composer.

Doing a sequel for Melanie or making another Game Boy game in the future is a possibility. Maybe add fishing? A gachapon game? EVEN MORE DOGS TO PET?! Who knows, I might even participate in Game Boy game jams some time. This will not be the last time I work in GB Studio, that's for sure!

TLDR; 

I made Melanie and the Magic Forest  by myself in 6 months using GB Studio! Overall it was a great learning experience for me and I am happy with my first solo game. I did not have much experience with scripting prior to Melanie and I was a newbie pixel artist when I started development, so I feel like I have grown a lot as a dev. Although my list of ideas for the game continued to grow, I decided to end the development of the game in April 2022 so I could move on to my next game and finally have a  solo game published. I truly appreciate all of the kind things people have said about Melanie and seeing people play the game makes me so happy!

Thank you for reading! 

I highly recommend GB Studio to anyone who is wanting to make a Game Boy game and learn pixel art! My best advice I can offer is learn the limitations of both GB Studio and Game Boy hardware, then get creative with those limitations and create the game you want. When you decide what type of game you want to make (adventure, side-scroller, point and click, etc) take some time to play Game Boy games of that type and check out other indie games like that.

If you have questions about Melanie and the Magic Forest or you want to chat about game dev or GB Studio things, email me at toadstoolpicnic@gmail.com or say hi on Twitter (@toadstoolpicnic)!

Bonus - Fun Facts:

• Melanie and the Magic Forest was originally called Melancholia and was going to be a game about a young woman struggling with anxiety and sadness finding happiness and new friends in the forest. The color scheme was a melancholic, monotone purple.

• The character Brendan is designed after my irl  brother-from-another-mother. 
  • All of the interactable objects in the Secret Clubhouse reference something from our high school days (DDR, anime, Yu-gi-oh! cards and Super Smash Bros.).

• The Lagoon Fish is a nod to the Creature from the Black Lagoon.

• The Furby in the Pups bedroom is a personal reference. 
  • When I was a kid I had a Furby that woke me up in the middle of the night and said "I'm hungry" in a distorted voice (it's battery was dying) as it sat on the shelf above my head, so I threw it into the closet and never played with it ever again.

• All of the Pups, including Mavis and Mama Pup, represent interests of mine: Nature, Science, Cooking and Halloween!