In space, no one can hear you meow
personal project
•
Game development
2025
Brief
"I wonder what Alien isolation would look like if it was on the Game Boy? Actually, I wonder what Alien Isolation would look like on the Game Boy but you're Jonesy the cat from Alien (1979). Well, let's find out…"
Background
I have been a player of video games for too many decades to mention, but making one has always been one of those things I've wanted to try. When this concept came to me, for some reason this was the thing that pushed me to build on the pixel art I'd recently begun learning and throw myself into game development.
How I helped
Game Development (GB Studio)
Character Design
Level Design
Having never designed or built a game before, failure was for sure going to be the biggest teacher in this process.
Before I started development though, I created a series of assets in order to not start with a blank canvas. These were all refined over time to fit within the constraints of creating a Game Boy game, of which there are many due to the technological limits of the system/engine.
Designing these levels and character sprites was a lot of fun.
Not just because I was learning to build upon my pixel art skills and further learn about the app I'd been using (Pixquare), but because each one became a puzzle piece I needed to refine and optimise to fit within the constraints of the engine.
Thanks to my initial concept, the game mechanics were already clear in my mind. Hiding would be the main goal, of the first level at least. Once I had begun development the idea for a second level came to mind, which was turning it into a platformer.
Adding the base logic for each level was easy enough within GB Studio, but adding my own (such as the Alien's behaviour) became a process of iteration and testing until I was able to achieve my desired outcome.
As a final step, I added in a small interim "trick or treat" style stage in between the two level designs. Depending on how many lives your character had, you would either be rewarded with a extra life, have a life taken from you, or nothing would change.
The logic and design of this section had to be stripped back the most from anything I'd created before, and as such was the biggest challenge I faced during this project.
Human-made
hack_the_planet.exe
All/of/this/will/fade*