DETAILS
_______________________________________
This is an homage to both Alan Wake II, by Remedy Games, and David Lynch.
I loved the idea of demakes since I was a kid, and wanted to make one for Alan Wake II after finishing the DLC. While prepping the whole project, one of my favorite movie directors died: David Lynch.
An artist who inspired many with his art, including the Alan Wake series. A filmmaker who was also painting, drawing, making music, taking photos...
I loved the idea of demakes since I was a kid, and wanted to make one for Alan Wake II after finishing the DLC. While prepping the whole project, one of my favorite movie directors died: David Lynch.
An artist who inspired many with his art, including the Alan Wake series. A filmmaker who was also painting, drawing, making music, taking photos...
His death moved me, since I'm also very much in love with cinema, and I decided that my game won't be just a game, it'll be a whole physical product, alongside an ad, just like Remedy did inside Alan Wake II, or David Lynch during his career.
Workflow
_______________________________________
_______________________________________
Using Miro, I made a sheet with gifs of Alan Wake's actions in the game, and their counterpart in GB Studio. It allowed me to see what could be possible, how, and what I could do with these.
Using the photo mode ingame, I took photos of everything I needed
Using Aseprite for all the sprites, and Tiled to make the whole scenery, I quickly build the town and levels for the game
In engine look at the whole game
Hardware Limitations
_______________________________________
_______________________________________
While scripting and building the game, I ran into limitation pretty quickly. For exemple, 192 tiles per background. The town got cut in half and some buildings disappeared to make up for it. Even now, the town don't have any dialogue because the gameboy can't process the town and dialogues.
Town splitted in half
True size of Player's collision box
In early versions of the game, player's health was going down if the ennemy touched them. When I built the "light ennemies up" system, I was struggling to have a system that would detect when "if an ennemy is near the player, press B and it will light the ennemy", since it would've been two different collision condition the Gameboy was not able to do that. I then made the player's collision bigger and the health to go down with time, so ennemies can touch players but they'll be lighten up if B is pressed.
Just like AW2, I tried to mix real video footage and game in Light Writer. I almost made it, using DaVinci Resolve and Aseprite, but the GameBoy couldn't handle it. Very sad but I liked doing it !
PHYSICAL VERSION
_______________________________________
To make the physical version, I needed two major things : The cartridge and the game box.
For the cartridge, I had multiple choices, but they were mostly breaking the hardware little by little. I choosed the safest option, with a 8MB cartridge, one of the biggest and a GBxCART, to flash my rom into it.
Using Nintandbox, I gathered multiple game box scans, and created my own.
Made the game rulebook as well, one trip to the print shop and it was ready to assemble !
TRAILER
_______________________________________
To finish the project, I needed a trailer. Using my phone, I filmed in an abandonned subway station to fit the game word.
Then, using DaVinci, I emulated the vhs effects using a grainy vhs video and some resizing for both the image and the color :
Then, using DaVinci, I emulated the vhs effects using a grainy vhs video and some resizing for both the image and the color :
Original footage filmed in PRORES
Downscaled and resized manually in DaVinci
Added some color, and it's done !
