I’ve been on a productive spree and have been on a reminiscing kind of mood lately. A while back I played Kirby’s Dream Land 3 for the NES with my significant other and we had a blast, and I wanted to see if I could quickly spin up a laid back couple of levels.
I’m not too worried about making something super unique gameplay wise, instead I’m going to put more effort into the graphical design and focus on funny, strange and try my best at cute. Kirby isn’t really too difficult but it’s still fun with a partner to just go through a cute adventure.
Again though, (and this mostly a note to myself) I need to keep it simple and limit myself to making something short short or this might never see the light of day.
So, in the spirit of keeping it simple for myself I looked for some assets on itch.io that could get me started and hopefully on theme. Luckily, a creator has made pretty much all the main assets and a couple of enemies in a cute/arcadey style. I’ll probably change the tiles or recolor them for a bit more variety.
After finding the assets I duplicated an older project of mine, changed out the sprites into the new ones and I feel like this is the most productive I’ve been in weeks.
But there is still a lot to do if I want this to be fun to play.
Even though Kirby is a pretty simple platformer, it has its eating mechanic where each eaten special enemy has different attacks and then there were animal companions in Kirby land 3 where a player could pretty much combine with a companion and have a different attack for each kind of special enemy.
And even though a player doesn’t really need all that firepower in a Kirby game (the only time I felt you really needed a power is when you’re swimming to make the level go by faster or fighting a boss which makes it even easier). I could be wrong but I think it’s all there to make players experiment and see the silly combinations while progressing through the otherwise simple platforming and seeing the rest of the cute/weird content.
So that’s kind of the direction I’ll be going with this game. Not an intense pixel perfect platformer but more like a laid back, and cute/weird roller coaster. Now whether I’ll take the Kirby mechanics wholesale or try to actually be creative idk yet but it really do be looking like I’ll be doing just that.
Until next time, hopefully with some cool pixel backgrounds.
