Announcing: Broken Links!

I’m finally ready to start sharing the little game I’ve been working on since late last year! It’s called Broken Links and it is a teeny little bite-sized 8-bit-ish style puzzle/action game in the style of a top down Zelda or Adventures of Lolo!

It’s a wee little thing, but my aim is to have it feel like a complete adventure, even if the runtime is under-or-around ten minutes. It has three mini "dungeons" all with their own action/puzzle mechanics, a few lore-and-advice dispensing NPCs and a couple of (hopefully cute!) NES-style cutscenes.

This is the first time I’ve made a game of this scale with my own art (and holy bananas was finding a style and direction a WHOLE THING on top of learning to make assets that worked stylistically—while learning to produce/be a producer of my own art) so it’s taken a very long time to get it going. I’ve spent a lot of time really figuring out how I wanted this world and these levels to look and feel—very much as my beginner art skills were just starting to develop—so it’s been a wilder and longer ride than an extremely modest little pixel art puzzle/adventure might typically take.

I’m definitely in the swamp (and trying to avoid the deathloops!) of early indie game dev as Derek Yu once famously blogged about. But I refuse to quit! This little thing will get out there, and it’ll get out there soon, and goddamnit, I will be proud (at least, of some parts of it!)

The idea for the game actually came about last summer. I was working on a project at work, going through hundreds of old pages on Game Developer with broken links and fixing them. At some point, fueled by cold brew and eyes watering from staring at a spreadsheet with thousands of cells, I thought “broken links” was a funny phrase for a Zelda parody, so I thought it’d be cool to do a tiny dungeon-based thing where you have to save the hero to fix a bunch of broken timelines.

That’s also when I started really having fun drawing 8-bit tilesets and game mock-ups, so the two paired nicely!

I made a (much smaller) proof of concept last December called The Blathering Keep to work through some simple structural stuff (making levels, a simple inventory system, dialogue integration with yarnspinner and NPCs), narratively based on some corporate hell jargon. That was fun! It created the foundation for Broken Links!

I’m really excited to start sharing some of the art and thoughts here. I’m even more excited to launch it and get back to working on The Tunnel (my whole pixel art journey was really inspired by wanting to make my own assets for that, and here we are now!)

I’m not settling on a specific launch day just yet, mainly because my own schedule is so unpredictable and I want to give myself ample time for testing. But I will say SOON and thank you for your time reading this little intro.