Announcing: The Blathering Keep!

As I'm about to "launch" my latest tiny game, I thought I'd go ahead and write about it! The Blathering Keep is a teeny-tiny proof of concept for the small top-down dungeon crawler I'd like to make next, once I'm through with The Tunnel. This began life as a tiny game jam prototype, but I really started having fun making a bit of a framework (for my simple art pipeline, for creating more modular, cleaner, *somewhat* less-spaghetti code and actually using... gasp... PREFAB VARIANTS), I decided it would be best to give myself a few more days and build out the rest of the simple systems and put this out as that proof of concept. Viola!

This is not the first game I've drawn (as well as designed/scripted, etc.) myself, but it is the first time my little art practice (Since May, I try to draw at least one illustration per day, for a daily "challenge" practice) has inspired me to go ahead and just make the damn thing I'm mocking up. The prompt for the Lospec community *pixel daily* on 10/10 was *Arena* with a really fun and versatile palette, I drew something I actually liked(very directly inspired by this fantastic tutorial), and someone on BlueSky said something to the effect of "I want to be a little guy running around in there!" and, lol, the project was born.

I'm using Yarn Spinner here (and actually, in much more sophisticated ways than I used to, that's a huge part of what I learned here, and drew as well from Mars Buttfield-Addison's tutorial here on my own website) to do all of the dialogue and the inventory logic, which was really, really fun! As I'm playing with Yarn Spinner, I am still using Unity (though the fine folks at The Secret Lab have been working on a Godot version of the tool too). While I suspect I'll be a Godot bro before too long (I really want to make 2D games, hence, not being as jazzed about Unreal), I still have a lot of basics and prototypes I want to get out of my system here, in the engine I've been playing with since like... 2010?

In any event, I'm nearly done with this little project, and excited to share it, mainly to share the progress I've been making. I'm having so much fun learning some pixel art, and learning a bit more baby-steps coding, and, naturally,  I always enjoy writing dialogue. This has really been a sweet little adventure for me, and I'm grateful for any feedback folks have when I post the build.