I wanna provide some history on my new game's development process! It was a really interesting and iterative process, so, thread! https://twitter.com/birdlegscass/status/1310094180555935758

Pyo comes from me rediscovering Bird & Beans, a DSiWare game I played as a kid. I got really into the game and started thinking, "what if I could jump up there and bonk the beans myself? What if this was a platformer?" That idea seemed really really exciting to me!!!

It was exciting enough that I started prototyping basically right away. I didn't have literally any idea how I wanted the game to be themed or how I wanted to look, so I just put in "Pyo," a shortened version of bird & beans' original name, "Pyoro" as a working name

At this point I was using extremely basic and ugly placeholder sprites. The goal was to get the gameplay to feel right, and immediately after bouncing off a, uh, potato, I decided I wanted more air control, so I added a double jump

But I also wanted it to be difficult to reach the top of the screen, and the double jump made it really really easy, so I changed the double jump to a sideways dive

One of my favorite things about bird & beans was how the bird can only stick their tongue out diagonally at 45°, meaning they can't eat beans directly above them--so the lose condition is when the bird gets donked on the head by a bean

I really didn't want that in my game tho because losing every time you got bonked in the head would be ridiculous given how close you're expected to get to the beans. Instead I wanted to leverage Pyo's platformer aspect and have the game end when you fall in the pits in the floor

Since, in my game, you could bounce off a bean from below, you could easily just stand in one place and rack up an infinite score, since you'd be protecting the ground below you. That's why I added the red bombeans, which send out two explosions sideways when they hit the bottom

The one thing I didn't like about bird & beans was how you could get loads of points for eating a bean that was still at the very top of the screen. That seemed like a cool scoring system at first, but in practice it encouraged me to just stand in one place and try to get lucky

Instead of that, I again wanted to go with the strengths of this game as a platformer and have a combo system where you'd get more points for every consecutive bean you bounced off

For the last thing I wanted to do differently from bird and beans, I wanted the block restoring system to be more dynamic and more platforming based. In bird & beans, if you ate a white bean, an angel would come down and restore the nearest hole in the ground

Instead, I had the idea to have the "angel" fly back and forth up top and to have the player get up there to have them drop the block anywhere--including over other blocks, creating a stacking mechanic advanced players could get creative with

In order to make the stacking work alongside the bombeans, I made the bombeans able to destroy an entire stack of blocks all at once

The ability to make stacks also presented the issue that it was hard to line up the block to drop it exactly where you wanted it. That's why I added the stripes made by the pits, which also makes it easier to tell at a glance when you're over safe ground

I later also made the ""angel"" fly way slower over pits, making it easier to fill pits than to make stacks, which aren't as useful as a filled pit

Finally, I was constantly running into frustrations where having a bean on one side followed by a bean on the opposite side of the screen meant I could never catch the second one and would instead bonk into the wall. The fix though, was obviously right there: make her bounce!

The game also had a bug where you wouldn't lose your multiplier until a short time after landing from a dive. I decided to make this a feature by having Margie do one bounce after landing from a dive. I call it the "dive recover" after Mario 64

For the game's art style, I wanted to start with a character who would look right doing the dive motion, so I decided to make them a little taller than they were wide. This was also so it would be easier to hit beans while moving sideways since you'd have a tall hitbox

I started drawing birds, cause you know, bird and beans had a bird, so why not start there I guess, and immediately I really liked this chicken with the comb flopping forward, so I decided to try coloring her

Since I was just sketching though, I just quickly threw a blob of orange color behind the linework. I thought that looked REALLY nice and I'd been wanting to do something simple and easy to draw already, so it was perfect!!

Once I put it in the game though, it ended up looking ghostly and indistinct, and the resolution made my wispy sketch lines look gross, so I started experimenting with tweaks to the style

I tried both full black outlines that had a doodled look to them and also paper mario-esque white outlines. Eventually I combined both, and maybe this is just me, but that made it look like the kind of art you'd see on a fancy wine bottle, and... No thanks?

So that's how the final style came out, with the colorful outlines. Way less wine bottle and way more cute doodle

I spent a LOT of time trying to make Margie feel squishy and bouncy. When she bounces off a wall, you get one frame of her squishing into it followed by a few frames of her stretching in the direction she bounces off. She also stretches in the direction she bounces off beans--

and then springs back to her original shape. Those are just a few of the many visual squash and stretch effects, but she also bounces when falling from high enough up. This is probably entirely useless but it makes her feel bouncy and cartoonish!

In contrast to her bounciness, her feet are hard and clacky, just like a real chicken's. I love how you can hear her feet clacking when landing from a height, but she also squishes intensely. I love contrast like that!

Aaaand I'm tired. There's a lot more that went into this game. I'll probably come back and finish this thread later. For now, thanks for reading!! I love sharing my process, it's really fun ;u;