Ashley

is this that void game everybody likes

silly self indulgent post incoming ⚠️ several years ago i got this copy of Tetris DX at a used games store for one dollar. knowing nothing about the difference between vanilla and DX tetris, i was a little surprised to see that not only does this version save your high scores, it even has space for three profiles so you can share the game with friends and family.

me, having no friends, was left to compete with DEBBIE, the only profile on the cartridge. maybe Debbie didn't have any friends either 🤷 not surprisingly, she had 1st place in every game mode: Marathon, Ultra, 40 Line Clear (my favorite). tbh i don't think she was a particularly great tetris player, but i was even worse, and so began my month-long, one-sided rivalry against a stranger who likely didn't even remember setting all these scores. i mostly played on the toilet.

anyway, after about a month of trying i finally managed to knock Debbie out of every first place spot! it was a weird feeling, having shared this with someone i'll never meet. recently i got this sick modded GBA with a new IPS backlit screen (humble brag) and found my old DX cart from years earlier; the cartridge's save battery had run out and any evidence i'll personally ever have of my rival's existence was erased. hope she's doing alright.

@hemlocks and i made a game. it's short, you can beat it in literally a minute and yet somehow it took like 3 weeks to make. it was a fun little project and we might do another in the future.

I did the art and music, and @moonflowers did the design and code! the production title on my end at least was Mild Gunman lmao

the original plan was just a couple or three duels and a single desert stage, and even though flower is remarkably resistant to scope creep we ended up with 5 unique stages and gunmen that i love a ton, along with between stage cutscenes 😎

this was my first serious shot at making a game for a small engine (and my first time dealing with GB Studio period) so it was a very harsh and tedious crash course on the gameboy's technical limitations lmao. about 80% of the way into the project, i realized that a lot of the tile/sprite limits could have been sidestepped by having some of the enemy be made up of background tiles (like Rescue Rangers bosses on the NES for example) but damn it we shipped something and i could not be more proud of us 🙏🙏🙏 it's pretty difficult (most of the gunmen will try to trick you into shooting early) but very short, hope you give it a try!