beating Small Saga was an absolutely blessed way to start 2024. my pants have been charmed all the way off.
I made an update post for The Heart of Arel with details of a small patch, a donations update, a custom Analogue Pocket palette for the game, and a "release" trailer I whipped up today:
If you haven't seen the game yet, you can check it out here! It's short, free and gay.
Play on Game Boy or browser (desktop/phone):
~ https://meadowdrone.itch.io/the-heart-of-arel ~
Eionn (she/they), Aoba (she), Eryr (they) and Harthe (she)
It's a radically soft, short game about four partners travelling to stop a deadly natural threat. Cook, cuddle, flirt and encourage each other to overcome the miasma, and explore both the lands, and each other's feelings on the way.
As an beginner at game development I wanted to challenge myself to make something competely my own, an uncompromising look into where I've been at in my life recently, and something of my own visual and sonic style, and embrace the imperfections that come from it. I wanted to make a really small, 5-minute long thing as a newbie game dev, but as I fleshed out these characters I enjoyed them too much to have their adventure end prematurely and I really enjoyed how creatively fulfilling it ended up being.
It's probably about 60-70 minutes long, is mechanically light with no reliance on reaction speeds or precise/multi-button inputs, with a focus on area exporation and the characters' relationships.
All money earned from this game will go to fundraising Dandelion, a Bristol (UK) based harm reduction information centre and needle exchange for trans+ people self-medicating their HRT. Thank you so much!
i've had my Analogue Pocket for a fair bit and it's fair to say I'm way more interested in newer, homebrew Game Boy games as well as the weird stuff from the original GB catalogue than I have been in all the FPGA console and arcade cores and what have you, at least so far. so it's fair to say playing this absolutely adorable sapphic and poly exploration/vania game has been extremely my shit. just bringing all them cute monstergirl vibes.
it's pretty inspirational, too - as if I don't have enough going on in my life rn, this really makes me wanna boot up GB Studio and see what I can do with it!