DECISIONS

One of the toughest things for me this early on in the process, is deciding whether I want this game to have hand drawn art or pixel art. I generally tend to be very indecisive when it comes to everything I make, so there's been a lot of back and forth with this. I spent a month drawing different pieces in either style to see which one would win me over.

Marketing-wise, the hand drawn approach would give this game a chance to do better, given the massive success of Hollow Knight. Plus it would allow for my art style to remain intact, whereas with the 8bit look I would have to sacrifice the recognizability of my style considerably. I do really love Hollow Knight and other games like that (Constance, Forgetting Anne, etc). But my concern has been that it will take me a much longer time to draw everything. Plus there's just something so cute and 'gamey' about the pixel look. I ultimately want this personal project to be a reason to have fun away from my regular work. This is meant to be an opportunity for me to dive deeper into learning new disciplines.

The other thing that I've been going back and forth with is whether to make this a side-scroll experience or a top-down. My main inspiration for Barbadango has always been the gameboy Zelda games (Link's Awakening, Oracle of Seasons/Ages) as well as A Link to the Past (of course) for SNES. I also loved how Fields of Mistria took inspiration from Link to the Past for their overworld design in addition to 90s anime for their character portraits, and I really, REALLY fell in love with Sea of Stars and how they managed to make the pixel art style feel fresh and current (except I don't enjoy turn based fighting very much, sorry).

So I set out to take my designs further into that direction. However, once Mina the Hollower came out, very recently, seeing how heavily it was also inspired by that look & feel and just being amazed at what an incredible job they did with it (that game is truly amazing) and seeing how many similarities it had with what I was originally attempting to do, I got a bit depressed for about a week and felt like quitting.

Eventually I got over it and went back to the drawing board. I thought back to when I was a kid and how no matter how much I enjoyed games like Super Mario Bros 3 and Klonoa: Empire of Dreams, I always wished that in addition to the platforming and boss battles, that those worlds could have also had more of an RPG aspect to them, where you could explore the worlds more and talk to various characters, enter their homes, help them with side quests, discover more hidden areas, and unravel more lore.

Some of the more contemporary examples that I had as inspiration for the side-scroll format early on were Astalon: Tears of the Earth and Flynn: Son of Crimson. So I thought, essentially, what would this be like if it was a weird amalgamation of Super Mario, Wonder Boy in Monster World, Klonoa, Astalon, and Zelda? Would that even work? Would it come across as fun and engaging? Or would it seem awkward and annoying, like Zelda II? A lot of people seem to dislike metroidvanias for some reason. Yet those who love them, really love them. The challenge here is to break away from the "skip past it" habit and make sure that the pacing and landscaping is designed in such a way that it puts the player in an exploratory mood.

The parallax effect will also offer a richer world building experience in terms of large fantastical vistas and depth. Still, there's something about side-scroll that puts the player in a psychological state where they want to keep moving forward and smashing through platforming obstacles. Whereas, a top-down view offers this beautiful sandbox feeling that slows down your adrenalin. It doesn't get on your nerves when you're reading dialogue boxes and searching around for clues and objects. It's like you're playing with little toys & trinkets on a massive model diorama. And when it's pixelated, it kind of feels like that diorama is made of legos, which makes it seem even more fun. I don't know. Maybe I'll have to design a mini section in both formats to see which one feels right.

SO I'M MAKING A GAME

I’ve decided to turn this shelved graphic novel from 16 years ago into a game. I have no idea what I’m doing but I’m learning. I know I have a long road ahead of me, however it’s worth a try. Chronicling my process in a blog seemed like a good idea, so here is my first game development post for "Barbadango".

Barbadango is a mischievous cat who starts off as a wily bandit scraping to get by on Copperbell island but when he finds a rare crimson shard that grants him magical red knight armour and fire wielding powers, he leaves his old life behind to embark on a journey across the kingdom of Humberthorn where he will learn what it truly takes to become a hero.

So yeah, that was it. Before thousands of indie creators made all these comics, games, and cartoons that featured cute badass animal (usually a cat) characters wandering on a quest through some type of a forest (usually during autumn), before Breath of the Wild and its 'unite the four kingdoms' main plot, before Nine Sols and Hollow Knight and Mina the Hollower and Over the Garden Wall, even before cat Mario, there was that. My main inspirations at the time were Super Mario, the classic Zelda games (Oracle of Seasons, A Link to the Past, Link's awakening) Bone, Avatar the Last Airbender, and Kung-Fu Panda.

Back in around 2008-2009 I was walking around my neighborhood in Fulham (Lillie Road) and I noticed a car abruptly stop at the crosswalk. A black cat with a "don't mess with me" look on its face was using the crosswalk to cross the street, taking its sweet time, paused in the middle, glanced at the driver with attitude, then kept on moving. It was pretty funny, actually. The cat eventually made its way over to someone's front yard where it walked by a garden gnome. The visual of all that seemed so amusing to me that I immediately started sketching ideas as soon as I got back to my flat.

The story and stylistic treatment grew and evolved over time. It started off with the animal characters being on all fours with various clothing accessories but at some point later on I caved in to the cliche approach and changed them to standing on two legs, being fully clothed. Another big change was switching all the scary forest creatures to robots.

In 2010 I eventually self-published the comic as a single ‘ashcan’ issue. Just a hundred copies and a digital pdf, nothing much. It was basically just a physical presentation of my first chapter in order to pitch it as a comic book mini series or graphic novel.

It gained a lot of interest from various publishers and literary agents, but despite all of them really liking it, everyone kept asking for massive changes. “Can you remove all the red? Scholastic hates anything with red. I won’t be able to sell it to them”, “Can it not be fall all the time? The colours are too warm and brown. Teals, pinks, and purples are really in now, add more of that”, “Can you change all the characters’ names? Here’s a website that lists the most popular pet names”. At one point I even had one publisher tell me “It’s a strong concept but you need to make the animals more like humans with massive muscles and have cute girls with big tits”. A couple times I even had people angrily yelling at me for some weird reason or another. Thinking back on it, I wasn’t rude and never spoke over anyone, so I’m not sure what prompted that kind of reaction. All I can think of is that maybe that’s some kind of strategic power move for some people to feel in control.

Eventually some serious life events got in the way, my work situation changed, and I was also preparing to move back to Greece. So after five years of trying, I put Barbadango on hold in favour of other priorities. I also had other fun ideas that I wanted to develop into comics so, all in all, it felt like it was time to move on. Seeing countless other companies and individual creatives produce projects that shared similarities with what I had planned just made me gradually feel less and less precious about it. It felt like there was really no point in revisiting Barbadango since these ideas have already been explored by others, and done so beautifully too.

I had stopped gaming for almost a year because I took on more work in 2025. When I got back into it this spring, I decided to just go for small, easy looking cozy stuff as a contrast to Ghost of Tsushima which was the last thing finished before the long pause. I noticed Klonoa: Empire of Dreams on the switch online gameboy advance games and I'd never played any Klonoa before so I thought 'why not?'. I absolutely fell in love with it. I couldn't believe I got this far in life witbout having experienced that. It put me in a mood for more pixel games, so I moved onto Super Mario Land 2, WarioLand, Metroid, and Super Metroid, and A Link to the Past, and then Oracle of Seasons... Then I started looking for modern day pixel games and I ended up playing quite a few. A couple of bad ones (that I didn't finish) but a whole bunch of awesome ones too, like Sea of Stars, Flynn: Son of Crimson, Astalon: Tears of the Earth, Fields of Mistria, and the Petal Runner demo.

All of that really got me into wanting to draw pixel art. I ended up illustrating a few of my own characters in 8bit and for some reason when I got around to doing a pixelated rendering of Barbadango, it just really clicked. Then I started trying out some mroe poses and variations until I started drawing a few trees, and cliffs, and other in objects, just testing out what would his world look like if it were a top-down RPG? How would it differ if it were a side scroll platformer? Then I tried him in different screen porportions. By the end of that day I wondered if maybe Barbadango was actually better suited for gaming instead of the comics medium...

...And so here I am, learning development and coding in Unity, mapping out the structure of the game, redesigning charatcers, and revisiting the story. I'm at a very early stage where I'm still trying to figure out whether to go the Astalon route with pixel graphics or the Hollow Knight route with hand drawn graphics. It's a tough choice. I love both styles equally for different reasons.

But I'll go into that more in my next post...