Happy New Year! Gong Xi Fa Cai! And an Update on After School Afterlife…
Long story short, we are going to devote this year to focusing more on After School Afterlife! Last year saw us distracted with various game jams. We came out with 4 new games in 2021!
The Start of After School Afterlife
This is the same boss room! The jam version above and the newer art below.
After School Afterlife started off as a chance for my sister and I to tell a story set within our culture. When I was a kid, there were times I wished I grew up elsewhere as none of the fantasy books I read seemed to take place in normal Singapore. Though I suppose true to my roots, After School Afterlife ended up being just as much inspired by the haunting ghost stories I remembered being told as a kid by either my older relatives or by reading True Singapore Ghost Stories during morning assembly. (There really must be something about South East Asia that makes it so incredibly haunted…)
After School Afterlife was also a chance for us to learn and grow as game developers during covid.
Through a process of trial and error, and taking part in many many more game jams, we’ve definitely grown from when the project first started. I had only just started doing pixel art for After School Afterlife during the game jam. This created a difference in quality when I started taking pixel art more seriously and the older assets of After School Afterlife felt starkly different as I grew as a pixel artist.
Changes to the Game
My inexperience with pixel art had the game initially set at 32x32 tiles and I was soon realising that I could better handle the tiles at a size of 16x16. Furthermore, the game design has shifted from the original jam version as well. The original jam version had the game blink between the worlds of the living and the dead. Visually, this had the regular coloured sprites startlingly blink into an ominous red shift. For a short jam game, this was fine. It was dramatic, spooky. But for the longer game we envision, the blinking red lights were disorientating and not visually accessible for those who might be sensitive to flashing colours. Focusing only on the shift from one world to the other also limited our game design ideas. It was a leftover of the jam version of the game, the jam theme being “Two Sides”. Over time, we were realising more and more we wanted After School Afterlife to focus less on the world shift and more on a world that dances to the rhythm of the music - not limited to just flashing between two versions of the same world.
Late 2021 saw us decide to take After School Afterlife and take the plunge to completely overhaul it. We wanted more flexibility with designing levels based on the music which needed us to rework its rhythm system. We also wanted to shift to tile sets. As the original code base came directly from the jam version, there was a lot of redundant spaghetti code and obsolete objects. We also aren’t completely throwing away the old code as a lot of systems can get moved over.
Timeline wise, we still plan to get our demo out this year. We had a demo out last year as part of the Singapore Heritage Festival but we realised the world shifting really wasn’t the angle we wanted to take and would rather re-write the music system and revisit our level design than continue with what we had.
Despite starting over, we are able to push updates a lot faster. A big part of this is because we got a new member to our team (hey Nyveon!) that we’ve collaborated with in the past. So I’m super excited to be making games with him! He’s a really skilled coder and someone who is also into lobsters and bricks. We also aren’t as held back by a lot of the older codes redundancies.
I was also finally able to see family again after 2 years since covid started! Being back in Singapore in December 2021 was a good chance to take pictures of traditional shop houses and stock up on reading material as research for After School Afterlife. I ended up getting some really awesome books on common household items you’d find in a Peranakan home, shop house architecture, and one book on the street hawkers of old Singapore. Look forward to seeing a lot of these little details in the game.
Thoughts on Game Release
On the business side, I’ve read a lot of articles that recommend releasing a game as fast as possible as the cost of game development can really be quite expensive. I find it fortunate that we aren’t a team that needs to heed that for now. None of us are full-time game developers. We started when some were still in school (some still are!) and others have their own day jobs to think about. In the end, making this game really is about us wanting to showcase a culture we never see in games as well as growing as a team. We probably won’t see a monetary return when you think about the time we invested in this (such is the life of an indie dev) but I’m hoping After School Afterlife will be a game people will enjoy and a game where they can learn more about our local culture.
Here’s to a productive year!
恭喜发财！！
