one of the new level mockups for T.H.I.S

No zombies, I promise… But maybe some skeleton kittens.

The Making of The Heart Is Safe

Tools used:

flashDevelop – $0

flashpunk – $0

MSpaint – $0

pxtone – $0

sfxr – $0

beer – $12

Total cost – a bit of my health

picture > words

Scanlines and diamonds and hearts, oh my!

T.H.I.S. was mostly a stream of conscious accident than anything.  In it’s first day of life it played more like a game of kleptomania. In fact it still does. So this is really a game about kleptomania. Which really says a lot about everyone who plays it.

The main thing I did differently in the making of this game was the lack of any to-do list until the second day. This created a fear that I wasn’t on schedule. Most people say that a to-do list is a way of tracking what you need to do. In this case it was more a way of tracking how much I had gotten done, because after writing it, I took a nap. I don’t necessarily condone this, but it worked in this case.

“I wouldn’t not be lying if I didn’t say that I wouldn’t hate seeing a sequel” -Farfin

Having tools like flashDevelop and flashpunk are really what made this project possible, so I feel I need to put that out there. I went into this project only wanting to use free software.

For sound effects I used sfxr, as most do, but for music I used pxtone. The music wouldn’t have existed without it, and I recommend it as highly as I would recommend sfxr. But if you disagree I would love to hear what you use. The music itself took about 20 minutes to write plus about 10 minutes of polish, but made a world of difference.

I think it’s worth noting that any amount of documentation before the game was built, or during, would have resulted in a much different game. I was confident going in with what I wanted the feeling of the game to be and went with it.

If I could go back and do something differently it would be the theme setting up a music playlist before hand so I would spend less precious time dj-ing.

blah blah blah shut up and let me play

My mother always told me: Never leave home without your heart – or else you’ll be attacked by exploding ghost cats.

The Heart is Safe