Hi, we're TwinkleSoft, a small team of friends – me, Khael, the artist, Horacio, the programmer, and Neoware, the composer - who are just starting to develop games. We started less than a year ago, so we're still learning a lot.
RoboGAL is a very inspired Mega Man and Touhou Project game, taking the NES Mega Man base gameplay with some tweaks with the cute and unpretentious (and bullet-hellish) atmosphere from Touhou and other doujin games, games that we are very fond of.
The development started when the programmer saw me doing the protagonist’s sprites for training and asked if he could test them on a little project. We liked the result and, since we wanted to create games but didn’t have much knowledge despite we have already worked on some little games separately, we decided to make it a full game. Some people would say that this is a pretty safe route, but it’s very important to us.
As people who are still starting out in game design in general, everything has been new to us. Many of the development stages we're going through are our first time, so we're in an environment where a lot is still a challenge for us, and consequently, we're still open to experimentation even if we've defined a scope that's no more ambitious than we can at the moment.
We're using Game Maker to develop RoboGAL. As the programmer is already more familiar with it and has had some previous experience in other projects, we preferred to opt for this engine. The most recent usage guideline served as encouragement too.
The list of things we've had problems developing so far is already quite long, it would be difficult to choose just one, in all areas of development there has been at least one thing we've had considerable difficulty with.
But if we really had to pick one in particular, it was programming the camera and the characteristic Mega Man room transition. Since the programmer is a beginner, he had very difficulty with it and was pretty upset with the fact that we were making the game for months but didn’t manage to make this work. He was very happy when he finally made it but still had to deal with a lot of bugs.
I think we can say that if you are trying to learn on your own and without deadlines from someone above you, take advantage of this time to learn whatever you believe that you need, but without getting stuck on it. Probably you won’t be happy with the initial result and that’s fine, you have time to experiment and fix things, but don’t let this consume your mind to the point that stop you from learning something new.
Maybe you’ll find the answer that you needed in something totally different, and for this you’ll have to take a break and start again. Do this can be pretty frustrating and exhausting, but you’ll get fruits from it.
Despite what we said previously, we frequently get anxious wondering if we will really make it, or if people will like the game if/when it comes out, but something that we can say for sure is that we are really enjoying to make this game.
Please, follow us on social media if you want to learn more about the game and see updates and side projects.
-TwinkleSoft Team
❤️
