PLEASE START US OFF BY INTRODUCING YOURSELF:

Hi my name is Zachary! I'm the sole developer of Garbanzo Quest! I've always loved art and learning different technologies, so I think it's natural that I ended up as a game developer. I went to school for digital animation, I originally wanted to work on cartoons like Adventure Time!

In my spare time I taught myself programming, because it sounded like fun, eventually I learned that programming would be a better career for me so I started work as a web developer. I worked as a web developer for 5 years, until I got really sick of it! The money was good, but I wasn't creatively satisfied... At the time I was working for a hospital during the COVID pandemic, there I wrote software that helped people get scheduled with COVID testing.

I felt really good about the work I was doing, but it was very stressful! After feeling some serious burn-out for a long time, I decided to quit and pursue something more light-hearted. Game development is notoriously difficult, so it's funny to think that this is less stressful than what I was doing before! I'm 2.5 years into working on my first indie game, and haven't looked back since!

TELL US ABOUT GARBANZO QUEST.

Garbanzo Quest is a wacky bullet-heck pixel art platformer! It's a game that's full of challenge and adventure that rewards those with determination and curiosity! In it you'll play as Garbanzo and save the world from Billi' Bones and his evil company Abra-Cadaver. His company has taken over the world, making it uninhabitable for its residents. It's your job to dismantle the evil factories plaguing the world, while making many friends in the process!

Garbanzo Quest draws from older games like Super Mario World, and new games like Celeste and Undertale, while doing its own experimentation to make a new experience! The world design takes cues from Super Mario World to help connect all the levels and give the journey a strong sense of adventure and exploration. The actual level design draws more from Celeste, levels are composed of individual rooms, each room acting as a checkpoint. This allows me to make each room its own interesting challenge, while still being forgiving. The story and attitude draws a bit from Undertale, the world is hostile to Garbanzo, but Garbanzo remains a pacifist!

I knew I wanted to make a game, but I never had a solid plan! I didn't start with a design document for Garbanzo Quest, and it still doesn't have one! It was a very loose and creative process. I would usually just pursue what sounds like fun, I love platformers, so that was a natural place to start. With lots of experimentation and iteration I think Garbanzo Quest has turned out to be a really compelling experience! I think there’s enough for platformer enjoyers to find some familiar comfort, while still having enough weird ideas to keep things feeling fresh!

HOW HAS THE DEVELOPMENT JOURNEY BEEN AND WHICH GAME ENGINE DID YOU CHOOSE AND WHY?

Making this game is the hardest thing I've ever done. Good thing I love a good challenge! Making Garbanzo Quest has been an awesome experience, I only hope I get to make more games after this one.

I decided to make my own engine using the MonoGame framework. Development of Garbanzo Quest started around when the Unity Engine went public, which for years was my engine of choice. Seeing the engine go public made me nervous about its direction, and it seems like I was right to be! This move made me cautious about closed-source game engines in general, so I wasn't interested in GameMaker or the Unreal Engine either. So with open-source being my only option I was either gonna have to use the Godot game engine or make my own. I think Godot is great, but at the time it was still pretty nascent, so I simply decided to make my own! Making my own engine definitely helped me level up as a programmer, but I don't know if I would do that again, especially seeing how far the Godot engine has come recently. Making a game is hard enough, adding engine development on top of it is maybe a bit much!

WHAT'S BEEN YOUR BIGGEST DEVELOPMENT HURDLE SO FAR?

By the time I made the jump to work on my game full-time I was already a pretty seasoned programmer. There really isn't one problem that has stood above the rest, for me game development feels like accomplishing one-million intermediate problems, not just a few big ones. I guess I can say that designing the overall game is pretty tough. Designing things like individual levels, enemies, mechanics feels pretty fun and simple, but getting all those things to work together to make one cohesive and compelling experience takes a lot of thinking and planning.

ADVICE FOR FELLOW DEVS?

Enjoy the journey, enjoy the pain! Making a game is really hard, but in a good way! For creative endeavors like ours It's extra important to make sure you're taking care of yourself. Think of yourself as a sponge, once you've rung out all your creative juices you gotta give yourself time to rest to soak in more!

ANY FINAL THOUGHTS?

Thanks for reading! I hope this has helped you at least a little bit on your Game Dev Journey!

- Zachary

Oh, and don't forget to buy my game 10 times on Steam:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2105910/Garbanzo_Quest/

And another 20 times on Itch:

https://zachisagardner.itch.io/garbanzo-quest

And then follow me 30 times on Twitter:

https://twitter.com/zachisagardner

❤️