Turning a life love story into a Pixel Art game
Yes! She said Yes. Now what?
Well, easy — lots of couples have done this to-do list before: choosing a venue, flowers, caterer, bands, save the date, invitations, etc. But the first thing that come to our minds is: how can we do some of these things differently? Wedding traditions are mostly “set in stone”, where people hardly stop to think why they do it this way. We appreciate the traditions, but how can we have them but “disrupt” them?
That one day we gather family and friends from different corners of this world to celebrate love is not actually one day, but all the months beforehand when the planning takes place. How could we engage our guests from different generations, nationalities, and from different moments of our eight-year history?
“I had a great idea! What if we…” — I told my fiancée as she gazed at the sky from the airplane window, enjoying the start of our weekend getaway. (I’ve lost count of how many times she heard this sentence, and to be honest it’s a 50–50 chance of being an actual great idea). I started drawing it — the enemies, the characters, the background. “Maybe we should throw tennis balls at the enemies? What about a surfer and a fish as our enemies?”. So, on the back of her used piece of paper, I drafted the game as we reached Tallinn. She loved it.
Save the date: the game
I’ve built a game for our save the date. A game to start telling more about us. An innovative way to build up expectations for the big day.
Why a game? I think a game doesn’t only tell the story you want to tell but makes “the players” (our guests) responsible for telling it. For me, it was the perfect analogy for how our guests have been a huge part of our happiness and life together. And that’s how we want them to feel when playing it.
In the game, our guests are responsible for taking us to the venue in the city where the wedding is hosted, so only then they can see and save the date. For some of our guests it’s their first glance at Florianópolis, my hometown, a laid-back island with amazing surfing, sea food and Azorean influence.
The “enemies” in the game are remarkable animals of the city’s marine life:
- Oysters, internationally famous and considered by many the world’s best
- Sand crab — known as “Maria Farinha” — an animal that can be spotted in almost all 42 sand beaches in the island. Its name literally translates to “Flour Maria”
- Pufferfish — in Portuguese “Baiacu” — a very common fish in the bay-side waters of Florianópolis. A huge part of my fishing heritage, and childhood. It’s the most common and annoying fish you catch in the hook. You can’t eat it, and often it will bite your hook off or just eat your bait.
The characters are us. You can choose between me and my fiancée. We’ll see us in our best outfit: relaxed colourful clothes and havaianas flip flops.
What our guests have to do to save the date is go through our favourite spots in the island jumping over the enemies. From the traditional Hercilio Luz bridge sight that connects the mainland, through famous Joaquina dunes and Campeche beach, reaching the traditional area of Ribeirão da Ilha to finally get to the wedding venue: Villa Casarão. Additionally, they should not forget to pick up the rings on the way — otherwise no wedding and no “save the date” for them.
Inspiration
I’ve started from the game design and art concept. Keeping it simple. A side-scroller was the best option for it. Reducing the scope and game controls, and still having something which is fun to play. Something along the lines of the T-Rex game for Google Chrome.
For the art concept, I wanted something more technical and symbolic. Something that resembled my favourite games from old 8-bit and 16-bit consoles. I played a lot of Game Boy Color in my childhood (Pokemon Red/Blue games) and I admire how fascinating the pixel art concept and game play was built with such hardware limitation and only 375KB available. Super Mario Bros. games on Nintendo 8-bit and Super Nintendo were hugely engaging, creative on its game-play, and made them popular until today. How Mario’s moustache is such a Pixel Art amazing trick to separate the character’s nose and face. And for its final touch, I wanted to have something from Mega Drive’s SEGA Sonic games.
Those were the main inspirations for the game. With lots of other ideas and incredible pixel art design from Mugga, we’ve created the scenario, enemies, characters and designed the game play. There is a second part of this post, with the animations tricks for parallax background and pixel art, the decisions made on the game design and all the technology behind it (using React and css animations in combination with html canvas).
Art
A game-storyteller
You could tell a snippet of your life story in a blog, in your Instagram, in your YouTube channel, or maybe in a book. You can make a movie or hire biographers to document it. I decided to tell this snippet in a game, because none of the other options would get the people we want to hear it so involved and to literally play a part in this little piece of our life.
Do you want to tell your own story in a Pixel Art game? Get in touch
Play the game: https://savethedate.deboraejoao.com/
