Rorasuketo Dev Blog

Similar to the resolution change to portraits, the battle sprites have been changed to maintain consistency with the map sprites as well. I'm still using a 56-color NES palette here. Fifty-six sounds like a lot, but it's remarkably small. (Twelve are shades of blue! Yowza!) Meet Gabby the speed skater, with whom you face off at the roller rink. I was hopping around the RPG Maker subreddit the other day and looking at others' work. One post in particular caught my eye. The main character's sprite went from roughly 100 pixels tall to 300 pixels tall. It was a staggering difference, and I applaud the maker for their hard work, but I couldn't help but think, "Doesn't that mean all of your art will now take at least three times as long?" Maybe this maker will be fine, but I'm not sure I would be in that situation! I basically took a string quartet and added an oboe and bassoon. What I didn't do was morph a piece for string quartet into a wind ensemb...

Worldbuilding has always been an exciting process, but I never thought that building a modern setting would be fun. Fictional branding honestly makes me giddy. I'm so clever. Nyuk nyuk nyuk.

  There's more to derby than skating around in circles. Blocking brings a lot of technical elements together. You have to be squat enough to maintain a low center of gravity, you have to have your waist and back angled properly, you have to have your feet turned inward in enough of a "plow," you have to keep your arms under control as to not draw a penalty, you have to be able to maintain as much contact as possible to feel where your opponent is, and so on. Then there are different roles. You might face forward (majority of our players here), or you might face backwards and operate as a "brace," helping your front-facing teammates slow down by placing your palms on their chest or shoulders and using your toestops as a brake (pink shorts). When I played, I was guilty of facing backward much of the time, trying to take on an opponent all by myself (green socks). My coach also called this going "fembot" or "matador." The "action" spri...

 Again, you can find Mike's score in a couple different places: rorasuketo.win , Bandcamp , and Apple Music . I know you primarily as a music guy, but you are also quite the coder and have made your own games. What’s something a game designer might want that would make a coder’s life miserable? Give me some advice.  MC: While I've made some toy programs in Pico-8, a fantasy virtual console for making lo-fi games that look and play like they came from the mid-80s, the most expansive game I've ever made is probably Gem Warrior, an even more lo-fi text adventure written in Ruby many years ago. The hardest part of making that game once the basic framework of player-input->screen-output is done is like any other artistic endeavor: content . Adding items, adding world, adding characters, adding dialogue, etc. is the real meat of almost any game sandwich. Coming up with a novel mechanic or gimmick is quite hard at this point in game development, so the specific wor...

Who doesn't love the experience of having an in-game critter with whom you can interact? Of course I had to give the player some options. At the end of the day, you have to make the kind of art that you yourself would like.

Rorasuketo is ultimately meant to be a story about healing and growth, but for that to mean anything in a narrative sense, you need to establish grief and loss. I decided some time ago that I needed to add an age disclaimer and content warning at the game start. Eek! While I've struggled with character representation on a few fronts, the themes of mental illness and emotional dysregulation are something I can point to and say, "This is from lived experience, and I stand by it." I've put in my fair share of time in both inpatient and outpatient settings, so the themes surrounding mental illness are rooted in some degree of realism - without going for shock value or melodrama. At least, that's the goal.   It's worth explaining that mental health crises are not sexy. They happen, sometimes, in a way that is strangely mundane. After a little while, the bolted-down furniture, absence of ball point pens, and timed shower knobs lose their novelty. And for the staff,...

The Barnes City Brawlers is a team of seven skaters - eight, including you! - and a coach. It's tiny for a roller derby team, but a decent juggle for the cast of a game. Wedge. Team captain and Pivot. Started the league back in the day. Puss 'n' Hoots. Blocker who is all too happy to get down at the afterparty. Killary Swank. Rookie of the team. Blocker and fashionista. Ermagerd. Blocker, team cheerleader, and lover of all things sports. Willie Smack. The star Jammer. A bit rough around the edges. Goron Roll. Resident geek and Blocker extraordinaire. Wrecktus Femoris. Gym rat and Pivot. Formidable on the track! Glitz & Clamor. Coach and co-founder of the league.

I first played Earthbound as an adult. I was going through a rough period with my family, to put it mildly. I remember picking up the little black phone to call Ness' mom and nearly crying when she told me I was a hero and I would go far. I decided that if I made a video game, I would put in some surrogate friends and/or family because it was so healing. Sort of like the "empty chair" exercise in certain therapies. I've also (half-ashamedly) played a dating sim that will remain nameless, as well as Harvest Moon , and of course Final Fantasy VII , all of which had affection point accumulations. These are Rorasuketo influences. Some people are living in a lonely place, as I have, and games can help spark a little bit of much-needed oxytocin. Currently, I'm plopping in gift-giving mechanics and a couple of "dates." I could be working on the battle mechanics, but this is just such a rewarding process that I can't seem to stop myself. It's a pretty ce...

I played roller derby from about 2015 to 2019. It was pretty well understood that roller derby was predominantly white and North America-centric. (I'm white and from the United States, myself.) While exceptions exist, of course, it was something of an elephant in the room. There also were/are those in the community working to expand accessibility to roller derby, but I'm just speaking to how things panned out around that time in my scope of vision. So when it came time to design teammates for a roller derby team, I knew I wanted it to be more diverse than what I'd seen in my own region. It's my made-up world, after all, so I can make it whatever I want. Furthermore, when you're looking at seven different characters wearing uniforms, a little variety in skin tone, for starters, makes them easier to tell apart. Progressive or practical? ¿ Por qu é no los dos? The teammates started out with their own little tropes, simply enough. The gym rat, the party girl, the geek....

You can check out some game info and the entire Rorasuketo soundtrack by Michael Chadwick here . It's absolutely divine. When I said I wanted to pay homage to the Super Nintendo games of my youth, he went to town and grabbed some soundfonts from games like Final Fantasy IV, Earthbound, and Battletoads . I am so happy with the results. The battle tracks are head-bangers, and the emotional lows are perfectly bittersweet. I wouldn't change a thing. I've known Mike since the boom days of of LiveJournal  — which is a long time, for the kids following along at home. He's an immensely skilled guitarist and songwriter, and has a really impressive catalog of work . Originally, I was going to write the music myself, but Mike has far more experience. And in creative projects like this, doing everything yourself has the potential to turn out an inbred, constipated piece of art. Collaboration adds depth to the work that you might not have realized before. It lightens the workload....

Put me in front of a big canvas with infinite colors, and it's absolutely paralytic with possibilities. But with pixel art, sometimes the difference between a guitar and not a guitar is the placement of one or two little dots. A lot of things are just, well, clearer. The limitations can be a lifesaver. When I first began to make portraits for Rorasuketo , I searched for a classic NES color palette and went to work in 48 x 48 pixel squares. A pretty modest size. However, I recently decided to bump those up to create more unity between the resolution of the on-screen elements. So 48 pixels would become 72, or a 150% increase. In case you didn't know, that's super awkward to scale. But I have maybe half the character portraits done by this time. It's coming along. New on the left. Old on the right. With some additional attention, of course. (What was I doing with that hair before?) Anyway, I'm enjoying the increased detail, and I hope others do, too.