In 2023, I took a couple of days to record a short album called The Outpost, inspired by video game music and dungeon synth.
I used only a TX81-Z (old FM synthesizer) and two effect pedals. All the music was played live via a midi keyboard and layered over as many tracks as needed.
A few months later, a Russian developer known as Ne1gh told me he was developing a game entirely based on this album.
It took a bit more than a year to complete the game, which runs on a custom engine.
I helped a little, created a few additional tracks, sound effects, sprites, and wrote a French translation.
Now, the game (for Windows) is available. You should play it.
Hello, Ne1gh's here, I will tell you a bit more about the game.
The Outpost is my first released game. To say it was the most educational experience in my life is to say nothing. It was paradise and hell rolled into one. But I finished it.
The game was planned as a 15 minute adventure created at a game jam. It was RPG Mania VIII and it was one and half months long.
The deadline was easily failed. Well, I tried my best at least.
I planned The Outpost as a 1-bit game, because I thought it will be easy to handle graphics and also music album cover was black and white. In fact, this cover is a scan of scratch paper art made by Yann!
1-bit wasn't the best decision. At all. Especially for me, who was (or is) a bad pixel artist. The main problem in black and white art was in the contrast. The player sprite was simply lost in the environment and it looked terrible.
Then, through tears (I don't remember why it was so hard to make this decision, maybe because 1-bit art was initial idea), I decided to switch to 2-bit graphics (which allowed me to use 4 colors). This change lifted a huge weight off my shoulders.
A tiny detail you may not noticed is... the game doesn't make you want to tear out your own eyes.
This is because of pallete shader that I wrote. You can press F2 to enter debug mode and see how original graphics look like (prepare for something).
One of the most interesting parts of development was puzzle design. This is really what makes you think like the player. Makes you build paths for the player to think through, and this kind of thinking one of the core game design skills.
