Aboo | DevLog 01

Somewhere at the beginning of 2020 I decided again — I need to make something. But to actually finish it, I had to pick the simplest idea possible. So I opened all my notes and sketches — about 60 ideas, all different. Some were just a short mood or mechanic, some had drawings, and a few even had rough prototypes.
I picked one idea — a game in black and white. It looked cool, and I thought it would be easy to draw. (Spoiler: it wasn’t.)

First sketch — this is where it all started...

The idea was super simple. The hero crashes on a strange planet and needs to find parts for his ship. So, you walk around, collect gears, go back to the ship — and fly away. THE END!

I started making a prototype, and it felt good...
Then I decided to make the character a bit more complex. Also added some gray color — for shadows and dust.

Working on character design — didn’t take too long :)

I didn’t want to complicate the animation, so I used a method I already knew — Flash tweens. I exported drawings from Illustrator to Flash and made a sprite sheet. Since I didn’t plan to have many animations, frame-by-frame was totally fine.

Animation process

First try in the engine

Then I started working on the environment. Of course, since the character got more complex, the ship also needed a redesign. And overall — it was time to add more interesting little details.

So this is the ship now

You can’t see it here, but the grass reacts to the character.

All this walking back and forth, and other basic stuff — I’ve done that many times before.
The hard part for me (since I’m not a programmer) was things like dialogue, saving, settings — all that more technical stuff.
So I decided to focus on it for a while... and got stuck. It was hard, but I did it (somehow).

Self-talk and some birds in the background.

After that, I loaded sketches of all the locations and connected them together (not without problems, of course). Then I decided to “play through” the game — from start to finish — with imagined events and dialogues... And that’s when I found another big problem: It was boring. Just walking through the world wasn’t fun. Even if the character talks to himself or someone else — it’s not enough.

Originally written in 2020 — just kept the spirit.
The original Russian version is here: Gamin.me — Как сделать маленькую игру