Solar Boy Learns What Fear Is a short 8 bit style game made with bitsy about a young little adventurer trying to save the galaxy. I initially had the idea weeks ago when we had first used the botnik predictive word generator during an exercise. I had found the results of the title to be hilarious and I had even begun a little preliminary sketch of Solar Boy after the class before forgetting about it. The concept came back for the final while I was looking through my sketches and I thought it would be a fun Idea to pursue. I already had the name and a draft of the cover art so I decided to go through with the project.
To begin my process, I did some crowdsourcing trying to see what people were afraid of. Since the word fear is in the title I decided to see what people truly fear and see how it would manifest into my game. Of course I got some of the more common answers such as the dark, which influenced my color palette and demons/other worldly creatures which influenced the monster but I had wanted to go in deeper. I ended up finding answers such as the unknown, death, failure to do what you feel you were meant to. I found the concepts pretty interesting and something I wanted to look into further. I really wanted to lean into the quiet aspects of horror, which came across in the points of silence and the ending.
For the programs used, I had used CharNG on the first guy in the planet room. I wanted to give the illusion of someone so hurt and scared they couldn’t get their thoughts together so I went on otter.ai and jsut started speaking a bunch of random phrases that came to my mind, the one I ended up using was “The corpses will drink the blood of their companions, the darkness is coming to envelop us all. I'm Scared, what will they do without me? He is near”. A bit morbid and scary but that was the aesthetic I was going for. In that dialogue box I also used the anagram generator, mixing up the words “Death to the Galaxy” as a little hint or a spooky sounding phrase alluding to the story. I used N+7 in the first red room in the game. For the text, I was listening to the song Achilles Come Down by Gang of Youths, specifically the parts in french. I translated the french into english and pasted it into the N+7 generator to get a strange, nonsensical, almost grim message. For the Oblique strategies cards, one I pulled was “Twist the spine”. This one I took rather literally, especially in that first red room. I was stuck on what I wanted to place there and was running out of ideas, so thinking about a spine twisting influenced that spiral shaped room. Another card pulled was “Do the words need changing?” which helped me relook at the dialogue. A lot of the beginning dialogue was more placeholder than anything else, so thinking about the dialogue helped me to really develop those ideas. Another card I pulled was “Is the intonation correct?”. I think at first I was really struggling with getting the tone to feel just right, but eventually thinking about it a bit more and planning things out helped me to push through it. The next card had read “Be less critical more often” which was probably my biggest issue. I am very self critical and always try to be a perfectionist in my work, and while I feel it helps me sometimes, I also feel it will get me to a point of frustration where I can barely get my thoughts out efficiently, which leads me to my last card “Take a break”. Sometimes it's best to take a step away from my project, do something else to clear my head, so when I return I can think more clearly about everything I had done up till that point. Taking breaks is what helped me to work most efficiently on this project.