Week 3: Pixel Pass & Trail Ideas

This week I focused on improving the visual look of my sample desert scene and started thinking more deeply about how to guide players along the trail.

🎨 Learning Pixel Art

I don't have much experience with pixel art, so I spent some time watching YouTube tutorials to understand the basics. From there, I drew out some path directions on a separate layer in Aseprite to figure out which trail tile directions I needed to create.

I then made a cactus, a rock, and some background desert tiles, and used those to fill out the scene. Although it’s an improvement over the simple block tiles I started with, it’s still far from decent-looking graphics. I’ve got a long way to go with pixel art and expect I’ll redo the graphics many times as my skills improve.

🎮 Trail Design Challenge

One issue that came up is how to encourage the player to follow the trail instead of just walking straight up. I considered ideas like making the player move faster on the trail, adding Pac-Man–like pickups for bonus stamina, or other small rewards.

But the idea I’ve settled on for now is to track the distance walked while on trail tiles. This distance can be shown on screen and used to award bonuses at the end of each trail section.

⚙️ Trail Tracking in GB Studio

Digging into how to implement that brought up some limitations. GB Studio doesn’t make it easy—collisions won’t work because they stop the player, and while triggers might be usable, they’re limited to 30 per scene and only update on entry/exit, not every frame.

So I started looking into GBVM (Game Boy Virtual Machine), the low-level scripting system behind GB Studio. It looks like it might be possible to fetch the current background tile index that the player is standing on and use that to determine if they’re on a trail tile.

That’s what I’ll be exploring next week.

Thanks for reading, and see you in the next update!
— Derek