so about that launch date...

Hornets for the Game Boy. A demake of an excellent piece of interactive horror fiction by renowned indie dev Kitty Horrorshow.

A game citing 2024 as its creation date right there on the opening screen, finally published two whole months into the following year. What happened there, then?

POV: me, May-June 2024. I had taken a break from that long-term NSFW project to work on satirical animated narrative 2124, a very different project with a very different set of mechanics, and as such exactly the break I needed.

That task complete, I found I wasn't quite ready to get back to the main project. I was also revisiting a lot of KH's work - including Hornets, obviously - and in accordance with a creative drive to "demake all the things!", an idea started brewing. I pulled up an earlier template for a Game Boy compatible serif font and started putting screen-sized bodies of text together; backgrounds for a new GB Studio project.

Within a few days this thing was almost ready to go, just requiring a thorough playtest plus a finished music track. I was tempted to just publish it once completed, but decided to try to reach out to Kitty Horrorshow for permission first. Granted.

One comprehensive playthough later, all that was left was the music...

The original audio sounds like layers of distorted winds punctuated by crunchy, almost percussive elements, and listening closer there are chords quietly, subtly fading in and out. I could use the Noise track for the wind, but I wasn't sure how I'd go about alluding to the crunchy elements in a chiptune. I figured I'd come back to that (😑) and decided to focus on those chords first.

I'd say the work-in-progress version of the chiptune sounds good, but creates a very different atmosphere compared to the original track, the original conveying a sense of foreboding whereas the chiptune, in bringing the chords more front and centre feels more immediately sombre. That and I hadn't finished adapting even half of the original track at the time.

With this being the case, I reached out again to announce a short delay while I overhauled the track.

The delay would not in fact be short, and I did not in fact overhaul the track 😑

POV: me, recently. Having some PC trouble, so migrated all the old projects to a new device, taking the opportunity to revisit a bunch of them as I go. As well as rediscovering I'd made a really good kick drum sound on the Noise track of a Game Boy cover of an At the Gates song (don't get excited yet, the rest of that one has a ways to go...!), I revisited the Hornets demake with fresh ears, concluding that it's worth sharing as is, with a view to working on a revised edition further down the line.

Other elements I'm thinking of adjusting:

• I've been trying to add sub-titles with the initials G.B. to any Game Boy adaptations I make, so the title itself alludes to being a Game Boy port ("Gruesome Beginnings" being a particular favourite so far), but I'm not sure how I'm feeling about "glowing, buzzing". I guess it's descriptive: the fires glow, the hornets buzz. But still...
• The serif font looks pretty good, but takes up quite a lot of space compared to some of the other fonts I've come up with, which leads to a lot of single pages of text being spread across multiple screens, in turn interfering with game flow, at least for me.

Anyway, here it is. A build I'd been sitting on for a good eight months or so. Wholehearted apologies to Kitty Horrorshow for the delay (not to mention the rambly DMs... 😑).