TRAAAAAINS

So, I've noticed a trend during my PhD, where, when I start getting existential dread around my work, I go make pixel art. Which, like, is not the worst thing I could do! Sometimes I rework existing pixel art I've made (like my kitchen pixel art) and other times I make something new! Recently I've been focusing on Gameboy pixel art, because the severely limited size and color palette makes it a very engaging challenge, and this time... I made traaaaaaaaaains!!!!

Mostly cause I found I had an unfinished pixel art file in my folder, descriptively titled "train" which when I opened it had this as the only content:

So, I took that as a start and went kinda ham making pixel assets. The windows are sized so you could stick a character sprite face in em, peering into the outside.

Once the trains were made, I started trying to make train stations which immediately got me stuck trying to figure out how to make escalators escalate... And I did it!

The gif of them escalating is actually even cooler, because that is them escalating inside of an actual Gameboy game.

I make Gameboy games using GB Studio, which is a fantastic tool for making them, but obviously is gonna have some limitations. One of which is the fact that scene backgrounds are static, aka if you want to have something animating in a scene, you have to make an "actor" or "npc" in the world, which introduces a lot of extra data demands and you can only have so many actors with so many unique sprite tiles. All of this is jargon which summarizes to: you can't have your scene animate like this by default.

But! There are a couple different guides on how to program in the ability to animate your background by specifically swapping tiles in the background with tiles from another scene. I had previously made a plugin to help me do this to make an updating calendar in a lil Gameboy game I've been slowly working on, Something Sweet.

So I added that here, but the escalators have four frames of movement for nine distinct tiles. So I made a custom plugin to simplify the process for anyone wanting to use the escalator, and added the GB Studio project that I used to test this functionality as an example with all of the sprites!

Then I got to work building interior maps for the trains... And continued maybe going overboard. I made art for the interiors of both the bullet train, and commuter train. The bullet train is arguably simpler

It has the forward facing seats you would expect, and I did add a scene in the example game playing with animating the windows, so it looks like the train is actually moving. (It's just the window reflection scrolling, because I made all the parts to make a window of any length.)

Then I... went bananas and made a couple variant bits for the commuter train, though most of the parts are displayed in this scene.

You have some hand rails, the seats against the walls, windows, and, the most fun and painful part: ~banner ads~

Banner ads are pretty common along the top of trains, and can be static, or include animation. I actually looked up real subway train car ads to use as inspiration and guidance for designing the ads here, and I made color inverted versions of the ads, so, much like with the escalator, you can animate them!

With that I worked through a lot of my ability to fixate on something else, so I'm finally getting back to actual work, but I do wanna make a couple more odds and ends. Notably, I wanna add:

• An open-air/above ground train platform
• Animation of the train entering/leaving the station platform
• Animation of the doors opening/closing (I have both open and closed doors sprites, but the animation setup will require some tweaking) DONE
• A train line map for the station/train interiors so folk can check their stops/transfers!
• Some animated scenes of trains driving through different locations, such as an open field, a city (using my city tileset), and maybe over a river or something (a good way to expand my outdoor tileset)
• Some silly armored trains that a friend told me about
• Maybe some more posters (coming up with them was actually one of the harder things in this set)

We'll see what I actually end up adding/doing, but for the moment! Enjoy the trains and example game!