Sakari's Wool Cardigan Game

As a child, I wanted to make video games when I grow up. In the present, I’m an adult with a suprisingly appropriate set of skills to fulfill my childhood dream of becoming a game developer. I wanted to start really small, preferrably something that could be achieved in a day or two, but was having trouble coming up with game ideas.

The solution to this issue fell out of the sky when one of my friends offhandedly mentioned Sakarin Villapaitapeli - a Finnish Flash game released around 2007 that ended up becoming a bit of a national meme.

You can play the original here if you are interested.

The plan

To set my version apart for the original, I decided to make it look like a GameBoy game:

• Resolution of 160x144 pixels, upscaled dynamically while maintaining aspect ratio.
• 4 colours; same as the GameBoy uses
• Pixel art graphics (not that they could be anything else at that resolution)
• Developed with Godot, a free open source game engine

Development process

It took me roughly 15 hours to complete the project, majority of which was spent learning how Godot works. I won’t go into technical details here, as the game so simple that documenting it wouldn’t be helpful to anyone.

For the graphics I used Aseprite, a really cool pixel art creation tool I already happened to own.

The game

The game can be played in browser at itch.io: https://turboblaster.itch.io/sakarin-villapaitapeli

In Conclusion

This was a short and fun project that lended itself perfectly to learning the very basics of Godot, and also broke a mental barrier I had where making games has to always be a herculean task that takes years to complete.

Maybe I should make something more complicated next time?