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.

Initially I had some issues coming up with game ideas. I wanted to start really small, preferrably something that could be achieved in a day or two just to get familiar with my choice of game engine.

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, crushing majority of which was spent learning how Godot works.

I won’t go into technical details here, as the game so simple that I don’t think documenting it would be helpful to anyone, but I will say that Godot felt very intuitive to pick up.

For the graphics I used Aseprite, a really cool pixel art creation tool I have previous experience with.

The game

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

Finnish is the only supported language at the moment.

Conclusions

Even though the game is extremely simple, I’m somewhat proud of it.

It 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.

Encouraged by this experience, I hope to start developing my second game in the near future.