Harold: Paranormal Instigator is a short, non-linear minigame made for Halloween 2022 as part of Devtober. The restricted development time but more open scope than a typical game jam made this an ideal way to test a few things I'd been meaning to work on for some time in a low-stakes setting, in particular building something more exploration focussed and open-ended than I'd previously been used to. 

From an artistic standpoint, I'd been looking for an interesting way to handle different resolutions in a visually appealing way within a pixel art style - my games typically rely on a fixed aspect resolution in order to play as intended, but I'd been looking for an alternative to black bars at the edge of the screen for a while. Inspired by the Super Game Boy, I began playing with tiled backgrounds displayed behind a centrally placed display. I'm pretty pleased with the overall look, and importantly I've learned a lot about what to avoid in future to prevent headaches!

Time management, as always, proved to be something of an issue, especially as the month ended up much busier than I'd anticipated with my day job. While the game is in a complete and playable state, there's definitely a few areas I felt could have used a little touching up, particularly with regards to sound effects and the boss, who would have benefitted from a few more animations and possibly a unique music track. Given the extension of the deadline I might return to this over the coming days to make a few improvements 

A final key area that's becoming increasingly obvious with each project is that I'm not spending enough time on playtesting, and that I need to start the process sooner. A few game breaking bugs popped up in the last couple of hours, which would have been visible much sooner had I had a few more players other than myself to give feedback.