Melon Head; a fantastical adventure in a delirious imaginary world RELEASED!

[Miggo]

I've been making a wacky surreal adventure game by the name of:



This game has been in development for over a year and it'll be released in a little more than a week! I wish I had found Exilian earlier to announce it here but I guess better late than never.

Here's the game on ITCH
Here's a link to the AGS forum where I've been devlogging too.

Story:

In the hedonistic capital of His Majesty's Realm a faceless king commissions a local sculptor, Melon Head, our protagonist whose head is shaped like a melon, to craft an extension to His royal staff.

An extraordinary vision reveals an object of rare composition: A Crystal Iris Distillate. Pursuing the parts needed to craft the object essential in fulfilling the royal request, Melon Head precipitates to a strange adventure across His Majesty's Realm. He must use cunning, questionable morals and sharpness of intellect to succeed in his task and, ultimately, to choose between allegiance to his perceived benefactor and the rising forces of dissidence seeking to overthrow the balance of power.

Current status of the developement is:

Coming out October 1st 2024!

PHOTOSENSITIVITY WARNING:

This game contains flashing lights that may not be suitable for people with photosensitive epilepsy.

Player discretion is advised.

Features:

-Strange characters of undefined species.
-Puzzles to intrigue the mind (item puzzles, dialog trees and other stuff).
-A built in hint system if you get stuck.
-Exploration of different areas of His Majesty's Realm.
-Three endings depending on choices.
-Colorful and highly saturated pixel art on a 16-color palette (an original art style using the EGA palette).
-Psychedelic visions.
-An out there jazzy original soundtrack.



Here's a picture of Melon Head himself:

[Jubal]

This looks delightfully weird and I'm very here for it Looking forward to being able yo give it a go!

[Miggo]

Thanks Jubal!

The demo version is indeed available to play right now, so if you should feel the urge to delve into a strange world a bit, be my guest 

[Jubal]

I played the demo! It is indeed bizarre The wall-mounted food unit really sets the tone at the start...

The only bit I had issues with:

Spoiler

The breaker box. I assumed that the numbers were of connections, so I set it up such that e.g. there were two connections from Z-marked elements and then got very confused why it didn't work for a while. I got there eventually though.

[Miggo]

Awesome! First of all, thanks for playing!

Interesting to hear how you thought about the breaker box. There's quite a chance to be mislead there.

The easiest way to solve the puzzle,

Spoiler

I think, is to focus on the pipes first and only then on the symbols, after all, you may get the upper middle one wrong even if all the pipes are connected. Then you would need to refer to the symbols.

[Jubal]

Yeah, once I knew what I was being asked for I didn't take too long to mess around with it and get a solution

[Rob_Haines]

The EGA art style really gives me early 90s PC flashbacks; really evocative!

[Miggo]

The EGA art style really gives me early 90s PC flashbacks; really evocative!

Awesome, thanks!

I found the color codes for the EGA palette in wikipedia and started to play around with them in pixel art studio. It was a small epiphany I got, like this is what gives games of that era their look.   

[Jubal]

Yeah, I've not even played that many games from that era - I guess maybe the early Space Quest and King's Quest games used that palette and I've played those - but even from that I find it a very evocative palette.

When I made my Doctor Who adventure game a few years back I made a lot of the graphics by making a photo collage, crunching it down to pixelly sizes, then applying an index/palette to the result (and maybe doing some post-pixelling for details), which is not a good way to make pixel art but it worked better than I felt it deserved to!

[Miggo]

Yeah, I've not even played that many games from that era - I guess maybe the early Space Quest and King's Quest games used that palette and I've played those - but even from that I find it a very evocative palette.

Space Quest and King's Quest use that palette for sure, and a lot of point and click games from the late eighties and early nineties. I haven't played them much either, really. I've seen some new text parser games resurrecting the palette lately. On top of that the palette just has a high saturation and brightness we don't see that much in pixel art these days.

When I made my Doctor Who adventure game a few years back I made a lot of the graphics by making a photo collage, crunching it down to pixelly sizes, then applying an index/palette to the result (and maybe doing some post-pixelling for details), which is not a good way to make pixel art but it worked better than I felt it deserved to!

I think that sounds like a pretty inventive process!  Is the game somewhere available?

[Jubal]

I think that sounds like a pretty inventive process!  Is the game somewhere available?

Yis! It's available on itch, and there's a discussion forum here for it. I don't think anyone's ever played it much, but I'd be interested in feedback if you do give it a go! The basic pitch is that you're an anti-Dalek resistance member and you can hop around different planets, there's a few different ways to solve the endgame depending on which bits of the game you choose to go for more

[Miggo]

Aha! now I see what you've done with the art. I'll be sure to give it a go!

[Rob_Haines]

My childhood was a bunch of EGA games, such as LOOM (which they absolutely butchered when they did a VGA conversion, just sapped all the nuance out of it):

[Miggo]

Oh! Loom's EGA version is very beautiful!

It's too bad only the VGA version is available on steam and gog. This seems to be the case for many classic adventure games.

[Miggo]

The release is close at hand so I got all nostalgic. Melon Head actually started off as isometric! I took a little gameplay vid of the prototype:

I thought it would take ages to craft detailed graphics for an environment like that so I switched the art style, but it looks pretty cool (it's got some more of those EGA-graphics).  :-D