On the last day of July, I decided to make a proof-of-concept for the PPU rendering technique used in this game -- and didn't realize until afterward that there had been a GBA Jam going since May, and that it was already almost over! (So I didn't get much sleep on the first few weekends of August... #worth)

Once I had scrapped together enough to show that the project was actually viable, I asked the other Hell Labs folks if they were interested in contributing, and they were! And as it turns out, when you have other people joining your project, sharing your vision with them is important (and sometimes the "other people" are future-you, too).

I quickly sketched these first two images on a couple different afternoons at a cafe, trying to scope out what we'd actually be able to achieve based on what the tech demo could already do and the tight time frame we'd have to work on it. By that point I already had basic platformer movement and tree climbing, so the environment designs I came up with were largely just aesthetic variants on the same game pieces.

Aside from that, I also needed to put pencil to paper to work out some of the trigonometry and bit-twiddling and such without it all leaking out of my head, so the last four images are some of my notes.

(I've of course cleaned all these up and replaced my chickenscratch with Comic Sans before uploading)