Yes, Jetboard Joust can now be wishlisted on Steam here. Your support is much appreciated, even if you don’t end up buying it each wishlist helps - as does tagging!

I’m getting rather behind on this devlog again and wanted to write something about the process of getting the Steam page up. Even if it’s not strictly ‘development’ per se, it’s an important part of the process and took me some time.

I started off by reading this excellent Reddit post on how to create a kick-ass Steam page. Lots of useful info there and I kept referring back to this throughout the process. I also spent quite some time looking at the pages of other games, especially those that are also in the same general genre (fast-paced pixelart SHMUP) such as Nuclear Throne and Enter The Gungeon.

The bulk of the work, of course, is creating image assets. I decided to do this using the in-game art rather than trying to illustrate the game in some other fashion. This was a decision largely borne out of necessity (it would have taken me ages to produce quality vector illustrations), but I also felt a pixel art approach would more accurately convey the spirit of the game. If I couldn’t get it to work with pixel art I’d try another method, maybe even commission someone else.

I started off working on rough layouts using art cut-and-pasted from the trailer just to see if what I wanted to do was going to be achievable. I knew I’d need to use at least one of the boss sprites as they were the only ones likely to have the necessary impact without being blown up a ridiculous amount. I settled on the ‘stinger’ boss as it seemed to work well within the proportions of the various steam ‘capsules’, the other bosses actually proved to be too large and complex.

When I had a layout I was happy with I built a much cleaner final version using art taken from the original sprite sheets.

A huge part of the game’s personality though is the particle and shader effects and without these my capsule images were looking rather static and boring. As these are all semi-transparent in-game and overlap other elements it was impossible to cut-and-paste them from gameplay footage and would have been extremely laborious to recreate them ‘manually’ in Photoshop. Consequently I was a bit stuck as to how to convey these in a static context.

After much head-scratching I came up with the idea of doing a pure black-and white palette for the game. I could then make only the particle and shader fx visible, capture these as gameplay footage, import them in to Photoshop as an alpha channel, position where I saw fit and apply colors and blending. This method, with a bit of post-editing, worked really well and, I think, enabled me to communicate the feel of the game pretty well in a static context without a lot of laborious Photoshop work. It was also extremely useful when it came to mocking up / embellishing screenshots.



For the screenshots I also used a ‘green-screening’ technique whereby everything but key sprites are rendered in green making cut-and-paste from gameplay footage extremely easy.



Annoyingly the ‘angled’ logo I use in-game just didn’t work within the proportions of the Steam Capsule images, particularly the smaller ones, and its proportions meant it was either too big or too small when blown up in the exact multiples necessary to maintain the pixel integrity. Consequently I had to recreate a purely horizontal version of the logo which I did in illustrator and pasted into Photoshop as vectors. I think a ‘pure’ pixelart version would possibly have looked better but I’m not sure it would have justified the amount of time needed to do it, particularly given the differing size requirements.



Then there was also the text to write, a myriad of forms to fill in, emails to write to try and generate some publicity, tags to add and a press page to create. I was pretty much losing the will to live by the end of it (not the first time I’ve said that on this project) but it’s done now. Check out the final result here.

Dev Time: 6 days (including other marketing)
Total Dev Time: approx 306 days