Initial Ideas

My initial idea for this game was to use a different tileset that had a bat enemy. I was thinking about making the player a bat that was injured and was trying to find it's way home. However, I'm not the best at pixel art, and the tileset was lacking in animations I needed for the bat...I eventually scrapped that project and went with what I have now.

The first thing (after finding the tileset) I did was write out everything I wanted for the story. It eventually kept developing into more ideas, but I had a good outline with spots filled in. After that, I drew a level out on paper, wrote down some code structure and got to work. I had some issues with my tools not working (the newest Jetbrains Rider update isn't great...), but eventually I got everything set up and ready to go (it only took 4 hours!).

Starting in the editor, I made the player character first, initialized some code structure, and drew out the first level on Tilemap nodes. Overall, it's looking pretty good so far. I added a couple of enemies and also added some ambiance / lighting.