GB Pixel Art Jam 2023 Submission

My submission for the inaugural GB Pixel Art Jam 2023.

Theme: An Awesome Discovery

My awesome discovery is GB Studio itself!

I try and work on a project of mine every single day and have kept that up religiously for nearly three years now. I have no idea how much time I have poured into GB development over that time, but it's a LOT! There is no question that GBS and the community that cultivates it have enriched my life in a creative sense beyond measure. I've made new friends and shared my journey with hundreds of people, either through releasing my own games or writing articles for GBSC. I feel very lucky to be part of such an awesome and passionate community and luckier still to have stumbled upon a piece of software that is not only fun to learn and use but also happens to be free and open source!

So, with all that said and in the spirit of the jams theme, my submission is a depiction of my GB dev journey that first began in 2021. Within are references to my games (some not announced yet), and presented through a graphical repetition that parallels  my groundhog day like commitment to the development process. The repeating body in the image is a kind of self portrait and although I'm of average weight and not literally obese, I do think the degree to which I get obsessed with working on my games and development itself can be unhealthy sometimes. I decapitated the head from my body because Gumpy Function the developer doesn't really have a face to go along with the brand. The homebrew scene is online to a large degree and so people don't really know what I look like for the most part. Instead they see my games and the Gumpy Function logo that precedes the gameplay. For this reason, I placed characters or representations of characters from my games on poles so that they act as my head to greet the players. Counter to this, I feel like some ideas I have come out of nowhere or are some weird surprise from my subconscious. So some of the characters are not  intentionally propped up on poles, but are jumping out of my body like a mutated martian from Paul Verhoevens Total Recall. These more strange ideas I like to encourage and see where they lead as its usually surprising to me, so I act upon them quickly as if I'm exorcising them from my mind. All in all, its a great experience and I wouldn't have it any other way!

Thanks for playing and rating my games and a special thank you to anyone who has donated their hard earned cash to support my journey!

If you haven't checked out my games, here they are. Enjoy!

- Tom (Gumpy Function)