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Indie Game Spotlight: Tales From Toppletown

This week’s Indie Game Spotlight comes bearing the gift of Game Boy nostalgia. Tales from Toppletown is a short quest-based RPG that allows you to play as a reclusive critter—your choice of a mouse or cat. You start out going into town to run some errands and, like the beginning of so many games, everything is just fine. Along the way you learn of a dangerous giant lurking in the mountains. Yikes.

We had the opportunity to chat with the game developer and illustrator behind Tales from Toppleton, Kayla D. (@leirin), and ask them what inspired the game and how they keep from burning out as they finish it for release.

What inspired the story behind the game?

Having no prior experience with creating games, I didn’t want to create a novel-length story for my first project. I knew I wanted to make something a little like the Hamtaro games, especially Ham-Hams Unite for the Game Boy Color where you were basically just interacting with a small area of characters and everyone’s needs would sort of overlap. It’s a similar motif to some other RPG-Maker games like Very Pink Game and Melon Journey, which I have enjoyed.

Developing video games can be tiring, how do you keep yourself from burning out? 

Taking breaks to work on other projects so you don’t burn out all your creativity in one place is helpful. As an illustrator I always have new pictures in mind [that] I want to create, along with my webcomic Sugar Stars (@sugarstarsofficial), and other projects still in the pipeline…

How did you choose the style for the game?

The visuals are sort of a Game Boy pastiche with a very specific, slightly muted color palette—there’s a lot of white so it has this kind of cold, wintry look, but dotted with lots of flowers and colorful characters so as not to be gloomy. Admittedly I hadn’t done much pixel art since grade school (back when we all made sprite comics) so it was difficult at first to adjust. I think making sure all of the graphics are satisfying has taken up the most time of the whole process.

Would you rather be able to breathe underwater, or have the agility of a cat?

As sweet as breathing underwater sounds, having a cat’s agility would come in handy far more in day-to-day life. For instance, when you’re with someone you don’t actually like and they’re about to ask if you’ll be free on Tuesday to hang out, you can leap onto a rooftop before they finish the question.

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Wanna stay in the know with updates to Tales from Toppletown? Follow @leirin on Tumblr!