In some sense, the 'dev' cycle of ART7 has been more about building community and Producing a Show rather than getting neck deep into programming. More about world-building and set dressing than engine dev or the like. Panic gave me an engine! They gave ALL of US an engine! I saw my job as to showcase what they have made with the Playdate console and the tools and community forming around it. 

So here, I'll go over some process and highlights of making this crazy thing including the terrifying feeling that I had broken Pulp and lost it all at one point.  

First off, this was a surprise to me too. IRL I do photography, balloon decor, dance, martial arts and general making of stuff. I was thinking of working up a gallery show of 3D Balloon photography at some point this year along with a couple of other concepts. But the Playdate. 

There are a series of concept arts in ART7, and those were where my mind went when first looking at dev for the console. If you've seen those, the following paragraph will make sense. If not, sorry, just bear with me. 

I studied Love2D. I had built a bit in LUA for the PICO-8. In particular, Forward and Breakthru seem like good fits for the system and are statements I want to make real - emotions made gameplay. So those are coming at some point. There were also the mechanics-heavy ideas like FPH and Chek and Nines LIVE! that I thought would be achievable, fun and appealing. I still think this. so those are on the docket as well. Long story short, my mind was elsewhere.

A few elements swirled around to lead me down this path. I got real into MOR in VR and downloaded Fortnite exclusively to visit the Kaws exhibit. I got real into the Gameboy Camera community's work and in particular that of Cat Graffam and the Gameboy Camera Gallery 2022. I Loved the concept of shooting Gameboy Camera and displaying IN a virtual gallery! I got real into seeing the weird and wonderful art and projects coming out of the indie Playdate dev community without hardware even in hand! I was waiting for the SDK to pull off what felt like more ambitious projects, but Pulp dropped before that and it was my first chance to dig into 1-bit development. And then everything came together - make a gallery to showcase Community works. 

So that was the plan but, how do you Produce a show when no one knows what the hell you're making? Securing works for ART7 was all about Outreach. I lived in the #art channel on the Playdate Squad discord and was always watching for interesting projects to pop up.  I DMed a lot of people with a short pitch on the gallery. I also lived on the Devforum where I had made longer posts about the technical aspect of the process. A few pieces came in unsolicited, but by and large, this has been about approaching people I've never met with passion for an idea. The response was largely Yes! but there were some No Times and a few Nopes. In the end, I think I was able to pull together an interesting show with a variety of works of which to be proud. But I needed a bit more than that.

ART7 needed to have a sense of place. It was important to me to build not a Gallery but an Environment. With Things to Do, even! Now that it's out, I'm happy to say that there are grounds to walk and things to see and do beyond viewing the art. Without going into spoilers, you can help clean up the place a little and if you do enough, you'll have seen a lot.

That has been the hardest part of making and promoting ART7. Showing the gallery without Spoiling the whole project. The Art IS the content! Crucial to any success and sales, I've had was to get a demo out Very early in the process. It was super bare bones but showcased a few pieces and gave the impression that there's more to the gallery than you might think. I got a little traffic from Destructoid and Eurogamer articles about the early downloadables on the Playdate and having a free demo on itch.io helped introduce a lot of folks to the concept. But I felt so bad about that first demo that I dropped another with a little more polish and much better music.

Oh shit, I broke it. There was one crucial process I had to put together to make this possible. Pulp is a very capable and accessible, tile-based engine. There is an 8x8 tile editor for art and animation and multiple versions of tiles available with the ability to import them if they are in the correct format. The Art in ART7 is entirely based on a process to import an entire piece of art into a single tile with hundreds of frames of animation. With the fps of the animation set to 0, you can write code that will set which frame of animation you want at any particular instance of the tile. So I made rooms full of picture frames and code, and when you enter a piece in ART7 it is constructed at that moment. 

Late in the dev cycle nearing release,  I was working on one particularly large piece that involved thousands of frames of animation. And it broke. I could no longer compile ART7 from the browser but could only export json files. This was.. problematic. We weren't aware of a limit to the number of tiles or frames in Pulp, but I had just found it. It took a full roll-back to a version several days prior (before I had begun implementing the large piece of art) to fix an issue with the counting of frames in the source. With that, I was back on track but had to approach the large piece in a much more complicated manner. It is in there though so.. Success! And ART7 was recoverable and releasable so double success!

What the future holds..

While this article is classed as a postmortem, ART7 is not dead! You'll find stairs to an upper floor in the North gallery. Those will be unlocked as a free update.. at some point. I'm interested in making another floor or more available for this release at a later date! I also keep talking about ART7 in terms of the first Show. The gallery as a framework can hold any artist's work as a 1-bit version. I could make an entire gallery based around one artist or a community of artists as I did with the Playdate indie dev community. I intend to show ART7 publicly as well. There are a lot of ways to go here! So stay tuned, follow on the socials and if you haven't already, come check out the Gallery!