Giraffe Fight is a indie game I developed and illustrated from scratch.
Project Type
Programs
Keywords
Branding
Game Design
Illustration
Developer
Visual Studio
Illustrator
Photoshop
Playdate SDK
Coding
Drawing
Animating
Branding
A Playdate with LUA.
As my illustrations began to take shape, I knew it was time to start coding. I reached out to a close friend, John Galbreath, to help design the home screen while I moved the project into development. The Playdate developer kit, though extensive, came with a steep learning curve—the code reads from bottom to top and functions more like an engineering language than the Java, HTML, and CSS I was used to. To make it work, I built a custom game engine from scratch through YouTube tutorials and late-night Discord conversations with a developer in Japan known as Squid Developer. His community, combined with my determination to bring this game to life, pushed this two-year project into existence and gave me all the motivation I needed to make it work.
Here’s the full concept: two giraffes fighting, using the crank to swing their necks until one’s health runs out. Sounds simple? It wasn’t. But I’d do it all over again in a heartbeat.
Bring the fight to the Playdate.
Creating a game from scratch for the very first time.
The Playdate is a small yellow console with a crank, created by Panic and Teenage Engineering. Its non-backlit display and minimalist design immediately drew me in—and that crank had my mind spinning with ideas. The first thing I thought of was how giraffes swing their necks in a fight for food. Mix that with the side-by-side fighter style of my childhood favorite, Street Fighter, and you have the foundation of my game concept.
Although the idea came together quickly, I needed to fully develop the visuals, illustrations, and animations—not to mention the code. I jumped right in, illustrating for the console’s small screen and learning everything about dither effects and pixel precision to make sure every detail matched perfectly.
