text: I am interested in art and programming. I do both for work and as a hobby. I’m a mediocre programmer and my superpower is brute-forcing things until they work.
  The Year After was the first game I made with it. I was searching for something that could make JRPG-style games. My memory is foggy, I may have Googled for something like “Zelda game-maker” and found GB Studio. The slick interface and ease-of-use was a huge draw for me but the technical limitations of the Gameboy format turned me off at the time and I decided not to use it. As time passed I saw the limitations in a new light and embraced them.
  I’ve had the idea of someone walking through time rattling around in my brain for years. Originally, I planned to make a game with a literal time-travel story in which the player cannot prevent a tragedy from striking a family. The environmental storytelling was inspired by games like Outer Wilds or Edith Finch. Perhaps also a bit by Wes Anderson films and how they use personal objects to reflect the personality of the characters. The game Florence by Mountains studio inspired me to use game mechanics not to generate challenge/fun but to evoke emotion. So I tried to use some simple movement restrictions to evoke emotion near the end of the game.
  Your game has some unique features with the colour and sound implementation. Can you tell us briefly why you decided to include that and how you accomplished this?
  I played some low-res bitsy games that added realistic ambient sound. The mashup of low-res graphics with high-def sound did something wonderful. Low-res art allows the player to project a lot of personal emotion into the characters and environment, like how when reading a book your imagination fills in much of the missing detail. Yet the high def sounds make it feel grounded, like you are right there in the environment. It also can evoke very specific moods. It was a perfect pairing of old and new-school and I wanted to try for that myself.
  For the technical explanation how it was done: I dug around the internet to see if I could find a way to access Gameboy memory with Javascript in the web browser and experimented with code. I came pretty close to succeeding but missed one small piece of the puzzle. Ben Grabau, the person who made a multiplayer GB Studio demo game, helped me find that last piece. After I had that, I wrote up a system using Howler.js that allowed me to play and layer audio files. Javascript that repeatedly checks the Gameboy memory for changes is what triggers the sounds.
  As for color, I originally didn’t intend to have any at all in the game but since I already had the code to trigger sound, it was a small step to use it to trigger color overlays. It also felt like some of the seasons were not distinct enough, so adding color differentiated them.