Developer Commentary
Hello, thank you for playing Fantasy Egg! I hope you enjoyed it. Due to various reasons this game took me about two years to make, but I'm happy with how it came out in the end!
As you might have guessed I started making this game around Easter time. In particular I was thinking about the Easter egg hunts my primary school did each year, where eggs would be scattered all around the nearby trees and bushes and we'd go out a search for them.
I was also playing the original Legend of Zelda at the time and was enjoying the surreal and obtuse nonsense you have to engage with to complete that game, and so in my mind the trees and bushes of my primary school melded with the mysterious forests and mountains of Hyrule to create: Fantasy Egg! A game about collecting eggs to awaken some kind of eldritch being???
Game Design and Mechanics
In terms of gameplay, my main aim was to see what kinds of puzzles and gameplay mechanics I could get out of the Bitsy engine, which ultimately doesn't allow many player interactions beyond walking into things.
The idea I settled on was to use the player's understanding of the overworld to solve puzzles, which came in the form of the small map shown in the bottom right-hand corner of the screen. The overworld is not actually that large or complicated to navigate but I hope the vague map initially made it feel vast and confusing. I probably could have pushed the concept much further but I liked the map reading mechanic well enough and didn't want to make the game huge.
I would love to say that the UI elements framing the game world were inspired by other Action RPGs like Hydlide and Ys, but it actually came about due to practical concerns. Moving the protagonist from one side of the screen to the other could be a bit tiring so I shrank the screen size down to reduce the number key presses the player had to make when traversing the overworld.
The visual resemblance to Hydlide and Ys is nice though. Those games are cool, you should play them.
Story and Characters
The gameplay mechanics and overworld design for Fantasy Egg were completed fairly quickly, but the story and the characters took a lot longer to finish.
The main reason why this game took two years to make was simply because I didn't know how to end it. Fantasy Egg was never designed to have a story and characters, it was just a silly idea I had for an Easter-themed game, but it felt weird to simply have the game end with no conclusion.
After many failed attempts to write lore and a backstory for the Creature and protagonist Jamn, I eventually leant into the mystery and vagueness of the game's world. Sometimes it's good to be left asking questions.
The Creature
The initial idea for the Creature was of course inspired by the Wind Fish from Link's Awakening; I needed a reason for the player to be collecting eggs and some kind of surreal egg deity seemed like the right fit.
It's a chimera of sorts, with elements of birds, insects, and molluscs — all of which hatch from eggs! That said, the Creature appears to still be in the process of hatching... who knows what it might look like outside of its shell?
It's not super obvious but the banded design running around the Creature's middle was inspired by painted Easter eggs. I sketched out a bunch of repeating floral and geometric patterns to decorate the egg with, but due to the sprite size on Bitsy games this just ended up being a few dots on the screen lol.
Annoyingly the concept art I drew for the Creature, which had a few alternate designs, has gone missing. I'll update this page when it shows up again, but my favourite alternative design by far was one where the Creature had a large lace ribbon wrapped around its mid-section and tied up in a very large bow at the back, which resembled the wings of a fairy or insect.
I really liked this design but once again Bitsy sprite limitations would have made it difficult to clearly represent on screen.
Jamn
Finally we have Jamn (the player), a young explorer around the age of 10 or 11 years old. My early placeholder graphics for him looked like the old Animal Crossing Villagers — the ones with the horned helmets — but I moved away from that design because there are lots of RPG protagonists with similar headgear. I eventually re-designed Jamn to be a faun after looking at their overworld sprite, which seems to have long flat ears.
Above: A comparison of the design iterations for Jamn's in-game portrait. The middle one was slightly re-drawn after finalising Jamn's design.
Fantasy Egg was intended to release on the same day as Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom but I wasn't able to finish all of the web-design stuff in time. I really wish I had though, because by complete coincidence that game also has a furry goat character with long flat ears, a cloak, and hair tied up in bands. Jamn isn't inspired by the hot goat man, I swear!!
I don't know a lot else about Jamn honestly. Much like the story, I didn't decide on anything about him until the final parts of development. Who is he? Why did he choose to search for the eight eggs? Who knows?! Fantasy Egg is a game of many mysteries and zero answers.
I do really like the little guy though. It'd be nice to make some more games for him at some point.
(PS. Jamn's name is pronounced with a "Y" sound. "Yam", like the vegetable.)