The problem is that sometimes the alternatives aren’t that great, and it’s usually a pain to learn new software. Luckily the past few years there have been lots of great alternatives being developed, both free and open source and pay-once & own. Alternative software is increasingly easier to use and adopt to, and most programs use similar workflows, shortcuts and design paradigms. Most are available on both Mac and PC, and some stuff is also available on Linux. I use a mix of all platforms, and while there is always some growing pains when switching software, I’ve found it to be good for both my wallet and my brain. Learning new stuff is cool!

Here is a list of alternative software that I use, both for game development and for general creative work.

Game Development
Phaser JS, a great html5 framework in javascript.
ThreeJS, a 3D engine for web. Not a game engine, but can be used to render 3D worlds.
BabylonJS, same as Three, but more performance and features, but harder to get started (in my opinion).
Svelte, a framework for rapid building of web components.
Twine, a fun, free text-based narrative game tool. I want to play around with this more!
Godot, I have not tried making a game in Godot yet, but it looks like a very good Unity alternative, especially if you are making non-console/mobile games.

Graphic Design
Affinity Suite, the best Adobe alternative. I use Photo and Designer as Photoshop and Illustrator alternatives.
Aseprite, pixel art drawing and animation. All sprites and animations for Milkmaid of the Milky Way were done in Aseprite.
Penpot, Figma alternative, great for User Interface design!
Blender 3D, amazing 3D modelling, animation, sculpting, rendering software. Everything 3D in Embracelet was modelled and animated in Blender.
Clip Studio Paint, A very good illustration/comic book/art suite with lots of brushes, tools and ways to create art. All backgrounds for Milkmaid were painted in CSP. It’s also very affordable when on sale.
ProCreate, The best hand drawing/illustration app on the iPad.

Photo Editing and Catalouging
On1 Photo Raw, A good Lightroom alternative. Has a nice featureset, decent catalog structure and robust editing tools. A little slow sometimes, you need a good machine to run it well.

Programming tools
VS Code, my IDE of choice.
Ollama, for running local LLMs to help with programming, autocomplete etc. Needs a fairly beefy/new computer to be usable, so YMMV.

Music and Sound Production
Reaper, affordable and powerful music and audio suite.
Studio One, a little less affordable, but easier to use than Reaper. Garageband and Logic Pro are great Mac softwares too.
OcenAudio, a nice, small, fast audio editor.

Source control/version control
Github.com, for version control. Free for personal projects. Back up your code, this is super important, even for beginners.
GitHub Desktop, I like this tool as it makes it easier to see all the files that have been changed (not only code files) and gives me a more clear view of the project.

Backup and data management
Synology NAS, I have a small network drive where I backup all my files locally. It’s also possible to use a NAS for lots of cool stuff, like hosting docker containers, hosting your repositories, syncing files over the internet etc.

Scriptwriting, Office work
Open Office, A fairly robust offline alternative to Microsoft Office.
Beat (not tried yet), a free Mac only scriptwriting software.
Scrivener, I wrote the script for Embracelet with this. Not great for branching game narratives, but good for story and script writing.

Various Tools
QuickLook for Windows, quick preview for most files with the space bar.
ShareX, for screenshots and recording gameplay.
FileZilla, FTP client.
7-ZIP, for un/archiving files.

There are still programs and software that I use that need a licence and/or subscription. I use both Unity and Unreal, and GitHub LFS for hosting the larger files from my game projects. I also use dropbox for syncing files between all my devices, and a gmail account for accessing the Google Drive software.
While it happens from time to time that I miss a very specific feature from some expensive software, I very rarely find that any of these alternatives hinder my game development or creative work in any way.

Feel free to send me tips on other software alternatives you have come across!
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All right! It’s finally summer here in Norway, and I’ve put both Embracelet and Milkmaid of the Milky Way up for sale with some hefty price-drops!

Embracelet is half price ($11.99->$5.99) on Nintendo Switch, Steam (PC) and iOS!

Milkmaid of the Milky Way is 70% off ($5.99->$1.99) on Nintendo Switch, Steam (PC) and iOS!

This offer lasts until July 8.

Gamer.no 8/10
– “A beautiful, funny and believeable adventure”

nTower.de 9/10
-“a clear recommendation to buy.“

Buried Treasure/John Walker
-“If I were a doctor, I’d be prescribing this game to people right now. It’s a tonic, an injection of joy.“

Nintendo World Report 9/10
-“Embracelet is in every way beautiful.“

Daily Nintendo 7.6
-“Embracelet has made a big impression on me“

Monkeybit.it 8/10
-“A fabulous narrative experience.”

NRK 4/6
-“Embracelet is a small game with a big, beautiful heart.”

Switchaboo 72%
-“Embracelet is a beautiful coming of age story about the importance of learning from the past.“

Screen Rant 4/5
-“a beautifully designed and inclusive coming of age story”

Keen Gamer 8/10
-“Embracelet is a fantastic and emotive coming of age story set in a land steeped with history.”

Adventure Gamers 4.5/5
-“Embracelet is something of a masterpiece, doing so much and doing it seemingly effortlessly.”

Nindie Nexus
-“dares to bring up some sensitive themes like sexuality, poverty, and death, integrating them cleverly and subtly.“

Rapid Reviews UK 4/5
-“With a truly unique experience and a gripping, magical tale, this is one to add to your wishlist.“

Two Beard Gaming 8.5/10
-“Embracelet is a short, sweet and wholesome experience.“

Combined ratings

Metacritic ratings, PC version

Metacritic ratings, Switch version

OpenCritic ratings

The idea of Embracelet started on a piano. Apart from plunking down some notes on synthesizers, i hadn’t really played the piano since I was a teenager. I’ve always liked the sound of a piano and the weight of the keys, so after Milkmaid of the Milky Way was released I bought a second-hand digital piano. When farting around on the keys, I struck a chord that – pretentious as it might sound – really resonated with me.

Now I don’t read notes and I barely know what the keys are called, but that has never stopped me from making music. This particular chord (F-C-F-G-G#-D# or something?) made me think about blue skies, windy grass and fresh air. It felt both sad and optimistic. Uplifting melancholy, perhaps.

The main theme

Based on this starting chord, I made a short melody that ended up becoming the main theme of Embracelet. Most of the soundtracks in the game are based on piano chords and melody lines, but I’ve always wanted to create something orchestral. Strings, horns, bazookas or what they’re called!

The orchestra

Back in the 90’s when I switched from making music on a 4 track recorder to recording on a PC, I remember trying to make music with tinny General Midi soundfonts that sounded horrible. These days, having a complete orchestra with great sound quality is not a novelty anymore.

I never studied music, and any professional composer would probably throw up in their mouth a little when they see and hear how I work. My way of working is establishing a base with chords and rythms and trying to add a strong sense of melody to my compositions. I play by ear, add and remove sections until it sounds right.

For Embracelet, I used a mix of Garritan Personal Orchestra, Sonuscore The Orchestra and Spitfire Originals Epic Strings for the orchestral instruments. Here is one of the orchestral tracks, “The Passage“.

The piano sounds of Embracelet comes from The Gentleman and PianoTeq. I used a lot of woodwinds on these tracks, and found that the old Garritan VST had a some solo instruments that sounded great (to me).

New workflow

I’ve used a Mac for making music for the past 12 years, but since Embracelet is developed on a PC I wanted to move my workflow over to Windows. My Mac was getting old, and to keep costs down I wanted to do everything on one machine. Losing Logic Pro as my sequencer was a pain, but I found a workable and affordable alternative.

Reaper has long been a cheap and stable performer in the PC audio landscape, and despite it – let’s be honest – horrible looks it’s actually a really good DAW. I spent a month dipping my toes in, trying to learn it and customize it to look and perform less… eccentrically. Hidden behind it’s spartan and Windows 95-like look lies a very customizable and powerful audio and midi platform. I had to learn how to set up Actions to make it behave the way I wanted, and after a month of pain I got used to the new workflow and felt I could work pretty fast. Also, the personal and small business license is only $60, which is very reasonable. It didn’t come with many sounds or plugins though, so I had to reinstall all the old stuff that I still had licenses for. If I had a new Mac and was starting out, I still think Logic Pro is a better deal – but for PC composers Reaper is a great choice.

So. much. music.

Embracelet started off as music, and at the end of production there was a huge dump truck of music to write. Making a cinematic game with a lot of cutscenes and different settings called for a lot of music. Both short cues and longer background soundtracks when running around exploring.

All in all, there are around 60 music tracks inside the game, and the official soundtrack (that you can get here) has 31 tracks. I’m pretty happy with most of the music and I think it has a coherent, laidback feel that suits the game well. But I look forward to returning to the world of synth sounds and soundscapes again – especially combined with a catchy little melody!

Embracelet is set to release on Steam and Nintendo Switch on September 24, 2020.

Bonus: Freebies

If you’re a composer on a budget, I recommend these free plugins. I used these on the Embracelet soundtracks.

Oril River Reverb – Great free plate reverb

Ozone 9 Elements – Mastering plugin

LoudMax 64 – Maximiser plugin

Spitfire Labs – Various, well recorded instrument samples

RandArp – Midi arpeggiator plugin, used on the track called “Heartlight“

A Lowpoly love letter

Making a game all by yourself is a journey of testing, failing, making compromises and finding efficient ways to express your ideas. While my previous game had 90’s looking pixel art, I knew I wanted to go 3D with Embracelet from the start. But 3D is a lot of work.

I did 3D modelling and animation in college, but that was 20 years ago. You know what they say about riding a bike – once you learn, you never forget that skill. 3D is nothing like bicycling. It’s more like if bikes have been replaced by flying hoverboards that you control with your nostrils. Luckily the tools are somewhat easier to use nowadays, and there were tons of tutorials and helpful forums that could get me up to speed.

And as a fan of cartoons and graphic design, I knew I wanted to create a game with a lowpoly aesthetic.

The prototype

The summer of 2018 I was sitting hunched over an underpowered laptop, trying to learn Blender and how to import 3D models into Unity. Keeping models lowpoly (with few details) made it easier to iterate and change things, while keeping a clean style that is easy to read. Win win!

After many iterations and tests, I was able to model and rig a passable character and import it into Unity for more testing and learning.

The characters

Embracelet has a lot of characters – more than 40 different models. They are all modelled by hand, polygon by polygon. Again, keeping things clean and simple was my rule of thumb. The characters should be easy to read and easy for me to animate.

Characters are modelled with an automatic Mirror modifier in Blender. This makes it easy to create symmetrical characters and edit the body parts faster.

The characters are modelled the old school way of extruding and moving polygons, carefully moving and connecting vertices. This makes it easy to have more detail where body parts need to bend, and to keep the visual style clean.

The scenery

I wanted the visual style of Embracelet to feel light and airy, stylized and colourful. Like all characters and assets, the scenes you’ll explore in the game are modelled in Blender. I did not want to buy ready-made assets, as I would have found it hard to keep the overall style coherent. Some games suffer from a visual disconnect when some parts of the game looks lifelike and amazing, while other parts of the game are simple and stylized. Embracelet is far from perfect from an art direction standpoint, but at least I feel the parts that make up the game fit together.

I knew I would not have the resources to add textures to the world of Embracelet. Instead I chose an almost flat colour style, where each polygon is visible and the colour is baked into each vertex of the 3D model. I painted the colors using the Vertex Paint mode in Blender, which was super fast compared to UV-mapping everything.

The scenery reacts to light and shadow, which I found more interesting than a completely flat style. It also has Screen Space Ambient Occlusion, which is a fancy term for making cracks and corners darker.

The shaders

Shaders are small computer programs that runs inside the game that decides how the models are rendered. I used Amplify Shader to create most of the shaders in Embracelet. Technical jargon warning!

The scenery gets its color from the vertex data, baked into the .fbx models. In addition, to create some life and randomness to the flat graphics, there is a big, transparent sphere with a waving, handpainted water colour texture overlaid the whole scene.

The characters are actually UV-mapped instead of vertex shaded. They share an incredibly small texture:

The folks (and animals) of Embracelet are supposed to stand out from the background. I decided to remove shadows from their shader so they pop and read better. Also, flat-styled characters are cool! They also have a very small fresnel rim light to make them ever-so-slightly more three dimensional. When limiting the character to these colours, the art style became more coherent.

I also made a custom shadow node for the character shader, so that it’s possible to control their general brightness from a script.

The animation

Rigging, animating and controlling all the characters was one of the biggest workloads when making Embracelet.

Characters are rigged with skeletons inside Blender, and each bone is connected to the different body parts with blend weights.

The characters have a library of movements, all keyframed the old fashioned way (no motion capture). All the animations are imported into a character controller in Unity, a spiderweb of all the animations that can smoothly change into each other.

During the first year of production, I used the Blender files directly inside Unity. This worked great at first, and made it really fast to change and iterate animations and scenes. But as the game and characters grew more complex, it took longer and longer to import updates – sometimes many minutes just to change a single keyframe. I realised I had to convert each and every object in the project to FBX and reimport them. It was a nerve-wrecking two week nightmare to make sure every object, character and animation were exported properly and worked inside the game. Lesson learned!

To animate talking, expressions, blinking and wind I used blend shapes – basically different keyframes of the 3D model to smoothly move between.

To simulate wind, I made custom scripts that animated the wind blend shapes by a wind strength value while also affecting the vertex offset on certain shaders – like grass and trees.

Sky and Sea

The first prototype I did with 3D graphics had 3D shapes as clouds, but I could not get them to look as fresh and inviting as I wanted. I needed the sky to look fluffy and warm, so I ended up painting it instead.

I painted the sky in Clip Studio Paint as a equirectangular map. Inside Unity it’s converted to a Sky Cube. It took quite a few iterations to hide and adjust the pinching of the corners.

The sea uses one of the only art asset I bought – I tried making my own water shader but it was too much work to get it looking right. I found the Stylized Water asset, and that was just what I was looking for. Sweet reflections, waves and foam and a clean look, and performance was good too.

Speech bubbles

There is no voice acting in Embracelet, and instead the characters talk in speech bubbles. I spent a lot of time working on getting this as good as I could. A pet peeve of mine is slowly animating text… Don’t tell me how fast or slow I can read! In Embracelet speech is presented instantly in bubbles over the characters head (most of the time!), and you can spend as much or as little time reading as you like.

The font size is big, white on black to make it easy to read. No squinting required!

I implemented the very fun (and slightly beta) Text Animator asset to add some liveliness to the text, and a custom PG swearword generator using custom sprites.

The font I used is actually my own handwriting, created in the open source Font Forge program.

Conclusion

When you work on a project for so long, it’s easy to only see the issues, the cracks, that weird limping animation, the grass that clips through those rocks. But then I remember that even the biggest budget games also sometimes look weird or have immersion-breaking bugs. The lowpoly style of Embracelet is probably not for everyone, but I hope it serves its purpose – to help you imagine being somewhere else and to let your imagination fill in the missing gaps.

Embracelet is coming to Steam and Nintendo Switch this September. If you like, you can wishlist the game or follow me on Twitter.

Making a multi-platform game by yourself is quite the work. Managing different builds for PC, Mac, Linux, Android and iOS is pretty challenging, and things break quickly if you’re not paying attention. Some have asked for a DRM-free (basically a version that’s not copy-protected) version of the game, but I’ve had problems decoupling the Steam integration and I really didn’t want to make a whole new version that needed to be patched and upgraded along the way. But thanks to some time spent on google and experimenting with some version checking I was able to build a version of Milkmaid that basically is the same as the Steam version, without the achievements and DRM stuff.

Now the game has been launched on itch.io, a great community driven indie game service. If you want to play the game on your Mac, PC or Linux version and don’t want or have Steam, go ahead and check out the game’s page here!

Spillprisen is the Norwegian game industry’s own celebration, where juries consisting of game developers and journalists honour the best audio, art, fun for everyone, tech, game design, game of the year small screen and game of the year. Milkmaid was nominated for four prizes, and I was pretty shocked when I ended up with both the general and small screen GOTY award. The other games that won were the delightful World to The West with four prizes, and beautiful voxel-flyer Fugl taking the tech award.

I had a great time hanging out with other game developers and journalists. The Norwegian game industry might not be huge, but there are so many friendly people around who all have a great passion for creating games and expanding the medium. And I had a hell of a time trying to juggle the two cactuses (cacti?) I won!