Turbo Pudding
Amabel is a turtle the size of a hill, and she is the biggest thing we draw in Amblestead. It’s Sunday, so here is our sketchbook page for her: how she is built, how she walks and how her face shows what she feels. Like everything in the game, she is drawn in code.
The picture at the top is Aurora Plain, the fifth chapter. Amabel walks under a full moon and ribbons of aurora, smiling, with the whole town on her back.
Printed, not painted
We call the look of the game “stamped print,” and every shape goes on in four layers. First comes a dark copy of the shape, shifted a little down and to the right, like ink that slipped on the press. Then the flat color. Then a screen of tiny dots, only on the lower right half of the shape, so it reads as a printed shadow and not as noise. Last comes a thick ink outline with round ends. No shine and no soft 3D shading.
Amabel’s skin is a soft sage gray. Next to that color in our code sits a short note: “not leaf green.” Her freckles are sand, her blush is pink, and on a blank page the plates of her shell are the same plum as the cells of the puzzle board.
The shell is the board
That’s on purpose. In Amblestead, the board you play on is made of Amabel’s hexagon plates, and the frame around it is the rim of her shell. So her dome has the same hex plates, and her rim has the same scalloped clay as the board’s frame. Under the rim, a cream belly plate peeks out between her legs.
The plates also show how far the town has come. Plates that are still asleep are lichen gray with a touch of lilac. When a lot nearby wakes up, the plates around it clear to cream with a hint of teal. In chapter 1, 15 of her 43 plates wake up. By chapter 6, all of them do.
Four legs, one foot at a time
Her legs are heavy columns, each with a few big round scales on the shin, a wrinkle ring at the ankle and three toenails along the front of the foot. She walks the way big, slow animals do: near back foot, near front foot, far back foot, far front foot. Only one foot is ever in the air, so three always hold her up. A full round of all four feet takes 2.6 seconds. The note in the code: “a giant does not hurry.”
A planted foot moves back under her at exactly the speed of the ground going by, so her feet never skate. After every step her body sinks a little and rocks toward the foot that just landed, and a moment later her head nods. Three puffs of dust swell and fade under that foot, and her short tail sways behind her.
She also walks to the music. One round of her four feet is one bar of the tune, and her back feet land on beats one and three, right where the music thumps like a footstep. If she drifts out of time, she speeds up or slows down by no more than 12 percent, so no leg ever jumps.
A big, kind face
Her head is drawn 1.3 times bigger than her body would ask for. The code says why: “a big, lovable face.” It’s a rounded wedge with a blunt snout, a lighter jaw and six sand freckles on the crown. The eye is a button: a cream rim, a dark center and two glints. Over it sits a heavy, kind upper lid with two curled lashes at the outer corner. Below are smile lines, a pink blush and a long, gentle mouth with a little dimple at the corner.
The face never quite holds still. She blinks every 4.2 seconds, sometimes twice in a row. Her smile drifts from gentle to broad and back over about 11 seconds, and as it grows, the lid drops a little, her cheek rises under the eye and the blush gets pinker. When she talks, her mouth opens, and her words come in capital letters. Her very first line in the game is “HELLO, SMALL ONE.”
On a phone held upright, if there’s room under the board, Amabel peeks in from the left while you play.
Moods for a long road
Asleep, her lid shuts in a soft curve and her head droops a little. And for part of the Glass Desert, the fourth chapter, the heat wears her down. “SO HOT. SO TIRED,” she says. Her brow lifts at the inner end, her mouth turns down, and every few seconds a tear rolls from the front corner of her eye down her cheek. Even the tear gets a tiny cream glint.
Mist Valley, the first chapter, is free to play in your browser at amblestead.com. The full game, all six chapters, is $4.99, paid once. More about the game is on its Amblestead page.
