Stackropolis

I made a game for HEJ November, 2025 for the theme of Organizing game. I was a bit under the weather, coughing a lot, but still I found some time to put together a little something. I got back to an interesting technique that some old games used and some pixel art projects use sometimes: image stacking.

I used this with only one game before: Vroom Boom Toycars!, that had small cars that looked like they were 3 dimensional. It’s a bit rough to draw sprites without a pipeline, tools that help to see what you’re doing. I managed to find a script for Aseprite, that sort of OK to view the sprite stacked, but it is rough around the edges. Should I make a game with full image stacked, I would use some voxel editor, that’s capable to print out layers to use as a sprite sheet. And it would be a great plus if it could import 3D models, voxelize them, then you could just paint the voxels. Well, an image stacked project would be a strain on resources, as the taller an object, the more drawcalls it would need, slowing down the draw events. It would need some 3D polygon parts for tall walls and a like (or batch all objects’ draw event in one for cycle). Anyways, I did it by hand in Aseprite, and turned out to be quite good. One new thing for this was that I wanted the board to be able to rotate, so players could observe both scenes in any angle. Also, I had to sort the objects with a hand written function, as it turned out, that in GM priority lists cannot be looped through. For this I had to ask help from chatgpt, as I was tired and couldn’t make anything useful. So, every time the board turns, it rearranges the objects in a ds list by their Y property, and then I loop through the list and draw them in order, so every object logically overlap.

The game itself is about that the player becomes the apprentice of Chiselius, as he tutors the player, then just let finish up the rest. The game is a kind of organizing / cozy game, there is no real “danger”, though there is a score system (that manages to give negative points for the players’ efforts, but never mind that :)). The screen is divided to two parts. Right side is the reference, that’s what the player should have in the end on the left side too, matching formation, objects and at the same place. The GUI has some general information on it, like how many steps were taken, score, and how many stars the player collected so far. These are all score factors. The useful information is the To match: it shows how many elements is still off. If it goes up, you can be certain, something were placed at the wrong place. The player only can use the left side, clicking on an empty grid will place a big stone slab. Left click will chisel it down to a smaller object: column, then an ornament, then floor tile, then it’s destroyed, back to be an empty grid. Right click on the other hand will change the current object to something similar: other type of walls, different columns, ornaments and different mosaic. Basically that’s all for the gameplay, Chiselius will give score and stars, using the mentioned numbers and a hidden timer.

Another thing is, that I was ready with the game, made the itch page and had some time to do some polish on the game, to find some issues. Instead, I wrote a song lyrics, and fed it to an AI. That become Chiselius’ song, the title song that can be heard in the game. It’s a fun song, reminiscent to songs I’ve heard in Bud Spencer and Terence Hill movies and it fits the game, very 4th wall breaking. 🙂

It was a fun project, I actually didn’t had too much problems, except with the sorting function. I do like image stacking, I absolutely would love to make a game that uses this as its main visual. But for now, I’m finished with the idea.

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