SUPER GUAPOLAND
Super Guapoland is a game about a funny little guy finding his purpose in a world that's maybe a bit too big and maybe a bit too serious. Meeting friends, learning and growing, our hero seeks the Warmest Blanket for his sickly widdle bwudder.
Our hero's name is Guapo, and his likeness is based on that of my right hand.
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(IN DEVELOPMENT!)
The project began in the depths of the 2020 pandemic, in which I was huddled away in an old factory building turned studio in Tallinn, Estonia. In this time, I rediscovered my love of pixel-based sprite animation and game development, and downloaded RPGMaker 2003, an (as one may guess) outdated game development software, that worked well enough for my needs at the time. I was content to animate, map, and build the strange world and beings Guapo would be interacting with and stuffing them into this crunchy little program. It still serves as the basis for Super Guapoland, but the technical limitations of RPG Maker started getting in the way. So the pandemic ended, the master's thesis needed doing, and Guapoland is away, until...​
SanquharLand was the next evolution of Guapoland, the result of a three-month residency at the MERZ Gallery in Sanquhar, a lovely town in the south of Scotland. While getting my bearings, I met funny people, discovered strange locales, and learned interesting folklore. Using RPGMaker XP (an almost-significant upgrade!), I adapted these elements into an interactive, pixel-version of the town, that a group of local kids in the community center's board game club helped to playtest.
It follows our boy, this time tasked with collecting all eight of the Sanquhar Pattern Sheep, whose wool is needed to make the mythical Sanquhar Glove...
It's 2025 and I'm back in the US and teaching and I'm itching to do something fun with Guapo & his LAND! I reach out to the brilliant Alex Sussman and we begin developing a reworking of the original Guapoland in Unity (a very significant upgrade!), all limitations to be pushed aside! It's an as-of-yet quiet and unfunded project, juuust getting started.
