This article was originally published in Issue 4 of the ICG Zine, June 2024. It was reformatted in December 2025, but has not been edited further.

ICG: So, full disclosure, I’ve played like 30 minutes of your game. I think I got to the third ring? I really liked what I got to try.

Ohhcurtains: Oh, hell yeah. That’s probably about a third of the whole game. [laughs]

ICG: I love the bite sized nature of it, I feel like it fits PICO 8 really well. I don’t know if this was your intention with the design, but something I really liked about each level is that it feels like each is a well-honed segment of what would normally be like a larger platformer level.

So you can learn the route through each level really quickly and just get that down, dying a few times just to figure out what the most optimal movement was for it. It’s very snappy and satisfying.

ohhcurtains: It started out as like a really emotional story that I wanted to tell that was very important to me, which was the story of a parent going to heaven, discovering that their kid didn’t join them and then jumping down and going to save them. And then the whole story would be a metaphor for a religious deconstruction.

I don’t know, it might be my demeanor, but I don’t like to be more challenging than I have to. The mantra the whole time was like, Kirby accessibility, I want the whole thing to be super duper duper friendly, and for it to feel good for everybody to play.

There’s also the other inspiration, which is a little converse. I was watching a lot of Kaizo Mario streamers and adoring it and playing a little bit of it myself, but not really getting into it; and also the Celeste modding community. So, I wanted the levels to feel like tiny Kaizo Mario levels that were not that bad, you know, that were all really chill and you feel cool and blaze through it in a night or two and feel like a badass and then you get this really strange, really dopey alternate universe or something. It’s like a Christianity fanfic.

ICG: I think the influence, like as someone who used to really enjoy stuff like I Wanna be the Guy, and definitely Celeste, I think the movement felt evocative of those – the influence felt obvious to me in the level structure, it does really shine through in that accessibility. I think you hit a really nice point where it was like, I didn’t die too many times per level, and I’m not someone who I’d say is particularly great at these types of games, but also it was quick enough that I could immediately go back and apply mastery to it, so if you did want to speedrun it’s very easy to get into.

ohhcurtains: I really hope so, because I never wanted it to be a rage game. I wanted it to feel, on the surface, that it’s like a mega hard thing that you’re doing, and then as you get through it, you’re like “I’m so sick.”

ICG: The beginning really sells the movement system as a conveyor belt for the story, and it does help that, you know, each region felt distinct from what I played. So the pacing felt very natural.

Something that I think is really interesting is that you advertise your game with solos by members of the PICO 8 community. I’m a huge, proponent of viewing the game scene as a music scene and cross collaborating, bringing people in as individual artists rather than studios or, I don’t know, your brand name.

ohhcurtains: Yeah, when I first conceived the idea for the game, the colors were black and white like the normal colors of black and fire and it was going to be a really traditional hell. And then I thought about drawing that for a year and it was like no, that sounds like it would suck to draw. I don’t want to draw gory demons.

So I started to think of like really satirical versions where each circle of hell is designed by the old one to give itself power. And what are all the ways that it feeds itself, and what are all the ways that it makes everyone who’s not a part of it in hell? So that’s how the levels got their really cartoony vibe.

When I started, I was also listening to a lot of jazz fusion and I loved the solos, but also how the music was really tightly constructed and the solos were for a very set number of bars and then they would go right back into it. Everybody knows exactly what they’re doing, they’re playing the melody or whatever. I just liked that style of jazz, which was really like rigid and structured and really tight.

Then I thought it would be really funny to do that with chiptune music, especially because PICO 8 has really strict limitations with how much music you can fit in a single cartridge. So I thought it would be a funny way to stretch out the length of each track by keeping the accompaniment parts, but then I just leave one channel free, and then I gave it to each of the artists and said do whatever you want. I thought it’d be so funny to have like an improvised jazz solo in chiptune music where it’s obviously not improvised, but it’s like having a feature. That just made me laugh and that’s why I wanted to do it.

And then there’s Eric Billingsley who did the cemetery one. There’s a cemetery level later. He added this one of the synths going like, like at the end of it goes [mimics synth riff]. And when he sent it to me, he was like, I don’t know if that’s like the vibe. And I, I was like, no, it’s really cool. He was like “it felt like a funeral, and I pictured somebody reciting a poem, so I added a little poem at the end,” I just always thought that was kind of funny.

All the people who contributed solos showed me, I think, I had been kind of lazy about expression in PICO 8 before. I think that I had been content to write notes that I felt confident in, but not to be as detailed with the way that each one was being expressed in terms of like velocity and the effects. I would do kind of broad strokes things. But all of the people who contributed solos really showed me, like a specificity that I wasn’t doing the work to do. I feel like I really grew from that.

A lot of choices in this game came about because they made me laugh and the name Amazing Grace felt pretty, I don’t know, pretty dumb and rebellious to me. As for the music, it took like a month and a half. Like a month where that was my big focus around wintertime. And then the rest, almost all the work in this game was programming and the level design. Because I wanted it to be so friendly I was really testing-oriented.

So, the goal was from the start that each month I would have a complete version of the game from the beginning, whatever that meant at the time. Then I would watch a couple people play all the way through it and then rebuild most of the content from the ground up; not like art, but mostly level content, especially in a game that flirts with difficulty, to avoid the thing where I get really good at it, and then I don’t understand why other people aren’t, because I’ve been playing it for a year. There was a lot of cutting features. Which is what PICO 8 is really good for. Overall, like a year and three months.

ICG: There’s a lot of intersection between Christianity and the experience of transness. Transubstantiation, or you know, just the idea of becoming something else.

ohhcurtains: Right? Yeah, exactly.

ICG: Being able to take that idea of being reborn or alternatively being so rigidly put into a system of a binary right and wrong. It’s all very enhanced by Christianity.

ohhcurtains: It’s hard to escape. It’s a hard mindset to escape.

ICG: Absolutely. Do you find that there’s any Christian art that has particularly influenced you or aided you in what you wanted to do here?

ohhcurtains: “Left Behind.”

ICG: Oh, that’s real. That’s so real. Have you ever seen Catechumen? It was like, a 90s FPS, but make it Christian.

ohhcurtains: I want to see like, Christian Doom Guy.

ICG: That specific type of media of like, Christian adaptation of whatever is popular. You know, like there was this Christian card game that was definitely like a knockoff of “Magic the Gathering,” called “Redemption,” that was just like religious paintings and theming and everything.

ohhcurtains: That’s such a bummer to hear because I wanted to play Magic so bad growing up and I wasn’t allowed. I wasn’t allowed to play Pokémon either. I’m still salty. I’m 30 years old and I’m still salty about not being able to play Pokémon. [laughs] I also got the Dungeons & Dragons ban.

ICG: I feel like it’s not uncommon to end up with queer devs or people with religious history who weren’t allowed to touch on games, popular media, and then choose to utilize it as a medium later on.

ohhcurtains: Oh sure, my friend actually got me a pack of Pokémon cards for my birthday. It was like one of the sweetest gifts I’ve ever gotten. So cute.

ICG: Walking back a bit: Specifically, for a game that has such a narrative lean, why a platformer?

ohhcurtains: Because they’re fun. I wanted to make one. Honestly, not tied to the narrative. I just knew I wanted to make a game. It was initially conceived as a top-down game. I knew I wanted to spend a year on a game, to take game development seriously for one year of my life and make something for a whole year, that was the goal initially.

And the first idea for a project was a JRPG. Like world maps, towns, dungeons, but the battle system would be a single screen 2D platformer like Mario 3, where you run into a Hammer Brother, and then you go in a little fight with them. So that was the initial idea, and then I spent a long time, maybe like a month and a half getting platforming feeling really good.

Maddy Thorson has this great article about Celeste and Towerfall’s platformer physics, as well as some of their grace mechanics that they implemented. And those were incredibly helpful to use; their way of doing collision is like foolproof, like you can’t clip with it, it’s super great and it’s pretty performant too. So, I had this great, good feeling platforming, but I started to feel pretty daunted by the JRPG.

I’d wanted to make the JRPG about a cult, based on the Heaven’s Gate story. I wanted to do a project about that for a long time, but I guess it just started to feel wrong, working on it. And it felt like things were not cohering. And then I had this pretty emotional experience, and I decided to switch gears and I already had all this platforming stuff, so the levels became longer and that’s when I made the game as it is.

ICG: Any plans for a next game?

ohhcurtains: I really want to make a game about Google calendar. You have your physical, emotional, mental and spiritual health, as well as your financial health and your energy level. Every event that you can plan. I guess I just want to make a game about planning your life on a Google calendar, which is how I feel like I live my life a lot. Like a statement about adult life and choosing what your life is and owning your choices, like owning the life that you’ve made for yourself. That’s the elevator pitch.

ICG: I think that does it for me, any last notes you want to add?

ohhcurtains: Yeah, I just hope that the game is enjoyable to people and isn’t – it started from a place of anger, and then the goal of it was to turn that into joy, was to turn it into silliness and joy. So, I hope that that comes through more than any anger. I hope that the ending feels redemptive for people.

ICG: Okay last question, who’s your favorite Pokémon?

ohhcurtains: I haven’t played yet. To be honest, I’m kind of past the point where I would be interested. I don’t know, Pikachu, he’s pretty cool.

I think it’s funny, I never noticed as a kid how punny their names are. They’re all super funny. I actually met someone recently who draws original, like these incredible pixel art, original Pokémon. And what was the one she shared with me? Oh yeah. Mortifly. It’s, um, if I remember right it’s a bunch of maggots that come across some roadkill and they animate it. And it’s pretty sick. It’s called Mortifly. [laughs] So that I guess that’s my favorite Pokémon right now.

All proceeds from Amazing Grace go to charity. You can find the game on itch.io or Steam. https://ohcurtains.itch. io/amazing-grace