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The History of BUDD

1. What do you mean BUDD was an RPG???
2. Games Between Games
3. There and Back
4. A Slice of the Modern Era
5. The Present, and the Future of BUDD

What do you mean BUDD was an RPG???

The initial spark for BUDD started in early 2020 as I was playing the Phantasy Star series for the first time. I adore early Sega stuff (Especially those few non-Sonic games from Sonic Team), so it was a no brainer that I'd latch onto them with their forward thinking sci-fi storytelling and memorable characters. In addition to the Master System and Genesis games, I spent way too much time emulating PSO1 Episode 1 & 2 in Dolphin, and then way more time playing the PC version on the fantastic Ephinea server.

Some time after I played both PSIV and PSO1, I bought RPG Maker 2003 and wanted to make my own little thing with it. RM2003's limitations would eventually come back to haunt me later on, but for now I was just satisfied seeing my characters running around.

For the art style, I went with a mixture of all the Phantasy Star games I've played to that point. A Master System color palette like 1, Characters with dot eyes and similar proportions to 2 and 4, a tone and story more similar to Online's. Eris' design came about because I love that 80's/90's adventure girl archetype. She was heavily inspired by characters like Nei and Rika from Phantasy Star, with some Popful Mail and Time Gal inspiration thrown in for good measure.

I had fun fleshing out rooms, stitching together scripted events, writing dialogue, and working on the skeleton for the first dungeon. Unfortunately for me there was a BIG elephant in the room; the battle system.

While RPG Maker 2003 was best for for the retro look I was going for, you have very little control over the battle system. RM2003 includes an Active Time Battle (ATB) system identical to the one used in the Final Fantasy games, down to the sideways battle view. Phantasy Star, however, had a rear view with a traditional turn based battle system. This led to many issues and quirks in the system, including but not limited to:

• Being unable to add new battle mechanics to make the game feel more unique.
• Battle animations being misaligned from their effects every now and then.
• Enemies flipping to face the physical location on screen the party member is at.
• The physical position of the player onscreen affects how certain enemies behave.
• Surprise attacks and pincer attacks not making sense from this perspective.
• The "Row" menu option not making sense from this perspective either.
• ATB being just plain unnecessary for the type of game I wanted to make.

Needless to say, I wasn't satisfied with the hacky way this game was turning out. I still wanted to make an RPG, but at this point I'd rather build my own engine from scratch. Eris' adventures in the stars had to be put on the backburner...

If you're curious and want to try it out, you can find a playable prototype in The Ultimate Kap Pack. It's a collection with tons of demos I've made over the years. For StarGame specifically, it has an explorable colony, a good chunk of a first dungeon, a very early forest area, and a debug room to access everything.

Games Between Games

After shelving StarGame I tried getting back to Crystal Heart, my other big multi-year game project. I really do mean multi-year too; it's been in development off and on in various forms since about 2012. I don't have to explain how exhausting it can be working on a game with no real end in sight, right? Development was technically progressing, but I didn't feel like I was making any progress.

About this time in the summer of 2020, I started looking into game jams to get the satisfaction and experience that comes with finishing a game. I've done smaller time-constrained projects in the past like Lana's Nightmare and Sonic Round 7, but it's been a few years since then and figured I could sharpen my project management skills some.

The first result of this was Frostbite Crawl. An arcadey game I made in 48 hours where you play as a mountain climber trying to climb as many mountains as you can before freezing. It was actually pretty easy establishing the scope and then executing on it when I knew what it was I wanted to make. People that tried it even enjoyed it once it was finished, so that was pretty good for 48 hours, I think! It was also nice being able to patch some features in once the jam ended.

So if I could make a game like that in a couple days, what could I do in a week?

There and Back

I like Youtubers that make game development videos. It's always neat seeing their own dev processes and comparing them to my own. Vimlark is one I discovered through devlogs on his game, Monkeys with Guns. He also participates in game jams often and logs the development through videos just like these.

Later in the year, he would announce he was hosting a game jam, with help from 8-Bits to Infinity. The jam's focus was "Collectables", and it was eventually revealed that the theme was "There and Back". This seemed like a good opportunity to jam that landed right in my lap. What could I do for a game where you go there and back between places, and has a fair amount of collectables?

What about a Metroidvania?

I figured the "collectables" could be Metroidvania powerups, and I could design a tiny little map around them. Something in kind of a figure-8 shape where it'd route you through previously visited areas without forcing you to go out of your way to backtrack? I wanted to go with a retro Castlevania or Zelda 2 inspired vibe, and the Sci-fi 80's Anime JRPG Heroine I just designed a couple months back felt like a good fit for it.

What kind of powerups would I include, though? I only had a week, so I couldn't scope it too crazy. If I were dipping back into that Phantasy Star inspiration, why not base it on the MAGs from PSO? I love when games give you a tiny floating helper companion, so maybe it'd be fun trying to flesh that out; give them their own mechanics? Crystal Heart had Lana who used a floating slime friend to attack, so knowing how that worked, it'd be pretty easy to do something similar for this game.

Now they need some short catchy name. Maybe an acronym to go with the sci-fi vibe? They're tiny little robot friends, so...

BUDD's development actually went pretty smoothly. I made most of the graphics I thought I'd need first, coded the various BUDD abilities, gave you an objective to shoot for (collecting parts to repair your crashed spaceship), then designed the rest of the map in Paint.Net before even touching GM's Room editor. I actually coded the ending sequence pretty early in the week, since if I ran out of time I could easily just drop the remaining ship parts elsewhere on the map and still end on a high note. There was also a funny thing that happened where I'd do level design before coding monsters and other interactive elements, so in true metroidvania fashion I felt like I was "unlocking" the rest of the map by making those things function.

I finished another game! I barely tested it, and probably could've smoothed out the difficulty a bit more, but it was done! I made an Itch page, submitted it, and tried other people's games around the jam as I waited for feedback. The feedback was pretty positive! I still regret relying so hard on NES tier fake difficulty, but I think people were understanding at the very least. I wasn't submitting this game to "win" the jam, but I had fun, and it was good experience!

But then the results came in.

So I guess I won the overall vote, for whatever that's worth!

It wasn't any of the judges' pick, and it wasn't the best in any specific category, but I guess if you did the math it was the best all around? It doesn't matter, a win is a win (even if it's on a technicality). There were some other really good entries too, so it's a bit surprising that this ranked #1 out of all the 467 entries. It got a fair amount of attention after winning too, so the extra feedback was nice.

A few weeks later, BUDD would even get the spotlight in the video Vimlark showed off of the jam's best games! This definitely was one of the highlights of my gamedev career so far. I met a few neat people out of it, too!

Eventually in 2023 I'd go back and do a massive quality of life update for this game adding tons of quality of life changes. Things like 16:9 widescreen, movement and ability tweaks for Eris, bugfixes, and an entirely new mode. These were done as a fun little distraction while I was working on the next project after this.

So what's this next project? I'm glad you asked!

A Slice of the Modern Era

Towards the end of 2020 and into 2021, I was feeling motivated. I was watching some Youtube videos about finishing what you start, and I was playing a few random indie games off Steam. The games were super small things you could beat in less than an hour and sold for only a few bucks, so I figured "Why can't I do that?". I was still a bit burnt out on Crystal Heart, so I wanted to do something with a much smaller scope.

I'd just finished BUDD those few months prior, so why not make a full game version of that? Plenty of games go from jam to full releases. It'd be pretty straightforward to expand on the Jam version's scope in a way that makes it feel fleshed out without spending another decade to finish it.

I got to work on a rough game design document, and a mockup screenshot showing how I wanted the game to look and feel. I also remade as many graphics from the original as I could in the new style.

From this point forward, I'll refer to the modern version simply as "BUDD", and the Game Jam predecessor as "BUDD (Classic)", or just "Classic".

Firstly, I'd still only have 3 BUDDs. They have a nice versatile dynamic as is, so it'd be weird adding a ton with very specific use cases. Instead of that I could work on giving them extra abilities, more ways to interact with the world, and even fleshing out Eris' moveset. Eris got her sword back, and with it came an entire combat system.

Content-wise, I was thinking instead of one small planet, you'd have Four. I didn't want to copy the Metroidvania formula most games go with, so I was more than fine with a mix of linear and non-linear spaces. Something similar to the Wonder Boy series, Metroid Fusion, or Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia.

It'd also be neat if I could work in story and design elements from the RPG with the new game's expanded scope, reworked to fit a platformer instead of an RPG.

A couple months later, I'd start working on a brand new engine from the ground up.

I got rendering code in, controller support and input remapping, music playback, collision, a basic character controller, general things you'd need to make a game with. My idea was that I could design this engine first, branch it off for BUDD, and then use it for other projects, but I ended up rewriting a lot of it down the line anyway. Oh well.

I felt like I'm way better at project management now, so I decided to give myself a little challenge. Could I design an entire vertical slice for the game in just a month? A few basic areas, your abilities, the general mechanics I'd need to finish BUDD.

With some foresight and planning, the vertical slice actually went off without a hitch! Just a few things it included:

• Several rooms to explore
• Two test planets
• All three BUDDs
• Multiple enemy types
• A miniboss
• A regular boss
• An end sequence
• The save system
• A handful of Eris' animations

This is looking like an actual video game now! I sent this build to friends for playtesting, made some changes thanks to their feedback, and took a tiny break. The next month, I'd work on Verdeo, the first actual planet, and the planet Classic takes place in.

One of these days I'd love to release this specific build, but it feels weird now considering how early it is. Maybe some day once the game itself is done!

The Present, and the Future of BUDD

A lot of things would eventually change since that vertical slice. I totally revamped the combat system with more moves, I added an experience system, I added a shop, I fleshed out the story, I added satellite challenges, plenty of things that naturally come from building the game up and working towards finishing it.

I'd love to document every fun milestone along the way, but BUDD's history is still being written as the game is far from finished. It's not as quick as I would've liked, but life happens. The best part though, is that there's an actual end in sight. I've been working on BUDD for a fraction of the time I've been working on Crystal Heart and it's considerably more finished, with considerably more game to play through. Hopefully I'll be able to even expand this article with my thoughts once the game's done!

As of May 2023, BUDD is roughly 75% complete.

To be continued...!

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