A Beetle Ninja Retrospective

 Beetle Ninja may not be the most popular game I've made, but it remains to this day probably the most ambitious and important that I've seen through to completion.

This journey about an unconventional savior's race against time to prevent a prophecy of doomsday successfully managed to nail a strangely captivating atmosphere and has successfully touched a number of people in the game development world!
It's always really strange to see somebody posting art on forums, or meeting somebody through friends who enjoys the game: I remember especially a very long time ago when Deegeemin had introduced me to his buds on Newgrounds, they were all blown away with what I'd managed to create with such rudimentary software!
Here's just a few of my favorite homages (that I could find) to Beetle Ninja by gamedev buddies of mine!

Art by friends evilsk8r (Friday Night Funkin'), Drazglb (Decline's Drops), and Tombdude (Mad Sister's Week Off).

But what went right with the game? Why do some consider Beetle Ninja to be the biggest sleeper hit of 2020? Why is there now an award category named for Beetle Ninja on RPGMaker.net?

To start off, I'd like to dive into what I remember of how Beetle Ninja came to be, and where a lot of the themes came from.

THE CONCEPTION

In terms of direct video game influences, I'd say the biggest one was, without a doubt The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask. Some smaller influences include LISA: the Pointless (which I feel comes across as extremely obvious in a handful of sequences haha), LSD Dream Emulator, Super Meat Boy, and to a much lesser extent MOTHER 3.
Truth be told, I honestly think Beetle Ninja borrows a bit more from external media: An Idiot Abroad and The Ricky Gervais Show were big influences on the humor, while the doomsday aspect was designed to feel sort of biblical (this is why the final boss is called "The Nephilim", and its themes are clear references to biblical passages).
The end of the world is sort of modeled off a lot of events from the Christian bible, though some influence from the Book of Mormon is also present: even if a lot of the symbolism doesn't inherently relate to the idea of the end of the world, the imagery is still present to give off the feel of an ancient prophecy.
A lot of games these days tend to prioritize paying tribute to series that influenced them, which can sometimes get in the way of making something cool, which I was very careful to try and avoid with Beetle Ninja.

Anyhow, Beetle Ninja was made at a very specific time in history... I believe COVID paranoia (which was extremely common at the time I was working on the bulk of the core game) pervaded a lot of the game's themes and some aspects of the story.

As far as gameplay mechanics go, Beetle Ninja derived from some experiments I was doing in the RPGMaker 2003 engine to see if a calendar-based progression system could be implemented into the engine (I hesitate to call it Persona-esque, because I still have yet to play the Persona series). I paired that with a mission structure I had wanted to explore for a little while, and the ideas fit together, surprisingly well.
Entirely separately, I wanted to try and reverse-engineer Yume Nikki's RNG-based events, since I hadn't really explored RPGMaker's randomizer features, and ended up making a large map comprised of a lot of RNG events... in motion, the two ideas kind of lent themselves pretty well to one another: exploring a town where a few chance events happened, and where the time of day could change randomly felt pretty good, and the chance to wake up and see differences in your little town constantly was refreshing, and gave you some extra incentive to explore around town (besides going to shops and things of that nature).
This aspect of the game will probably play a much greater role in Beetle Ninja 2!

Eventually, I'd made a few missions, but I was pushed by some friends of mine to make the missions grow more complex and detailed as the game progressed; in fact the only missions that weren't altered in any significant way were Mount Saint George, Utah, and the small farmland from the game's opening.
The main town area began to receive more updates as well, with the addition of the "furniture black market", the minimum-wage work minigames, and an extra floor for the main office. I added in the dojo after complaints from friends that paying for new ninjas felt like a constant gamble: players could now test out party members for themselves instead of party member recruitment being a risk/reward system.

Lastly, the party members were refined and made more distinct. Combat is always sluggish in RPGMaker2003, but I think given what I was working with, I managed to make something fairly interesting, especially when friends started getting involved.

THE DEVELOPMENT

In terms of interesting behind-the-scenes information, there's not very much I haven't really revealed before, but from what I can remember:
>The strange shadowy figures huddled around Ostrich Ninja's corpse are reused from an old game I was working on with some of the crew who left the Oddity project. I can't remember what they were used for there.
>Almost every enemy in the game came from a dream journal I kept in high school. The only exceptions are the Nephilim who I wanted to design myself, and the Flamestros/Gullstros who came from a scrapped fighting game I was working on (which is also where the design for 174 NINJA came from)
>It's barely visible, but the secret rooms all have 8-bit drawings of Beetle Ninja in their parallax backgrounds

But, what I REALLY wanted to discuss here was the bizarrely large impact Beetle Ninja has had despite it's relative obscurity...

THE LEGACY

Why did Beetle Ninja resonate with so many though, and why is it the namesake of an award on RPGMaker.net though?

As I said earlier, in some ways the plot of Beetle Ninja was sort of an elaborate metaphor for how I felt about the COVID-19 crisis at the time, so in that way I feel like it just came at the right time.

The game's sense of atmosphere and art direction are also pretty big reasons I see for people enjoying it: when paired with the atmospheric lighting, I think it gives off a very distinct vibe and feel that I've often seen compared to Fooly Cooly and other anime. In truth, I wasn't very familiar with anime before making Beetle Ninja, but it's a comparison I now find to be pretty accurate: Beetle Ninja does indeed emulate a pseudo-anime look pretty well, especially when taking the dynamic lighting into consideration.

But independent of that, to a lot of people I think Beetle Ninja was a pretty refreshing take on a "MOTHER-like": it's not quite held back by the trappings of Earthbound, unlike so many other games that claim to be influenced by the offbeat 90's cult classic, so as a result it resonates with people who may not enjoy the MOTHER series. There are no real direct analogues to Mr Saturn, PSI, etc... so the game kind of has a more unique feel to itself, while the aesthetic keeps things a little bit same-y.

THE FUTURE

Beetle Ninja has touched a lot of people, from what I understand (I don't actively look for content related to it, but friends do sometimes show me fan-art they find or projects they think look similar), and I'd wager to assume that the future will be pretty kind to Beetle Ninja.

Of course, I'm working on a sequel to Beetle Ninja, Beetle Ninja 2. I won't talk much about it, but it's shaping up to be a lot more focused on a new "reputation" system similar to something like Fallout: New Vegas, and will probably completely lack combat.
In terms of what to expect, I'm trying to keep the imagery consistent tonally: so this game is kind of based more around the idea of an "Armageddon", while the original was based broadly on the idea of an earth-shattering cataclysm.

A game that I can clearly tell borrows a lot of influence from Beetle Ninja is "Salaryman" by Meatnood1e. Haven't seen too much of it yet, but from what I have seen, it looks like it'll be taking quite a bit of influence from both Beetle Ninja, and Where the Moon Goes At Night (my previous RPGMaker game).

Beetle Ninja as a character is actually set to appear in a few projects by friends of mine too. No promises, but some of them are probably gonna be pretty cool if they work out.

I'm very excited to see what happens to Beetle Ninja in the future, and I'm really psyched to see where the sequel goes! If everything goes right with it, it'll probably have a lot of what people loved about the original, without some of the more tiresome aspects that were more heavily criticized.