GiggleForce Announcement and FAQ

A few days back, I announced a project I've been working on with a handful of friends called "GiggleForce". Reception so far has been beyond what I could have imagined: to some it might not seem like much, but I don't really use Twitter all too often these days and haven't really gotten this kind of response on a game in a while.
Maybe that's because I've been focusing mostly on smaller web games for the past few years? Maybe it's because people just like the superficial Earthbound look? I dunno, but I'm glad people seem to like it.

Render of the game's protagonists by Topple: the game's main concept artist

In short:
Giggleforce is a parody of the "Quirky Earthbound-inspired RPG" subgenre. You play as a recently-let-go everyman: Guy Parker, a provocative young woman: Dani Shale, a masked serial killer: Jeffrey Pilkington, and a macho ex-stuntman: Jickie Choon. These four unwittingly end up tasked with stopping the birth of the antichrist by defeating hookers, joking ostriches, robots, and just plain dumb bullshit.
!FAIR WARNING!
Giggleforce features a lot of crude humor and adult subject matter. There's no shame in being uncomfortable with this kind of content, but I would recommend against playing the game if this sounds unpleasant to you.

I've gotten a fair few questions and comments about the project, and seeing as how I've been mostly silent about it thusfar I figure now is as good a time as any to answer them:

RELEASE / DEVELOPMENT
Q: When will the game release?
A: At the moment, there is no set release date.

Q: Will this game be released on platforms like Steam? How much will it cost?
A: Nope, only Gamejolt. The game will be freeware.

Q: Where can I follow this game?
A: I post monthly updates on the game in the Unique Indie RPGs Discord server.
I'm going to try to post at least one screenshot every other week or so on Twitter, though as GiggleForce is largely a comedy game I might go dark on occasion when I work on sequences that are better experienced blind.

GAMEPLAY / GAME DESIGN
Q: Can you rename the party members?
A: You can! At the beginning of the game, you are able set unique names for all the party members, as well as a few words that appear in dialogue ala the favorite food/thing in Earthbound.
That being said, character surnames appear in dialogue (albeit rarely) which cannot be changed by the player.

Q: How long is the game going to be?
A: It's easily one of the biggest games I've ever approached, though it's hard to say for certain right now. I'd guess about 5 hours, maybe more.

Q: How bad is the "crude humor and adult subject matter"?
A: It's hard to really give specifics without spoiling some of what I consider the game's best moments, but personally, I feel like it's about on par with something like Da Ali G Show.
Characters cuss, there's nudity in certain sections, and the player can take pills to cure status effects.

MISC
Q: I thought you were working on a sequel to Beetle Ninja? When is that coming out?
A: Admittedly, Beetle Ninja 2 was mostly born out of the over-enthusiasm I had for the original game. The project has lingered on in development hell for about 3 years now, and while bits and pieces of it are still technically impressive to me, I wouldn't hold your breath expecting it to release.

Q: Who's who?
A: Guy is the man in blue with the yellow tie, Dani is the red-haired girl in the yellow jumper, Jeffrey is the guy with the metal mask, and Jickie's the guy with the boxing glove and the wifebeater.

Q: Is this set in the same universe as Beetle Ninja or Where the Moon Goes at Night?
A: GiggleForce is very much a separate continuity from my earlier games. That said, don't be surprised if there's a cameo or two from some of my previous RPGMaker projects.

It's been too long! 2023 update

It's been around two years since last I updated this blog. Holy fuck does time fly.

I recently left my last job, where I helped fix planes. Needless to say it was very stressful, so I'm looking to work on something I actually enjoy. With Bird Tapper and the Great Krampusnacht Cleansing being so well received publicly, and with this new Bird Tapper game doing similarly well (at least so far), I'm pretty excited to see where things go!

Since my last post I've released 5 web games: T.O.F.U, Adventure of Leek, Ruby Heart Matchmakers, Bird Tapper and the Great Krampusnacht Cleansing, and Bird Tapper: Purple Platoon Panic.
> T.O.F.U is a visually boring "I Wanna Be the Guy" clone where you can jump on your own corpse. Physics are a little too finicky, and corpse mechanics didn't work super well in my opinion.
(4/10)
>Adventure of Leek was ok: I like the character designs, and the game was fun, but my art was very sub-par with this one.
(7/10)
>Ruby Heart Matchmakers was fun, even if the final game feels a little clunky and unpolished. The character designs I think turned out pretty good, though some parts of the game feel a little off in retrospect.
(6.5/10)
>Bird Tapper and the Great Krampusnacht Cleansing. I did an entire YouTube video going over this one, but TL;DR: I'm happy with the core gameplay, although the power-ups and level design probably needed a little extra work.
(8.5/10)

I also just wrapped up Bird Tapper: Purple Platoon Panic! It's a little too early to have many thoughts on it, but I do have plans to go back to the game!

Internally, we're talking about a "map pack"-type game that'll add maybe 20 new levels at most. It'll be a separate game page, but will feature identical mechanics and physics to the original Purple Platoon Panic. The levels this time around will be designed by a few of our friends: mostly fellow game developers, but there might be contributions by some people you wouldn't expect. We're starting it in December, and I'm excited to see how it goes!

I'm also working on a little JRPG called Giggleforce. It'll likely take a long time to be anywhere close to done, but it's a fun little side-hustle whenever I have the time for it. I was aiming to get a Christmas demo out this year, but with Bird Tapper doing so well, I think I might have to delay that until 2024.

Anyhow, that's all from me so far! I'll try to post more shit here lol.

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.

What is Super SimLove Tactics?

What is Super SimLove Tactics?

Super SimLove Tactics is a game I'm working on with Plufmot and PostElvis, with a little extra help from my friends ToonToonToonToon (ToonyRab) and Paniswag who've helped me out with character design and animation respectively.

Gameplay
Gameplay-wise, it's heavily based around old board games like chess and checkers.
If I had to cite any similar video games as far as gameplay goes... maybe Advance Wars would be the most direct comparison? To be honest it's not really designed after any other video games (unlike a lot of my other projects), so it might be a little hard to make any direct comparisons.

The goal is to keep things much more quick-paced than other tactical games, so the movement of characters functions similarly to in chess:
The player has one "king", a main character who has a special ability he can use once per battle but whose destruction will cost the player victory, and four "pawns", which act as basic soldier units. You move one unit one "tile" per turn, so when combined with the relatively smaller map size, it keeps things much more quick-paced than other tactical games.

Aesthetics
Aesthetically, it's meant as sort of a lighthearted parody of early 2000's-era Japanese gaming: which featured (amongst other things):
>Unnecessary information about blood types
>Strange dating sims
>References to very specific pop-culture events and trends, which nowadays comes across as randomness
>Uber-charming artwork and character designs
>Strange localization changes

All of these are things I'm aiming to recapture with Super SimLove Tactics! It mainly serves as a bit of a parody of the weirder side of the dating simulator sub-genre, though I'm aiming to make it more of a "general satire" of early 2000s video gaming as a whole.
In terms of specific games which influenced the aesthetic, there are a lot. Several of these are alluded to in the character design, specifically Love! Brother-kun, Pico Sim Date (to a slightly lesser extent), and Hatoful Boyfriend, but there's also a few maybe lesser expected aesthetic influences: such as Final Fantasy II, Super Meat Boy, WarioWare, and Space Channel 5.

I'd say out of all the influences it leans most heavily into both WarioWare (which is especially evident in the character designs) and Pico Sim Date: it's intended to have that kind of fluidity with the characters and settings.

Hopes/Goals for the project
SimLove Tactics is something I feel has the potential to do very well.
It's not being made with the intent of being uber-popular, I believe that most games made with that in mind generally end up falling short, but I'm treating it right now like everything is going to be nit-picked in the same manner as a popular game: so I'm spending a lot of time refining everything and smoothing out character designs to look good. I remember showing ToonyRab the first draft of Big Bro, the printer rival, and him commenting that it looked "Whitty tier bad" so especially with the characters, I'm always careful to make things look just right.

Characters
This is all well and good, but it's about time I showed you something tangible, right?

Playable Characters
Much like Super Meat Boy, SimLove will probably end up featuring a handful of guest characters to play as:

Eikichi Sekksuman: The default protagonist unique to SimLove. A young man with strange psychic powers he uses to seduce women.

Pico Asshole: Alleged to be the descendent of a legendary samurai, Pico believes himself to have been sent on a romantic mission by his future son.

Montrell Saint-Luc/Beetle Ninja: A mystic ninja from Point De Garu, France who wishes to translate his hand-to-hand combat skills into his love life.

From my experience in the indie scene, I think a lot of people tend to go after cameos and guest appearances as the primary "draw" of the game: for my generation of indie developers, it seems to be a big focus of the game development experience.
For SimLove, I decided I only really wanted to use characters from games by my friends to avoid this stigma, so the most well-known character in the game is probably Pico from Pico's School, who consequently was mainly included because of Pico Sim Date (otherwise I probably would've chosen Samurai Asshole or something).

Rivals
At the risk of being cliché, "rivals" are the primary opponents you'll be facing throughout Super SimLove Tactics. Armed with immense charm, they'll stop at nothing to defeat our hero!
Here's a small handful of the "rivals" you'll be expected to meet throughout your conquest:

Justice Moon: a flashy pop star, whose groupies are known to be a bit pushy and violent.

Hateno: a punkish, yet devilishly handsome parrot who impresses women with his smooth voice.

Big Bro: eternally invested in his studies, would probably bury himself deep in work if he wasn't constantly attracting women.


Random/Links

Plufmot's devlog blog: https://www.bennyrenya.com/devlogs/super-simlove-tactics
Music preview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jI6KC54ddZ8&lc=UgyYEPJQk3iUH8qEyxl4AaABAg

I'm very excited to see how this project turns out! It's been a blast to work on so far, and I'm hoping that translates into a game you all enjoy playing.

I Wanna B The Clock

I Wanna B The Clock!
This one was pretty interesting to say the least. What started out as Stepford and I chatting about Clock Day at 2AM spiralled into what basically amounted to a bit of a clone of StrawberryClock's very own "B: The Video Game"

When going in, we had no real concrete ideas other than it should be a clock day thing, and it should have StrawberryClock in it.
We threw ideas around about maybe doing an homage to "Dickey Mouse" or one of StrawberryClock's other early games, but ultimately decided that B: The Video Game was basic enough of a template that we could kind of do whatever with it, it'd turn out fun, and wouldn't require a lot of effort.

The Good:
I think the inclusion of the speedup mechanic (wherein after picking up a B, the game's speed increases) adds a lot to the gameplay, and encourages the player to keep collecting Bs. Progression systems like these are inherently addictive, and add a reason for players to keep collecting Bs.

Of course I couldn't talk about the game's progression system without mentioning that quick "pop" that happens whenever you collect a B: a quick white flash appears, and a clock will jump out in celebration from off-screen. This feature was inspired by Indie Pogo, an indie game crossover that I had previously worked on.
When paired with the RNG-based B placement, the random clocks can sometimes lead to a shotgun effect, with multiple clocks popping out from off-screen. In my opinion, this is what leads to a lot of the addictiveness people seem to ascribe to I Wanna B The Clock.

The Bad:
There's honestly very little I'd complain about with I Wanna B The Clock.
I think Stepford and I said it best when we finished the game up: it is the most polished turd ever created.
I think some sort of in-game B counter might have benefitted the game, but it's a double-edged sword to me...
The game is seen by a lot of people as highly addictive so leaving out a counter discourages some of the competitive aspects of it. At the same time the game does have quite a competitive scene with the Newgrounds leaderboard list. I could easily see compelling arguments for either option, but it's not something I'd mess with personally.

Unused Content:
There's not a whole lot here, but to start out, there's some sprites for StrawberryClock holding a gun, which he was going to use to shoot at Pube Muppet, a recurring antagonist in his animations. These pink tiles were considered before we decided to go with an abstract backdrop.

Not entirely unused, but the StrawberryClock sprite used in the game is actually reused from some old Piconjo: Teh 6aym assets. TL;DR: with that game, I'd thought about having NES-era Final Fantasy sprites display above characters instead of using a more generic player indicator.
None of the other characters were ever implemented, neither here nor in Teh 6aym, but it's an interesting bit of trivia for those who care about that sort of thing.

Conclusion:
I Wanna B The Clock was a fun, quick game made for shits and giggles that I think ended up being a little too addictive.
I Wanna B The Clock, while basically a glorified shitpost, does give me a lot of confidence: if I can get people to touch the letter B 3,500 times, I can't wait to see what I can do with my next project: Super SimLove Tactics (which should be my first Steam release)!

The Projects that Never Were

I recently stumbled upon a blogpost by Edmund McMillen about all the projects that never were, and I've always found it fascinating... so I guess I'll rip it off.
Unlike McMillen's blogposts, however, most of these lack any sort of screenshots.

Karrion Killer 2
I still have hope this one will happen for halloween 2021, so I won't talk too much about it. Some changes, some new stuff, but I wanted to kinda innovate on what Karrion Killer did, just by changing up the way some stuff worked to be more fun.
Boss fights might work here too... I dunno.

Tunneler
Tunneler never got very far, but I'm working on something of a revival of the original concept. You just dug tunnels underground, and tried to survive in a subterranean environment.

Paf
Paf was another French-language RPGMaker game I was working on briefly about a little caveman named Paf. I was trying to make something that had a large Fallout-esque world in a Zelda 1 structure, but it never really got far before I gave up.

Boil King
A Pokemon-type RPG I was making out of my frustration with Monster Crown scrapping most of my work without telling me.
It ended up a bit too ambitious in some areas, but I'd like to try making it properly sometime in the future: my ideas for the game were pretty good in my opinion, and I think it could be done quite well if I had the spare time to dedicate to such a large-scale game.
Paf was kind of a test for the overworld system I was going to use here.
Unlike most other Pokemon-esque indies, I was more influenced by Fossil Fighters and Fallout New Vegas. You needed to find each mutant out in some area of the wild before recruiting it, and the only "infinite" monsters you could use were human slaves.

Retrospective: Everything I've Made

I think I've just finished making about seven games now!
For fun, I thought I'd write some short retrospectives on my past work: what I like, what I hate, and if they're worth playing still:

2017
Monochrome Memories:

It's sort of weird even talking about this one, because it's barely even a game. I see it more as a set of public experiments with the RPGMaker engine that I put out when I was a dumb 16 year old kid, and it's very clear that it was trying to ride the coattails of Yume Nikki.
That said, I think I learned a lot with this one: a lot of it was coding, for sure, but it was an important stepping stone with my creative process:
With a lot of games after this one (especially Beetle Ninja), I would draw a lot of the aesthetics and character designs from dreams. After this game, I got a blank book to start writing down dreams, which would eventually help out on subsequent games.
Fun fact: this is actually where I got the design for the seeds of rebirth in Beetle Ninja from.

2020
Gate to Hades:

Gate to Hades was sort of designed to be similar to Hotel Mario. I thought its gameplay loop had potential to be fun if designed a bit more appropriately. Unfortunately, I didn't actually do this, and it turned out to be a frustrating game with lots of collision issues.
I think it could be done loads better today if I decided to redo it with another programmer, but I think the character designs were fun.

Where the Moon Goes At Night:

Where the Moon Goes At Night is by far the most popular game I've ever made. It's also consequently one of the least deserving of that title in my opinion, but it is what it is. I made most of it in high school, and then finished it up during a little of my time in university.
The primary influences for the game were probably Giftpia and I Wanna Be The Guy, but I wanted to design something that felt like a very "old" indie game, like something you'd find on tigsource back in '09, especially from the RPGMaker scene. I thought at the time, and still sort of do, that a lot of games made in RPGMaker are very circlejerk-ish, mimicking OFF and Yume Nikki endlessly without much deviation from these games.
It's wild, and very weird, and showcases my aesthetic in a fairly nice way I'd say. I'm still proud of a few small moments, but I don't consider it as noteworthy as I think most others tend to claim it to be.

Château des Lapins (Castle of the Rabbits):

One of the two quick demos for games I made in French following Where the Moon Goes At Night, and this one is probably the better of the two.
There's some roughness of course, and I do think the coding tends to be a little fuck-y, but conceptually, I think it could easily be done well in a different engine.

Jardin De Squelette (Garden of skeleton):

I still really like most of the puzzles here, all of them are a bit outside of the box, and the use of older compositions in an 8 bit style is a nice creative choice I think.
The atmosphere is the eeriest of any game I've made so far, I think when coupled with all the other elements.
The only part I don't like is that it's way too short, and it's a bit too cryptic with some of the elements, but it comes together well in my opinion.

Karrion Killer:

The first Newgrounds project I worked on that I'd consider a good game. There is for sure room to improve on it: some of the enemies feel a tad cheap, and you sort of struggle to find things out at first. The conclusion is also a bit underwhelming to some, I think which definitely ends up disappointing some.
I think an endless version of Karrion would definitely be cool, and I'd like to see how a "Super Karrion Killer" would be...

Beetle Ninja:

Without a shadow of a doubt, Beetle Ninja is easily the best game I've ever made. The world is really fun, and my character design was on point here.
There are a handful of small issues I had though, most of which were corroborated by a few friends:
The plot elements involving Beetle Ninja's backstory are unnecessary and intrusive, the first hallucination is needless and over-explains things that don't need explaining, and there's a few bits where it gets to be a bit tiresome: I don't want to hear the backstories of all these characters really, that's not the type of game I think a lot of people wanted with this.

2021:

Rat Game:

It's still unfinished, but I did a lot of the character design for the next big update of Rat Game by Levi Ramirez. We'll see how it turns out.