Design Document Part 2

Hear me out:

Animal Crossing, but you’re a traveller who settles in a seemingly abandoned japanese village because you got a sweet deal on the real estate. Then you realize that the village is not abandoned and is inhabited by animal spirits! You can befriend them and do all the other typical animal crossing stuffs, but your goal is to help your villagers pass on. When they “move out”, you have successfully put their spirit to rest. And new spirits for you to help are always coming into the village. Please? (Oh, and also the only other “living” person in the village is a fennec fox shrine maiden named Safaia)

pixeled some 1-bit spooky bois. 

I really never post art here bc nobody ever sees it, but here are my fake y2k CD-Rom girl game rpg pieces anyway

planning to add some animation and music and make a little vid for them at some point

ICE WARS was a fantastically-popular vector scan game, featuring a thinly-veiled representation of the Soviet invasion of the Aleutian Islands early at the start of what became World War Short. It was also the game that turned struggling Vectorpoint into a major power in the field of arcade gaming, sponsoring three sequels, as well as the spin-off game SNOWMOBILE CARNAGE, one of the only vector-scan games ever to be rated AR for graphic violence. A tamer set of graphics was included on some supplemental ROMs, but they proved to be so unpopular that they were discontinued (and it’s one of the cases where the more-restricted version of the game ended up commanding higher prices on the collector market).

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Obviously ICE WARS is based on BATTLEZONE (1980), itself a fantastically-successful tank simulator (and one of the first realtime 3D games). It’s also an amazing technical achievement given the computing power of the time. The designers, Ed Otberg and Owen Rubin did so much to conceptualize digital space and set out basic rules for gaming within it. 

I learned a lot in the process of making up these screens and designs (themselves based on vehicles created for the Microgame ICE WAR (1979) by the eponymous Elohrir, though I wonder if that designer turned out to be someone else.) Probably the biggest lesson was that games like BATTLEZONE are really dominated by negative space. You don’t shoot at the vector lines, because your target lies in-between them.

The 12 Tracks of Christmas 2019 Track 3: Nightmares Won’t Chill (Course BGM #04) [from “Nightmare Busters”], by Denji Koshiro Original Track: Chilling Air

Don’t worry, folks; this album ain’t gonna turn into “R.I.P.1.0.3. x XMAS 2019”. Pinkie swear, this is a one off.

Nightmare Busters is an older project of mine that holds a special place in my heart; it was the first fully-fledged Gonkaka project I ever worked on and completed, as well as the first (and so far, the only full-length) chiptune project I’ve put together. If memory serves me correctly it’s initial release on 103 Records was the first release I ever charged for- this was before the “pay what you want or get for free” clause was mandatory. It definitely shows it’s age compositionally, as well as my inexperience in terms of sound design- not helped by the inconsistency of sound design between tracks (each piece basically uses entirely different sets of waveforms/“instruments”, which is not at all period-accurate for what was supposed to be an arcade game from the late 80s/early 90s)- but it’s only with the benefit of experience and hindsight that I can say all of that. And of course, none of that takes away from the fact that I sat down and put the time in to create an entire album using software I was pretty much completely knew with on a mobile device, working on rough “game design” documentation alongside it with help from Dio (who provided the excellent cover art). I did grow discontent with it after a period, and strongly enough to actually take the initial release of the album down, though cooler heads would eventually prevail and the idea to re-release it swam around in my head for a while before it eventually dropped in 2017, with the story surrounding it reworked to frame the version of Nightmare Busters that music was written for, in Gonkaka/Nincom lore, being an overly ambitious prototype from a freshly established company that collapsed under it’s own weight. The story does state however that Nightmare Busters was eventually revisited by Nincom, re-imagined for the console that in-universe stands in for the Playstation.

That’s where this song comes in, but first I should probably explain what Nightmare Busters is about. Like, the in-story game, I mean. Strap in folks; this is gonna be a long one. So much so in fact that I’m going to throw up a readmore to preserve the sanity of mobile users, but I encourage you to read further!

Keep reading

So a friend of mine from @mmmskulljuice‘s circle was talking about their desire to make a “submarine Zelda”, and I started drawing this little guy on the assumption that you’re playing AS the submarine. More ideas followed:

The title of the game is Foot-Long Hero. You play as a very small submarine drone who’s on a mission to visit five to eight dungeony areas above ground, but they can only be accessed from underwater. 

You can name your hero sub whatever you want, but his canon name is Hoagy. 

The villain’s name is Grinder.

Hoagy is a member of a wandering group of salvage drones who call themselves the Poor Boys.

Yes, we’re riding the sandwich puns hard in this.

Hoagy is a sentient, mobile vehicle in the tradition of classic game characters like Twin Bee and Opa-Opa. He gets hungry, scared, and has emotional reactions to things that happen in the game, but he’s still a machine and has interchangeable parts.

Hoagy is equipped with boots, boxing gloves, a propeller, and a nosecone. The boots and boxing gloves are only used while on land: the prop and nosecone come into play underwater. Each of his parts are interchangeable and he’ll find new propellers, boots and so on that will give him new powers.

Being a sub, Hoagy swims much faster than he can run. He’s highly mobile underwater, to the point where the underwater sections of the game are more like a top-down Zelda, whereas on land it’s a traditional side-scrolling platformer.

On land you can run, jump, launch your boxing gloves, and perform a special Periscope Flip, shown on the bottom, that lets you jump much higher. 

Underwater, you can not only launch your boxing gloves but also extend your periscope up to the top, which is a factor in solving many puzzles.

Later in the game you may even acquire a special hat that allows you to grab things with your periscope and pull yourself out of the water.

You can also play as a female-presenting sub, which adds eyelashes onto your periscope but otherwise doesn’t change the game. The canon name for the female sub hero is Baguette, but again you can call her whatever you want.

Blue Notes (2017) Printed digital label on Nintendo Famicom cartridge

Original cartridge design created for the My Famicase Exhibition 2017 held at METEOR in Tokyo, Japan.

NEW ALBUM: BOSS RUSH

OOPS! ALL BOSS THEMES (with accompanying 3d scene for each track!)

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