Project Betelgeuse Developer Diary 006 (Patreon)

Disclaimer: Everything about this project is subject to change. It’s not ready until it’s ready.

With that out of the way, it’s finally time to reveal some stuff about the world of Betelgeuse. First up, our protagonist.

This insectoid samurai is our main character. I’m delighted to finally show him so I’m fighting the urge to talk about him at length. As much as I’d like to give you a full breakdown right now, it seems like a bad idea to get analytical about something you’re seeing for the first time. Visuals should speak for themselves after all. That said, I’m interested in what kind of impression he makes so feel free to let me know below.

Anyway now that you’ve seen the protagonist, let’s rewind to the moment of inspiration, which actually took place on this very Patreon. Several years ago I made a post about Irish Influences in Japanese Media. It didn’t fit with my repertoire of videos but I thought it was an interesting topic nonetheless. At the time I skimmed over the towering presence of Dracula since it almost seemed like cheating to classify everything it influenced as somehow Irish in origin just because it had an Irish author. Privately I found this very interesting though. Here you have Castlevania, a series inspired by European myths, architecture and (especially) the films which sprang up from Dracula. That game was made on the other side of the globe but to me it’s all quite local. Living in Ireland you’re never very far from an old castle or ruin of some sort. Bram Stoker was born and raised in Dublin, just like myself. So what if I reversed the premise? Wouldn’t it be fun to make an action platformer with a Japanese aesthetic? I immediately pictured a samurai standing in front of a huge pagoda and that image has come back to me over and over again.

Already we’re halfway towards our samurai. The other half is explained by my disappointment that so many games are about human struggles on a world exactly (or almost exactly) like our own. Don’t get me wrong, I think many great games fit that description but I just don’t think I could be satisfied making a game which was actually set in Japan, no matter how much that version of Japan stretched the truth. That said, the aesthetic of Samurai versus Pagoda was totally crucial as the initial spark of inspiration so we set about creating a character who could match the silhouette and act the part without being human. A beetlesque insectoid was the obvious choice. And yes this is why I chose the title Betelgeuse. Don’t bother thinking too hard about the other codenames, this is the only cheeky one.

Longtime viewers will find it no surprise that the Oddworld games made a strong early impression on me. I still think about how if felt to play them back then because it seemed like the possibilities of games were truly endless. For me, Oddworld was proof that a game could take you to a completely different world which had its own history, its own creatures and rules. Despite how strange a world might be, it can feel “real” with enough thought and it’s always enjoyable to me when I see a weird setting be fleshed out in meaningful ways. I’m totally committed to making a simple action platformer where the priority is tight, satisfying gameplay (a Goblike if you will) so I know there’s only so much “reality” we can bring to the table but I’d really like to try all the same. Thankfully, this is one point that my colleague and I are in total agreement about. She initially struggled to create characters because she takes this kind of cohesion very seriously but didn’t know what was or wasn’t permitted by the setting. This made me step up and envision/explain the world more completely for her. As a result, I ended up writing a ton of history which gave her more material to pull from. It’s not that the narrative itself will play a big role, just that these details can help explain different facets of the world. I suppose an example is in order.

Two types of mollusk, the bottom one is many individuals working together.

There are several intelligent species in the world of Betelguese but naturally there are lower intelligence creatures too. Mollusks tend to have lower intelligence. Some crawl along ceilings and try to impale anything underneath. Others clump together using this stringy material (which I’m told is their guts) and form a pitfall trap colony. Others are much larger and are used as beasts of burden by more intelligent creatures. This gives us some enemies to work with but also tells us something about the world: shells of various shapes and sizes will be plentiful. When the game takes place, the most advanced insectoid technology might be a matchlock pistol. In such a society, it’s not hard to imagine these shells being collected for storage or other purposes. For example if you want to hang a torch on a wall, maybe it makes sense to use a conical shell as the container. Although we have a reasonably good sense of the overall hierarchy already, we’re mostly working our way up from the bottom like this because creatures lower on the food chain (or chain of command) tend to inform how the creatures above them look or behave. My colleague has never played an Oddworld game and we’re not going for the same tone but I’ve been urging her to think along these lines. The art for those games reveal all kinds of cool considerations from the artists, such as how various species relate to each other evolutionarily. We’re trying to do something similar in our own way.

Larger mollusks concepts, we haven't settled on a shell shape yet.

On top of physiology there are other questions to consider. What weapons do they use? What relationships do they have with other creatures? What do they wear, if anything? And so on. You might have already imagined me to be a stickler for these kinds of details but my partner puts me to shame. She assures me that our samurai’s armour could sit comfortably and provide a free range of movement while also being possible to equip from the bottom up since a top down approach would be made difficult by his shell. Maybe it’s absurd to be asking these questions for a Goblike - especially when it’s all going to be rendered down to pixels at the end of the day - but it’s something we both care about so we’re indulging ourselves for now. In my life as a critic, I like to think I advocated for developers to follow their own passions and ideals as much as possible so I’m trying to practice what I preached. Perhaps this focus will help us stand out from similar games or perhaps it will bury us under a mountain of details which nobody else values. Whatever the case, I’d rather fail at making a game I’m passionate about than succeed at making something just for the sake of it. You might not agree that a Goblike about an alien, insect samurai could ever be grounded but that’s the way we’re thinking about it, strange as that may be.

On the plus side, I think this grounded approach could have interesting mechanical ramifications. It’s always bugged me when you have a guy who throws daggers or bombs and he’ll just sit there throwing stuff for a million years if you let him. Where are all those bombs coming from? Maybe you don’t care but I do so I want to address it somehow. I’m not looking to craft Rain World style AI here but it seems to me that if we put care into the setting it would be a shame to ruin that with Infinite Bomb Guy throwing constant reminders that everything is artificial. I want to have ranged attackers but I also want them to have an excuse for their infinite ammo or a second behaviour for when that ammo runs out. These kinds of branching possibilities are engaging anyway because you have to be prepared for anything. The “bullet hell” aspect of Ghost ‘n Goblins is distinct precisely because the bullets have such complicated behaviour. Predictable but complex, that’s the goal.

Likewise, I had been wracking my brain about how we should handle the player’s health but thinking about this in a grounded way seems to have solved the problem for me. As you might have guessed, reducing our samurai into his little beetle undies wouldn’t suit the tone of this particular game but health can be conveyed in more grounded ways. My current plan is to simply change the character’s standing pose depending on how healthy he is. This would require you to stand still in order to assess your health but you never want to take damage anyway so it’s not vital to know exactly how much health you have at all times. Some of you might recall I made a similar argument about visible checkpoints in my New ‘n Tasty video. I suppose speedrunners might not like this decision but it’s not a speed game in my mind anyway. Overall the grounded approach seems to act as a nice guiding light for us to follow. If we’re not sure what path to take, it helps keep us on track.

To reiterate, this will not be a narratively focused game, to the point that I don’t even envision any dialogue or cutscenes whatsoever. That said, I’d like to create an intriguing world where players can piece together details by paying attention to the environment and maybe a few scripted events that happen along the way. I have several ideas for this kind of storytelling already and I suppose their inclusion depends on our ability to execute them or how burned out we become along the way. Personally, I’m excited to tackle those segments and think they will add some flavour if we can pull them off.

Going back to our protagonist, I know he’s an insect but that’s nothing special where he comes from so I think of him primarily as a samurai. As such I think of this as a samurai game first and foremost. Unfortunately I’ve never had the chance to visit Japan myself so the bulk of my research for the samurai vibe has been watching a bunch of films. This is a probably an appropriate approach anyway since my initial source of inspiration was Castlevania. You get the impression that many Japanese games set abroad were primarily filtered through the lens of movies anyway, like the Resident Evil series’ view of America. Castlevania is certainly no exception there and I’m returning the favour by taking inspiration from films like Yojimbo.

Note the two swords.

Here’s a few things which struck me about these movies. Firstly, they’re bleak. There seems to be a lot of peasants barely scraping by and samurai taking jobs just to survive. The sheer feudality of it is front and center which is something Betelgeuse will almost certainly inherit. Secondly - and this is maybe a strange thing to get hung up on - there are more guns than I expected. There’s tons of guns in Ran and a gun plays a big role in Yojimbo. I really wasn’t sure if we should include guns at first but watching these films convinced me they would be a perfectly fine inclusion which was a relief because they open up a lot of possibilities. Thirdly, this is something which is easy to overlook as a foreigner but proper samurai always have two swords. This was a well-worn tradition and it seemed like the kind of detail we have to honour if we’re going to do the samurai thing right. Lastly, samurai tales are bleak but not nihilistic. You can question whether the events of Seven Samurai were worth it but you can’t question the bravery of the men laying their life on the line in battle. There’s a noble aspect to a samurai, even if their cause is questionable.

Note the gun.

Looking at our guy, you’ll see points two and three got combined. When his gun is holstered it gives the impression of a second sword. We’re honouring the samurai visual but giving it a little twist which echoes the evolution of the main character himself. Essentially we’re transplanting certain aesthetics into an alien world and while I was a little reluctant about that aspect in the beginning, I’ve since come to fully embrace it. Once the samurai became a giant beetle there was really no point trying to resist the urge anymore so we might as well have fun subverting the visuals here and there. I think it’s cool to make stuff that looks like one thing but turns out to be another and it helps the world feel a little more alien in a way.

A small scarab creature, this might show up in a few places.

That brings me to my last tidbit. In keeping with those films I mentioned, Betelgeuse will have a bleak atmosphere but I don’t want it to be monotonous. The little scarab pictured above is still a work in progress so its design might change but if all goes to plan it will represent a different aspect of the tone. I don’t want to say levity since it’s not a comic relief character (don’t worry) but maybe something which helps the non-samurai aspects of the game to shine. It’s hard to explain without revealing more and the scarab itself isn’t playable or anything (don’t worry) but basically I think it’s a character which can provide some tonal variety without betraying the overall grim and serious vibe that a samurai story needs to shine. It seems inevitable that I’ll have to reveal more before development concludes but for now that’s all I’d like to say. Hopefully this little tease has been more intriguing than frustrating.

Before I finish I’d like to acknowledge that we still have a very long way to go. So far we have a rough “storyboard” of how the game will progress from level to level, a handful of enemy types in the concept phase, some more rough ideas of flora and fauna that might occupy the world, a few ideas for stage hazards and tricks, more ideas for setpieces and reprieves, you see what I’m saying. On the programming side I anticipate two more major hurdles to overcome, AI and Sound. The latter should be easy enough but knowing me I’ll find some way to dig myself into the weeds. (Perhaps we need a good way of handling footstep and impact noises for example.) AI will obviously be challenging, especially since I would prefer for them to be slightly smarter opponents than the average action platformer. Wish me luck with that one. Meanwhile my colleague needs to flesh out more enemy designs and consider what props we need for tiles and backgrounds. We plan to tackle the game in a mostly linear order so that if the project falls through we at least have something to show for it. Additionally I found the vertical slice approach very useful (when I was putting together Victor’s state machine) and I’m hopeful the same is true for art somehow. It might be beneficial to try making a single screen which looks finished so she can get a sense of how different assets need to work together. It seems difficult to make pixel art cohesive in that way so I reckon it’s a skill which is best cultivated sooner rather than later.

Perhaps this post has made Betelgeuse more concrete in your mind so I just want to warn you that it could still easily be abandoned at some point. The more we reveal, the more I feel obligated to succeed so having shown you a lot more, I’m genuinely sorry if we’re unable to bring it to fruition. Should that turn out to be the case I hope you can at least look back on this post and imagine what could have been. Until that day we’ll keep chiseling away, for what it’s worth we’re both more enthusiastic than ever. With a bit of luck we’ll ascend that pagoda some day.