Hello monster maniacs! As the one year anniversary of the
release of Kaiju Big Battel: Fighto Fantasy approaches, I’ve taken a
look back at the journey along the way. As with any project, the end
result is never exactly what we expect when we first get started; I’d
originally planned on making a 4-6 hour game that would release in early
2017! As the game got bigger, time for both Soda Piggy and myself
became more limited. Fortis was brought on to help finish some graphics
and some Glock & mr8bit tracks from older Super Walrus Games demos
got reused here. Certain things had to be scrapped or revamped in order
to reach a reasonable release date and a finished game we could all be
happy with. Here are some of the missing pieces and bits that evolved
along the way. Heavy spoilers ahead for the entire game!
Title Screen
The game’s title screen went through three versions. Here’s the original, used in the game’s initial reveal:
I love this art, but it gives away all of the game’s important characters. Vegetius in particular works better as a late-game surprise. It’s a great promotional piece, but less functional as a title screen; the game’s menus simultaneously covered too much of it and were too hard to read with so much going on around them.
This
was the second version, a title screen that plays up the Final Fantasy
parody aspect more prominently. It’s clear, clean, and menus integrate
nicely with it. This ended up being the screen we used in the final
game.
This was the final title screen drawn and it was used in the game for a long time before we switched back to design #2. The reasoning here was that this art already appears in the game’s "What is Kaiju?" introduction scene, so seeing it twice in such a short time when starting a new game felt redundant. We also used this graphic (and variations of it) in much of the game’s promotional art on Steam, where it worked well at a variety of sizes.
Hero Sprites
At
first, the game used a more realistically proportioned art style for
its characters. This was changed fairly early in development when we
switched to a cartoonier style that made it faster and easier to design
characters along more standardized templates.
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| American Beetle and Silver Potato concept sprites in The Abyss |
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| Final hero graphics |
The
original art wouldn’t go unused! Recolored versions of the original
hero sprites would be used for the Evil Clone Hero battle graphics
players encounter towards the end of the game.
Graphics Development
For
much of the game’s development I used hideous placeholders I quickly
threw together for NPCs instead of waiting on Soda Piggy to finish art
for each character before developing areas of the game. This helped the
development move forward at a mostly steady pace as we each worked on
our own part. Some of his early NPCs underwent redesigns as development
continued, so let’s take a look at one of those guys.
Here
we see a Roman senator who's thrown his support behind Dr. Cube. In the
top left we have my hideous placeholder graphic used during
development. To the right, Soda Piggy's first draft of the character. At
the bottom, the completed work!
In
later parts of the game I would draw handfuls of NPCs myself while Soda
worked on the game’s remaining large format graphics and Fortis took the
reigns on smaller enemy sprites. I took existing sprites and recolored,
modified, and moved bits and pieces to make them work and hopefully
blend in well with Soda’s work!
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Modern day club-goers wearing recolored, modified Roman togas
|
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| One of Fortis’ enemy sprites |
Hero HQ
The
Kaiju Hero HQ underwent major revisions some time after the game’s
first public demo was released. Originally it was a series of six
rounded rooms that you traveled between using a central elevator.
I
liked the animation for the elevator but during testing quickly became
tired of waiting for it as I moved between each floor. If this was
frustrating me, it would have driven players crazy! I took a couple of
weeks to fully remap HQ, which involved rewriting a lot of code for
cutscenes, NPC behavior, etc. to fit the new map layouts. The final HQ
would keep most of the original graphics but connect the rooms side by
side, eliminating the need for the elevator. Much faster to explore with
no downtime for the player.
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| New HQ also got a kitchen and a couple of bathrooms |
Another
change to HQ was a cut that made me a little sad but made sense. That
disco floor in the Party Room was originally functional; each hero could
perform a unique dance that would give an XP boost the first time and
teach Dusto Bunny his ultimate spell once the player had seen every
dance.
Turns out scripting and
animating dances that actually looked good took a ton of time! The only
one I finished was American Beetle’s and I wasn’t thrilled by it. With
development running long, there were more important places to prioritize
than this goofy side bit. Instead, Dusto now learns his ultimate spell
by interviewing each hero for his radio show. Less visually appealing,
but does more to flesh out the characters.
Game Flow
Originally,
players would explore Rome as the game’s first major area after
finishing the introductory section. We built a miniature version of the
Rome map for use in the game’s first public play session at PAX East
2016. This was before we’d really settled on a visual style, so the Rome
pictured here looks quite a bit different from what made it into the
final game.
Early
in development, I decided to swap the Rome and Egypt zones around.
There were a couple reasons for this: First, I decided to make the
game’s time travel plot follow a linear progression through time, rather
than the original plan to jump back and forth in history. The Egypt
section takes place earlier in history so it makes sense to visit that
one first. Second, the Roman zone was always planned to be a large city
with lots of careful exploration and tons of NPCs to talk to. I thought
this might be a little overwhelming to new players, so Egypt’s open
desert with a small town and a few important locations felt like a more
natural way to ease players into the game’s world and flow.
Aside
from swapping their position in the story, design concepts for Rome and
Egypt didn’t change much during development. The initial designs of
Russia and Boston went largely unchanged too, though Russia probably
needed some more direction and another revision or two, given the
negative audience reactions to that zone.
Tokyo
This
brings us to the biggest development change to the game’s story and
design, one that I believe ultimately worked out for the best: Tokyo
2016.
After leaving 1970’s Boston,
players would travel to Tokyo a mere two years in the past from when the
game takes place. There would be a bunch of jokes about how long ago
this all feels and the heroes would run into past versions of themselves
that they’d brawl with. You would go to a bar/restaurant and watch an
old Kaiju Big Battel match on the TV while the heroes reminisce.
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| Vegetius would be the game's largest sprite by far. |
Eventually the peace would be
shattered by the arrival of Vegetius, a colossal turtle Kaiju who towers
above the city. Players would fight him at ankle-height and not be able
to do a thing, forcing the heroes to retreat and come up with a real
plan for once. They would then need to seek out three scientists
throughout the city who could work together to build a device that would
allow the heroes to become super huge, each of whom is currently
occupied by gangsters, Dr. Cube cultists, or monsters. The longer
Vegetius spent in the city, the more tears would begin to appear in time
and space, and portals would start dropping junk from other time zones
into Tokyo.
After the heroes got huge
they’d defeat Vegetius and seal the rifts around town. Just as the last
one seals, they’re sucked into a portal that takes them back into The
Abyss, where they’d encounter a Keeper of Time who explained how their
adventures had mangled history terribly before giving them Cube’s final
location: The Moon in the year 3030.
This
area would have required a substantial amount of new graphics at a time
when development was already behind schedule. Some basic structures
from Boston would have been reused, but we would have needed a ton of
new signs, lots of neon, and totally different interiors.
Dr.
Cube also didn’t really have any role in this zone. Egypt has him
raiding the pyramid, Rome has him secretly working behind the scenes to
manipulate politics, Russia has him attacking the survivor HQ, and
Boston has his whole radio show schtick; with Tokyo, his goons would be
out causing trouble but he wouldn’t be directly involved in any of the
Vegetius story. This felt a little weak after he played such a prominent
role in the Boston zone story.
It was
a tough decision but the correct one to cut Tokyo from development.
Instead, after completing Boston players are sucked into a void much
like the one that would have appeared in Tokyo post-Vegetius. Now,
players find themselves in The New Abyss, showing the initial area from
the game’s introduction growing into a thriving landscape full of weird
mutants and distorted artifacts. This became a fully fleshed out area,
rather than a small room where a Keeper of Time would dump some
exposition.
As they would have in
Tokyo, players explore New Abyss sealing time rifts and ultimately
confronting a giant Vegetius, though they never become huge themselves.
Rather than fighting their past selves, the heroes battle evil clone
versions here and in the next zone. Dusto’s clone, Worsto Bunny, was
referenced post-Russia and moved to Boston so the whole cloning theme
doesn’t come out of nowhere.
I was
able to reuse and modify graphics from throughout the game to create
this amalgam area, bringing all of the visuals and themes up to this
point together into one messy mixture of chaos. Gameplay reflects this,
with the optional Abyssal Coliseum bringing back enemies and locations
from the entire game. It really sells how badly both the heroes and Dr.
Cube have befouled the timeline, and the Keeper of Time was replaced by
the much jokier Head of State in order to really explain the damage. New
Abyss would become my favorite part of the game, in spite of originally
only being a blip in the storyline. Skipping Tokyo helped streamline
both development and the story, and the end result is a greatly expanded
version of the game’s strangest area.
Cats
One
of the earliest side quests implemented in the game was that in each
zone players could find and adopt a different cat, culminating in a
visit at Hero HQ from a spirit who grants the player with a powerful new
attack after testing them in combat.
Originally
that spirit was going to be the ghost of Polo Cato, a long-forgotten
Kaiju Big Battel character. In spite of not actually being a cat, Polo
Cato would appear as a sort of guardian for the lost pets and would be
one of three super bosses to appear towards the end of the game.
Unfortunately
no good visual references for this character seem to exist anywhere!
The best we had was the picture above, which doesn’t really show the
character in enough detail to work off of. I reached out to a couple
people at Studio Kaiju but it seems no one has any better image of him.
I
ultimately decided that it was fine to just cut this character and that
no one would miss him. Instead players meet the Queen of All Cats, an
ancient god figure depicted a tubby tabby in a crown. She congratulates
them for their acts of kindness and there’s no boss fight, just a
feel-good conclusion to a game-long side story.
Sea Amigos
This one was a bit of a bummer to cut, but there wasn’t enough time or budget at the end to add these guys to the game.
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| The Three Sea Stooges |
When players explore Boston, the pond on
Boston Common is foul, filled with trash spewed by the monster Gomi-Man.
After completing the zone, players are immediately whisked to New
Abyss, but if you do go back to Boston later and explore the area again
you’ll find that the water has now been cleaned up and looks nice and
blue.
The fresh, clean water would
play host to a three-man team of watery Kaiju rogues: D. W. Cycloptopuss
III, Unibouzu, and Call Me Kevin. The fight would involve the three Sea
Amigos using moves that boosted each other’s abilities while wearing
down the heroes, forcing players to focus on debuffing as much as on
doing damage.
This fight would have
involved three new large boss graphics, NPC graphics to go along with
them, new attack animations, and a new battle venue. It would have been
easily missable by players and simply wasn’t feasible to add by the end
of development and had to go before any development had started on this
side content. This is the one side quest I would love to revisit and add
back in if the game is ever successful enough to warrant going back.
Dino Kang Hero
Dino
Kang, the squeaky boss of the Egypt zone, was going to be a playable
hero in a side game unrelated to the main content. It would unlock from
the title screen menu after a certain point in the story had passed and
would feature Dino Kang jumping into the time machine alone and
rampaging through the Age of Dinosaurs, eventually meeting his own mom
and getting a tearful goodbye (with his squeaks in place of any real
dialogue.)
This
was planned very early on but cut before we reached the midpoint in
development. It would require an enormous amount of resources to build
an entirely new time period, multiple new dinosaur buddies, and a whole
host of other graphics. I couldn’t justify the time it would take away
from finishing the actual game, even if it would have been a fun zone.
Hero Intern Program
After
the Dino Kang plot was scrapped, I started planning another side game
that would unlock after completing the main plot. Players would build a
custom Hero Intern using selectable bits and pieces from the game’s
various NPCs and the Kaiju Heroes would send that character out to
previous zones to perform menial tasks, ie. going back to Rome to return
a hat Pedro had borrowed from the groundskeeper he befriended.
This
one wouldn’t have needed much in the way of new resources, but I also
couldn’t really find a good way to make it fun. The joke behind it all
was that by performing all these crappy tasks the Intern was the actual
hero who saves the world, completely unknown to the Kaiju Heroes. I
liked that idea but so much of what was planned revolved around fetch
quests and I just didn’t want to do that to the player. This was another
piece I’ve considered revisiting if possible, but as for now it’s left
in the dust bin.
The Ending/Sequel Hook
I
always knew that the game’s finale would involve brawling with Dr. Cube
on the Moon in 3030, but what happened after that changed a few times.
Very,
very early on, before I’d even completed Egypt, I planned on having the
player defeat Dr. Cube and then have Kaiju Big Battel’s alien warlord
Uchu Chu the Space Bug descend for a final battle, forcing the heroes
and Cube to team up to beat him. This was dumped pretty quickly; I
wanted to do the whole "Surprise villain is the REAL final boss" thing
that so many Final Fantasy games have done, but Uchu Chu is an
established character in the Kaiju universe who would be too big to
throw in for a one-shot fight with no story.
Instead,
the surprise final boss would become a giant, Cube-infused version of
the Goobles, the gooey monsters that torment players throughout the
game. This allowed for a more bizarre looking demon enemy, one that
required a lot less story behind it while simultaneously making a lot
more sense within the context of the game.
Once
Uchu Chu was dumped as a boss fight, I thought about putting his space
ship in the game’s final shot of the Moon or having a cutscene where
Dusto Bunny intercepts a subspace transmission before cutting to
credits. This was thrown out very quickly when I stopped and thought
about how much I personally hate "Well, that’s that! But tune in NEXT
TIME to see the REAL threat!" endings that keep cropping up in action
movies these days. So, Uchu Chu and friends were instead relegated to an
arcade minigame. Apologies to the Space Bug fans out there!
As
for sequels, the one I had planned involved Dr. Cube escaping the
heroes’ beatdown at the end and firing up his time-traveling Space Slug
one last time before it explodes. He’d vanish from history, undoing the
damage he’d done throughout the game, leaving the heroes perplexed about
what had just happened. Still, they’d think, "Whatever, job well done!
Let’s eat some Hero Cake."
Meanwhile,
Cube would find himself waking up in a new dimension, an altered reality
where the Kaiju Heroes ruled Earth as tyrants. The sequel would involve
him traveling the world recruiting his allies to take down these
maniacal ex-heroes. The former heroes would have teamed up with Uchu
Chu, using Space Bug technology to control the Earth. Cube would be seen
as a hero to the people, but really he’d still be the same selfish jerk
he always was, fighting not to liberate the nations of Earth but just
to take down his rivals so he could take over again.
Thinking
back on those ideas, having the freedom fighter who battles to save the
world from dictators and space colonialism be a villain who’s only in
it for the power, fame, and money is not a message I wanted to send. It
feels tasteless and cynical to me now, where Fighto Fantasy is defined
by colorful optimism even in the face of terrible threats.
There
are no plans for a sequel at this time, and I decided to end Fighto
Fantasy with actual closure rather than a sequel hook. Cube’s captured,
history’s saved, and now there’s two of each hero running around to get
into trouble. I think it feels very complete, in spite of the bits and
pieces we lost along the way!
Thanks
for reading this look at Fighto Fantasy’s cutting room floor, and thank
you most of all to those fans who supported this game from announcement
all the way through release! Happy anniversary, Fighto Fantasy!
