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In this edition of our (irregular) Origin Stories series, indie developer Alex Neuse talks about the genesis of the Bit.Trip series and Bit.Trip Runner, his "severely retro" design aesthetic, coming up with the idea for Canabalt before Canabalt, and much more.
Read on for an exclusive look at Runner's development and influences, including screens of a very early target mock up and a super-bare-bones prototype. Neuse even gave us hand-drawn cut-scene storyboards straight from his sketchbook!
Alex Neuse: So basically, the initial concept behind Bit.Trip Runner in particular is that we wanted a sort of run-and-jump platforming game, kind of on par with some of those older games on the Atari 2600 like Pitfall!, Jungle Hunt, or even H.E.R.O., if you remember that one.
We also needed to evolve the character and story a bit by game four. It was a very deliberate move that we built up the abstract stuff in the first three games, which kind of represents the abstraction of what it means to be a human. And then we explore what it means to actually play as a human in game number four, with Bit.Trip Runner.
The running and the jumping and everything was an inspiration from those old platformers, and then it's kind of two-fold with having you control a human and giving a meaning to the story that's more advanced from the earlier games. Then we just kind of went for it.
BITMOB: So Commander Video's human?
AN: Oh yeah, man! He's been a human the whole time! What did you think he was?
BITMOB: I thought maybe he had his own thing going on…maybe was some kind of 8-bit alien.
AN: No way. He's going to be so offended.
At the end of Bit.Trip Beat he exclaims, "I am only a man." Well, actually, is he a human? I don't know, I can only trust him. Because he says "I am only a man" — I guess I've taken that for granted. He kind of sounds like a robot, but I think he's a human, yeah.
"At the very beginning of each game we work on, our artist, Mike Roush, creates a mock-up screenshot of what we think we want the game to look like. This gives the team a visual road map for production and helps us to retain focus on what we want. In almost every case, the final game ends up looking somewhat different from the mock up, but the feeling and the direction always remains."
BITMOB: Can you address some particulars about how the earlier games in the series explored what it was like to be a human in an abstract way?
AN: Sure. I want to keep it a little bit vague, still, because there's room for speculation. One of the things I like about really good art, or meaningful art, is that people can interpret it in different ways, and so I wouldn't want to say that this is the one interpretation of our games. But really what we set out to do is tell the story of the "everyman." So it starts in Bit.Trip Beat with sort of transitioning from the ethereal to the corporeal, and by the end of Bit.Trip Beat Commander Video kind of learns what he is, and that's when he says "I am only a man."
And then in Bit.Trip Core, you kind of see his body developing, and his motor skills, and his physicality taking shape. He realizes that there are other things that are on this planet that are also doing that; there are other people like him. At the end of Bit.Trip Core he has the realization that "I am not alone."
And then in Bit.Trip Void, we sort of delve into his psyche, and what it means to have emotions and personal space. Not only what it means to have those things, but to use and abuse them. By the time Runner hits, Commander Video has become a master of all of these things and now he's taken the world on by storm, in a very physical way, a very tactile way, for the first time. So that's it in a nutshell — it gets a little bit wackier than that, but that's the gist.
"Before we start production on any of our games, we work on a prototype to prove the fun-ness-ibility. As you can see, our prototypes look like pants, but as I've always said, great graphics do not a good game make. This prototype proved the Runner concept and allowed us to move forward with production with complete confidence."
BITMOB: So you came up with all of the individual game concepts for the Bit.Trip series all in the beginning, and you have them all laid out right now?
AN: Definitely. At the beginning of the series we looked at the type of game we wanted to make as a team of three people — and a lot of the restrictions that come with being a team of three people — so we needed something simple, something that we could do.
I had wanted to make some severely retro games for a long time, and I say severely retro because it's more like Atari 2600 than the NES retro style, which is also awesome. I wanted to make a bunch of these high-concept games, because a lot of the 2600 stuff is very wacky, very out there. You know, you've got olives chasing propeller beanies, elk that don't look like elk, they look like aliens — there's weird stuff on the 2600. I wanted to get into some of that, and kind of deconstruct games into sort of bizarre concepts that are still fun even if you don't understand them entirely.
So I wrote down, I don't know, eight or 10 game ideas, and the team got together here at Gaijin Games and we chose the six strongest that we thought we had. We were trying to decide on one game to make, and we really loved all six of these ideas. So we decided, why not make a series? And then I wove it all together with this story that really made a lot of sense over the course of six games, and I think that players are really going to realize by game six just how much meaning each previous game had in it.
So yeah, we've known what they were going to be from the beginning — surely they've changed a little bit here and there — and we know how the series is going to end, and it's going to be awesome.
BITMOB: I love that term "severely retro."
AN: Yeah, I hadn't thought of it that way before, but it sounded good when I said it just now.
BITMOB: Can you point to some really specific influences on Runner — I know you already mentioned Pitfall!, and I've seen one level that looks very much like a Pitfall! environment….
AN: Definitely. There are several very specific examples to give you in that regard. I think the strongest one is Vib Ribbon for the PlayStation 1. You've played that, I'm sure?
BITMOB: Yeah — a loooong time ago.
AN: It's a rhythm-music platformer, black-and-white vector graphics, you know, your little rabbit, frog prince, whatever he is is running constantly, and you're just hitting the button to the beat of the music to overcome all these obstacles. So that was a huge inspiration; we played a fair amount of Vib Ribbon at the office.
And then, of course, Pitfall! was another big one that we drew from. We wanted to make one of the levels in Bit.Trip Runner — it ended up being level two — very reminiscent of the color scheme and the palette in Pitfall!, and that was really fun and cool.
Then I guess you could also maybe say that Donkey Kong: Jungle Beat was a little bit of an inspiration, but we were looking at that in terms of how does one play a platformer with a rhythm kind of vibe to it.
Those are maybe the three biggest inspirations.
[Continued on page 2.]
BITMOB: So did you come up with the idea for Runner even before Canabalt came out?
AN: [Laughs.] Yeah, we did, actually. Our plan was in place for Runner when we started Bit.Trip Beat — we knew what game number four was going to be. It is funny, though, that you mention Canabalt, because our last level in Bit.Trip Runner was going to be jumping across rooftops of gray buildings as the city was in kind of this disarray. And then we played Canabalt, and we were just like, "Oh man, Adam Atomic did this!"
We're friends with him, so we emailed him and were like, "Ah, dude, we're making this game — and it was going to be like your game!" So we kind of backpedaled a little bit; we took it down off of the rooftops and into the city. Although I don't think that Adam Atomic would've minded…it just felt more like the right thing to do. But then we did add a little section of running on the rooftops — you've got to be true to your vision.
BITMOB: That's funny. It's interesting how that fairly simple mechanic is kind of going crazy right now — Canabalt, Robot Unicorn Attack….
AN: And Tomena Sanner just came out for WiiWare, that's an autorunning platformer as well.
BITMOB: Tomenawhat?
AN: Tomena Sanner? It's on WiiWare and it's 500 points, and it's super bizarre. Like, I don't even know if I can call it a good game, but it's definitely worth 500 points. You have to have it. It's very weird.
I think it's cool that there's this whole new genre coming out, you know, Canabalt, Bit.Trip Runner, Tomena Sanner, the unicorn thing you mentioned, all these games where you're autorunning and you're just sort of spazzing out, hitting these buttons with this timing — and it's ultra precise timing that you need. I like to think that great minds think alike, and we're all together and rockin' it.
BITMOB: It's interesting to see a new genre suddenly emerge that's based on such a simple and elegant gameplay mechanic. It's kind of like when tower defense suddenly blew up — it's the classic "why didn't I think of that five years ago?"
AN: It is neat. That's one of the things that appeals to me, at least, but I think it also appeals to a lot of gamers — the simplicity of this genre. You know what you have to do; you just have to do it with that precision. And if you can nail that then you know you're going to do well. And if you fail, you know exactly what you did wrong. There's a certain elegance in the discrete nature of that success or failure, and I think that's cool.
BITMOB: The interaction of gameplay and music is a big theme throughout the Bit.Trip series. How does that change in Runner, or does it? It seems like you aren't directly influencing the music quite as much as you were in the previous games.
AN: You're absolutely right, you're not as involved in creating or playing with the music in Bit.TripRunner. It's still a musical game, and you do interact with the music in meaningful ways, but it's a lot less sort of deliberate musical interaction. There's a very specific reason why we've gone that direction with Bit.Trip Runner, and that's because, as Commander Video continues on his journey, he is less and less in touch with what he was in touch with in Bit.Trip Beat. So that ethereal sort of soul, if you want to call it a soul, whatever Commander Video was before he became a human is now more and more fleeting.
I think people will find, in game five, a really interesting spin on that [as] we take that idea a little bit further still. So yes, you're definitely noticing a little less musical interaction, but no less musical a game.
BITMOB: What did you look to when you were working on the kick and slide moves?
AN: In terms of his moves, the most direct influence was Super Mario Bros. for his jump. We've got the jump in there where if you tap it he just does a little hop, and if you press and hold he does a longer jump. It didn't feel right for a long time in development, and then we really started looking into his jump to make sure it felt better and better.
When New Super Mario Bros. Wii came out, we brought that into the office, and we really started examining how the different jumps in that game felt and how they worked, and tried to get it as close to the Super Mario Bros. jump as we could. So that was one move that Commander Video does that had a lot of direct influence from some other games.
The slide, I would say — even though we didn't have a lot of sort of deconstructing of design methods used in other games, I often thought of the slide that was introduced in Mega Man 3. There's something about the slide in Mega Man 3 that feels so right to me; it always has. So that was one of the things that I kept trying to think about while we were working on the slide.
His kick kind of actually came about because those brick walls in Pitfall! just pissed me off so much. You want to go through them, because you know that that's the fastest way — and you can't. So we got a kick in there so that he could kick down walls in his way, because Commander Video will not be stopped.
BITMOB: I was kind of surprised when I first saw him kick in an early gameplay video — it's the first aggressive move Commander Video makes.
AN: That's true. You know, we thought about that; he actually had a couple other aggressive moves in there, too, that we ended up cutting. I'm not going to tell you about 'em right now, because we may add them into game number five, and I want them to be special and a surprise there.
But yeah, game number four, you're starting to see Commander Video dealing with the harsh reality of what it means to be in this world. And as you progress through the levels you'll kind of see what that means, as you see the serenity of the moon, the destruction of the wilderness, and the degradation of the city. It's more of a sad kind of a thing. So Commander Video's pulling out all the stops.
Cut-scene storyboards:
