Created by: Polly
Testing, Feedback, and Good Ideas: John and Rhete
Background Art: Sayara-T
Music by: PANICPUMPKIN
Additional Testing by: Sraëka Lillian

So the thing with ASDF was when it came out, it did fairly well for how my games typically tend to catch on. I was seeing high scores posted on social media, in our Discord, and even a few stray emails here and there from people that were able to blow that game wide open. Along with that enthusiasm came a lot of requests for a sequel.

People wanted a sequel? To one of my games? Yep, they wanted one.

They wanted a very. specific. sequel.

Behold, the sequel that almost was: ASDF 2: Double Type.

This is legitimately what I was asked for over and over in conversations with people who liked the original game. This isn't me just making a joke. It's the most obvious path for a sequel, there's room to play around with the idea, and it continues the idea of ASDF being made because I liked typing.

I never got around to prototyping this version of the game beyond creating the playfield graphic above, but I was set on the name Double Type and had a couple ideas on how to spice the formula up. It's just not an idea that inspired me, though. It didn't feel exciting. It felt predictable, through the motions, and maybe even kind of too jokey in a way, if that makes sense.

A few months after the release SynchroniZ (and a month before the release of SynchroniZ Version 2.0), I decided to start fiddling with the idea of going back to basics a bit and maybe working on a shmup.

I'd been mulling over the idea of doing a shmup with the aesthetic and red/blue Boys™ gameplay for a while (yes, I guess that'd be a total rip off of Ikaruga in some ways, shut up!), but was leaning toward doing something kind of Space Invaders'ey with it.

I did play around with the initial idea of the player ship freely moving left and right on the ground and shooting red and blue bullets up at moving targets (unfortutnately no prototypes exist, sorry!), but in the middle of playtesting this, my mind visualized the ASDF playfield under it and suddenly something more interesting started taking shape.

Could I do a shmup with ASDF's rigid lane-based movement and mix that with some kind of color changing or shot color mechanic? Could ASDF's sequel blow completely by the original idea and instead evolve into some kind of neat shmup? This felt immediately more exciting to me than simply doing the obvious.

Sure, it was a huge leap from what people wanted, but I just had to find a new way to use the keyboard that still felt as seamless as ASDF and added a little more meat to the twitch-based gameplay, while adding new functionality that still felt as easy to pick up and play.

My first attempt was very. freaking. not. that!

(Weird aside, but this game's working title was "Tomato" until I'd finally decided to make it an ASDF sequel.)

ASDF 2 "Tomato" Version (2.34MB)

You really have to play this to understand how bad it feels, but for those that can't download let me explain.

This was way too overcomplicated. You still change lanes with the A, S, D, and F Keys like normal, but the firing and color swapping mechanics are awful. You use either the Up or Down Arrow Keys to fire and you can change your ship's color/attack color with the Spacebar and Left or Right Arrow Keys. You could fire a laser once it was charged with the G Key.

Just an absolute mess of controls. Rather than embracing the keyboard as a keyboard, this awkward and completely clunked-out mess of a control setup was trying to turn the keyboard into a gamepad, and it felt ridiculously ham-fisted.

When I sent this prototype to Rhete and John, it was painfully clear that I was off on the wrong foot. After a little discussion, the controls found themselves pared down to what they are now. J and K keys fire Blue and Red shots and Spacebar fires the laser. This new setup got the game back on track to feeling more like a TYPING game. Like I said in the ASDF commentary, I LOVE TYPING!

After the new control scheme was in place, I basically pulled Rhete and John into being co-developers through the rest of the game's development. Every idea went past them and they were probably sick of me sending new builds every other day or so or showing them video of some dumb new thing I added.

Their input was vital though, and it was also the first time I really let anyone in on my development process without it being a direct collaboration. I always valued doing things in secrecy because I wanna surprise people, but these days I'm less precious about that idea and often get early feedback on games now, and it's all due to the ASDF 2 experience being as helpful as it was.

ASDF 2 Alpha Download (2.33MB)

This version, dated April 4th, feels muuuuuuch closer to what the final game is and would basically be the foundation the rest of the project would be built on top of. It's kind of wild looking back at this version and the original sketch and then seeing all the zazz the final version ended up with.

Sayara's art was once again pulled into the project, because it just looks really good with my simple game designs superimposed over it. Since ASDF 2 doesn't contain different stages, all of the backgrounds are shuffled through randomly during gameplay along with some random color shifting to make what is essentially a fairly static looking game feel a lot more dynamic.

Most of ASDF 2's balancing and pacing were handled exactly the same ways I handled the first game's. A lot of time spent recording videos, playing with Boy Speed and Spawn Rate numbers and then locking them in. I settled on the game's progression pretty early and it never really changed too much through the final game.

What I did spend a lot of time on this time around was MECHANICS!

Since it's a shmup (or shmup adjacent) I wanted to fiddle with the scoring system a bit, so I added in the combo and multiplier mechanics, made the laser juice the multiplier even more to incentivize aggressive play, and even added spiking (intentionally hitting a Boy with your ship's nose when they're the same color) to add some flavor to things. It's a very simple system, but everything feeds into everything else, and I'm really happy with how those parts of the game came together, and it's always a treat seeing people really take advantage of the systems to squeeze as many points into a run as they can.

Everything else was polish. A lot of polish. I think ASDF 2 is probably my most stylish looking and feeling game. There's a snappiness and sharpness to everything I'm extremely proud of. I was tweaking and adding little things almost all the way up to the game's release. I was even able to put in an interactive tutorial for the first time just because I wanted to, and it's just another little thing that I think makes the game feel very cool and put together as a complete package.

What did take a lot of time to settle on, however, was the game's logo. I struggled with this thing for ages. I knew I wanted the logo to feel more shmup-ey and not just be pixel block lettering again, but I'm in no way a graphic designer.

So, I just grabbed a ton of fonts and tried some things out.

I eventually landed on mixing the lettering from Font #2 and the number 2 in superscript from font #5 to create the base logo, and then came what to do with coloring. I tossed the idea to Rhete and he came up with a lot of ideas...

...but in the end, I went with a very simple white ASDF+color shifting 2 and it looked and felt perfect.

Rhete did have a very cool idea inspired by the ZeroRanger with adding the ships to the logo.

I really wanted to go with this one. I even planned an animated title screen where the ships would circle in, leaving room in the middle for the ASDF 2 portion of the logo to crash in. This particular logo was finished a little too late into development though, and I didn't wanna re-do the title sequence I'd already put together. Could have maybe used it for the itch.io page logo or something. Either way, very cool!

When ASDF 2 was ready to go I could hardly contain myself till the release date. I really felt like I'd nailed everything I wanted to do with this game, and it's the most confident I actively felt going into launch. And when the game launched, I posted the damn thing everywhere I could. I'm never one to be a great promoter, but I promoted the hell out of this game the day it came out, probably even more than I did SynchroniZ.

And... Sometimes things don't quite hit your expectations...

ASDF 2...absolutely bombed. Not that I'm a numbers person and I don't make any money on my games, but this was the most I've ever experienced complete and total silence on a release. In the game's first two weeks it saw a mere 9 downloads and a scant few people posting scores or messaging me about it after all the promoting on social media and Discords I did or the first game's small reputation.

There's no way to ever know how anything you put out there is going to be received (or in this case, if it's received at all.) You have to be prepared for the possibility that any one of these could be a complete whiff no matter how hard you worked on it or how awesome you think it is.

If I'm honest, it's still a bit of a sore spot and it spun me out really bad for a while, but like I said, that stuff is out of your control. I still consider ASDF 2 to be the hidden gem of my gamedev collection. The black sheep in a way. It's like my own little Zelda II or something!

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