Created For our Friend Sayara
Created by: Polly
Assets Blatantly and Unapologetically Stolen From: Nintendo
Additional Ideas and Testing: Rhete and John
Trailer Voice Over: Dante Wahou

This game actually started as a "toy", similar to what I did with You Beat The Turbo Tunnel.

It was gonna be an endless silly little gag I made for our friend Sayara (who is a prominent artist in the community and great friend) who not only loves Super Mario Bros. 2, but especially loves World 4-3 of the game where a large chunk of the beginning of the stage is just riding an egg quietly across a few screens.

That idea was literally all this game was going to be at the start...

And then Polly Brain happened and suddenly I was now in the middle a much bigger project than I'd bargained for.

Production of this game was swift. It took about a week to create the entire thing start to finish. It was a feverish pace with ideas for new gimmicks and stages coming literally effortlessly. Nothing about this game was planned. Every stage, enemy, setpiece, encounter, it was all completely off the cuff. I had a blast recontextualizing enemies from Super Mario Bros. 2 into something that retained their original charm but also functioned more appropriately in a cute little dodge-em-up.

If I thought of something, I made it then and there. Even things I had no idea how I was going to pull off, I did so with ease. And not only did those things work, but the stages actually seemed fun. I rarely ever feel confidence in the middle of a project, but this is the first time I knew I was on the right track. I got giddy with every playtest of a newly implemented enemy or finished stage. I was making something I felt was "good."

I'm no amazing programmer or anything, but I'm actually really happy with how I put this game together. The entire game takes place in the near empty room above with just a scrolling ocean background, Luigi and his egg, a cloud object that randomly creates more scrolling clouds, and a lifebar. Everything else that happens in the game is spawned and built on the fly. The stages aren't mapped out in any way other than timers that build them tile by tile and spawn in obstacles. That little blue dot at the top of the screen contains everything that makes the game happen once you've left the title screen.

A real simple example, let's take that second screenshot.

Notice the ground in particular. You may think all of that is just one big piece of land, but...

...in actuality it's just a 64x256 pixel object that gets created every 32 frames. The alarm[0] repeats and resets itself to 32 frames every time a new piece of land is spawned and creates what looks like seamless ground. The object is created 104 times for the duration of the stage, then the spawner destroys itself.

It's a complicated-sounding explanation for a very simple mechanism, but I was happy I'd figured it out myself instead of creating an entire graphical asset the length of the stage to scroll in.

Everything in the game gets pulled in and spawned off screen and then scrolled on like this, from the spitting fire plant, to the Beezos, to the icy poles sticking up out of the ground.

To seasoned gamedevs it's probably nothing at all, but I felt really clever making the entire game like this. I had a problem and I solved it in a way that worked! Tinkering with timing and conditionals for the second half of the final stage in particular and finally getting it right was one of the more fun moments in gamedev/figuring things out.

So, I know I said earlier that everything about this game basically came quick and easy and with almost no issues, and that's all actually true except for one very big issue that cropped up when Rhete and John began testing...

When I saw their test videos, the game looked like it was playing at almost 50-60% slower than I had designed it to. There was absolutely no way this game was somehow pushing other peoples' systems so hard to cause this level of slowdown. It completely wrecked the difficulty curve of the game and it felt fairly sluggish and bad. The game played perfectly fine on my system and there wasn't anything wrong with their videos, but something was messing the game up on other hardware. Talk about a real crummy problem to crop up 36 hours before launch.

At this point I had a little bit of a panic attack and concluded that if I couldn't find the answer to this, the game was toast. Game development had by this point already turned me into a little diva, you see...

I stepped away from the computer for about 20 minutes to take a walk and clear my head and by the time I'd gotten back, John had also got back to the group chat with a possible fix.

By default the circled setting is set to 1 for some reason in new projects created in GameMaker 1.4. Without getting too technical, I'll just say this is a setting that when set this low is far too intensive for Windows to handle the game loop, and it'll grind things down in speed very quickly if set this low. Setting this to 10 miliseconds fixed the issue on all testing hardware, and thankfully Luigi Floating on an Egg Over the Sea was saved and experienced no other issues through release.

This is the game where, for the first time, I genuinely felt like I *got* it. I've played, critiqued, and enjoyed action games all my life, and I feel like this game is proof that I absolutely do understand them and what makes good ones so good. Needless to say this one was a confidence booster and it's no surprise that my game making output would pick up quite a bit in the years following this game's release.

A few silly tidbits to end off on...

1. There are 50 randomized intros that appear before the game starts.

2. You can fart by pressing the Q key at any time. It doesn't do anything special, you just fart! For fun!

3. There exists an exclusive version of this game where, for whatever reason, Luigi can ejaculate Skittles. Only one person owns this version of the game and I think it's funny to just keep it that way.

Taste the rainbow!

I know you're thinking What could POSSIBLY ever top that last little tidbit, but I recently unearthed something I thought may have been lost by my own negligence.

When I originally finished this game, almost immediately the idea for an expansion or follow-up hit me!

When the game released, a few people favorably compared it to Scramble, one of my favorite quick-fix arcade games of all-time!

Scramble by Konami is one of the first side-scrolling shmups to really gain notoriety, and is essentially what Konami's more popular series, Gradius, would eventually evolve from. A key mechanic of the game is your rapidly draining fuel gauge that you manage by destroying fuel depots. Yeah, I know that doesn't make a lot of sense, but hey...early videogames, ya know?

ANYWAY, all this to say that for a while there was a new version of Luigi Floating on an Egg Over the Sea in development for a bit, named the Scrambled Edition.

Not only is it a clever name because of being tied to EGGS, but the way this version of the game was going to be tied to Scramble was that you had an energy gauge you'd have to manage on top of normal gameplay.

Unfortunately, no playable version for this. The energy meter and battery are the only things added from the normal version of the game, and the energy meter doesn't actually cause you to lose once it runs out. This is merely just a build that has the visual hooks in, but the mechanics don't actually work yet.

On top of the new energy mechanic, I was going to design entirely new levels or heavily alter existing ones to work better with the mechanic. I also planned a new final boss fight and escape sequence that would be more in line with an over the top shmup, but still retained Super Mario Bros. 2 silliness. Both versions of the game would also be available for play.

Ultimately, it's just a project I never got around to. I think it's a really clever and fun idea, but I don't know that it's one I'll necessarily return to at this point. I think it was a great idea for the moment and woulda been great had I followed through, but it's not something I'm entirely excited about now, even though I have the confidence to say I think I could deliver on it.

That said, I'll probably riff on Scramble someday.