8Bit The Musical
Let’s go 7 years back in time. Hi. I’m François, and I’m now a fresh new software developer. School is over and it’s time to get a job. But as I’ve loved video-games ever since I was a kid, my dream has always been to be a game developer from the first time I put my hands on a controller. I have almost no knowledge on how to make a game but hey, I can learn on my free time. Let’s do it !
So, what type of game do I want to do ? Hm. I love rhythm games for sure. I have an arcade Dance Dance Revolution dancepad at home and I even made some songs for Stepmania which are quite popular. I still play with my megadrive sometimes. From Sonic 3 to Streets Of Rage 2, I love how it is so simple yet so catchy. And damn, those musics… I can’t forget them. So basically, I love both rhythm games and retrogaming.
Poof ! 8Bit The Musical was born !
I love how Space Channel 5 brought a story mode to a genre that is not used to tell stories. So I started writing some ideas and drawing mockups of 2 heroes inspired by my brother and I. We had a terrible childhood but video-games were kind of a shelter for me. I wanted to tell a story about escaping the reality of a small world into all those incredible video-game universes I’ve travelled to in my mind. My intention wasn’t to make something really dark like Binding of Isaac. I wanted 8BTM to be a love letter to retrogaming. So let’s be crazy !
The first concept (that we kept for a loooooong time) wasn’t very original. It was basically a Project Diva like with a responsive background. If you don’t know what project diva is, it looks like this :
The idea was to make a rhythm game that is both fun to play and nice to watch, because rhythm games are usually boring if you’re just a spectator. I wanted to create a background that seems to be a classic game but that responds to the player rhythmic’s successes or failures. And of course, because I had no idea of what I was doing (take that past me), I thought it would be great if every level was a new game.
Working with XNA
When I was a student, I had some classes about XNA, which a mid-level framework made by Microsoft to make games for Windows and Xbox 360. Being able to publish my game on a console was enough to choose it among everything else (even if I was a Sony fanboy). I also loved how XNA was so basic and powerful at the same time. It had almost nothing in it. No Sprite or Animation class. Just functions to draw images on the screen, read player inputs and play sounds. No interface. No tools.
I started to create my own engine to compensate the lack of classes. Welcome to the world, 2Drulez Engine. I even made a tool so artists can delimitate sprites in a spritesheet and create animations that I can then use in my code.
I pitched the project to some friends. Nicolas (known now as Yponeko) is a childhood friend with an unbelievable natural gift for music composition. Thomas is a school friendthat was good at pixel-art and with an awesome sense of humour. They loved the idea and we started working together.
For 2 years, we worked on few levels with all these tools I made. We struggled and redid a lot of things. And it was very hard to keep our motivation alive.
Breaking Bad
At some point, we just stopped working on it. The main reason was the framework itself. XNA is a powerful tool, but it’s a developer tool. As it has no interface, every asset integration needs to be done by a developer. Here is what you need to draw an entire image on the screen :
Texture2D mySprite = Content.Load<Texture2D>("sprite"); spriteBatch.Begin(); spriteBatch.Draw(mySprite, new Vector2(10, 20), Color.White); spriteBatch.End();
Clearly, it’s impossible for an artist to dig into the code to edit this without messing everything up. Everytime they wanted to test a change on an asset, they needed to send it to me. I then had to compile the whole project and send it back to them. It became so hard to manage that we all slowly lost our motivation.
Here is a preview of what the beginning of the game looked like at the time (in croissant baguette language).
<iframe title="Embedded content" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/3rV5gO7fppc?enablejsapi=1&origin=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.gamedeveloper.com" height="100%" width="100%" data-testid="iframe" loading="lazy" scrolling="auto" class="optanon-category-C0004 ot-vscat-C0004 " data-gtm-yt-inspected-91172384_163="true" id="918558284" data-gtm-yt-inspected-91172384_165="true" data-gtm-yt-inspected-113="true"></iframe>Starting over
One year and few months after, I felt sad about letting one of my life goal down. I had a stable situation working for a software company but I was missing the good old days when I was trying to make a game. I had a lot of projects in my life that I just let down. This time, I decided to take my revenge on 8Bit The Musical and finish it.
The first step was to find a new team. Thomas (the graphic artist) was not available anymore but Nicolas (the composer) came back on the project. I then asked Anthony, a friend of mine, if he was interested in making graphics on the game and I shared a post on Facebook to find Felix, the developer who would help me in my hard task of writing thousands of lines of code.
Having new people on the project was great but I had to think about what led to the abandon of the project. I decided to take a huge risk and completely change the Engine. I wanted something that can allow artists to work on it without the constant help of a developer. I wanted it to be customizable, multiplatforms and with a huge community to ask for help. These are the reasons why we chose Unity.
Unity has a lot of drawbacks : bugs in the engine, a support that sometimes doesn’t even answer, some features that are not good for anyone so you have to rework them or buy plugins… but damn, it was the first time I could make everybody work on the project without frustration. Nobody in the team had even a little knowledge on Unity. Internet helped, but mainly patience, motivation and tests were necessary to improve. There were some funny fails, like the first time we tried to animate Tib :
<iframe title="Embedded content" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/5b_YBmqJDkY?enablejsapi=1&origin=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.gamedeveloper.com" height="100%" width="100%" data-testid="iframe" loading="lazy" scrolling="auto" data-gtm-yt-inspected-91172384_163="true" id="235863915" class="optanon-category-C0004 ot-vscat-C0004 " data-gtm-yt-inspected-91172384_165="true" data-gtm-yt-inspected-113="true"></iframe>The other thing that I decided was to put everything we had to the trash. We didn’t keep a single line of code and all the assets were reworked from scratch. The problem with the time passing by is that you are better at the end of your project than you were at the beginning. You are always tempted to edit some old assets you did 2 years ago because you can do better now. It’s usually a terrible idea because it makes your project last forever. But because the team was all new, I thought it was a good idea. Here are some exclusive previews of what some levels could have looked like if 8Bit The Musical had been released when it was planned to be :
The last idea of this “fresh new start” was to give the game a new identity. We decided to rename it, from “8Bit The Musical” to “Old School Musical”. Take that Mr The-game-is-not-really-8-bit. We were ready to start the real work from the beginning.
Bringing some guests
We were all rhythm-game and chiptune lovers. We wanted to build a game that people would love but the most important for us was to enjoy making it. I think that the comment we had the most about OSM is that it’s obvious the game was made with love by true gamers. So we decided to contact some music composers we were fans of to see if they would be interested to make some music for the game. One of them answered and that’s how we met Dubmood for the first time. He was very kind and humble. He was down to make a few songs for the game. In the end, we had more than 20 from him.
We then had the chance to get songs from Zabutom, Hello World and Le Plancton. Dubmood offered us the possibility to have the OST on Spotify / iTunes / Deezer / Bandcamp and a lot of other digital platforms via his label. It’s that kind of unsuspected meetings that can change a lot of things for a project.
The game was getting bigger and bigger and we asked for the help of Arthour, a friend of the team, to help with the songs mapping. He was highly ranked on a lot of rhythm games. At that time, we still thought playing a game was almost the same as making one. And it was a very huge mistake. Arthour had a hard time with the mapping system and his work was not as good as we expected. It took months of training and brainstorming to finally get something we could be proud of. And that’s the essence of our studio. We were all amateurs and we helped each other become an essential part of the team.
Building a community
Because we are players before being game makers, building a community around our project was a main focus all along the project. We were conscious that we were learning the difference between playing and making games. We opened the game to beta testing very early to get constant feedbacks about what we were doing. We also started to do a lot of conventions.
It was great to watch people play the game to see what was working or not. But it also created a lot of anticipation for some as they started waiting for the release 3 years ahead. With the time passing by, we started to have some success during conventions, even with the (French) press. We all put all our efforts to promote the game and make people come to try it.
Even Anthony, the artist behind all the graphics, tried to help with some interview (but I don’t think he will keep a good memory of that).
It’s meeee
We always had something with portable consoles. At some point, before our transition to Unity, the game was even running on PSVita.
When Nintendo announced the Nintendo Switch, I was very hyped by the console. I bought it the day of the release and it was a revelation. The game was made for this console. I managed to get us a devkit and we started thinking about the port while waiting for it. But something was wrong with the gameplay…
Getting what’s wrong with the game
Our gameplay was focused on your ability to identify easily the button you had to press on your controller. On a Playstation controller, you have symbols that everyone knows. The Xbox controller has colors on buttons that can be memorized.
