CBC Remaster - More Progress!

I spent the week drawing sprites and arranging area maps!

I spent hours every day this week working on this thing, and I’ve made a lot of progress! Though there’s more to do than I initially anticipated, especially as I’ve decided to change more than I originally intended.

For example, I’ve been adding all the old enemies to the game, and redrawing most of their sprites as I do so. Here’s a comparison between the old and new sprites for some humans currently in the game:

There’s some annoying inconsistency about whether or not skin should have a black or coloured outline that I’ll need to resolve eventually.

I’ve kept the basic idea behind each one, though the execution is improved, I’d say. Though I did alter the ‘Thug’ enemy more substantially (from what younger-me imagined a criminal goon would look like to a shifty ‘hoodie’: “(British, slang, often derogatory) A young person wearing such a sweatshirt, usually a male, stereotypically associated with antisocial behaviour.”). All their behaviours remain the same.

Most of my time has been spent trying to sort out the area maps. The game is made up of four levels (house, day streets, work, night streets), each made of many ‘rooms’. Each room is a number of screens in width and height (eg the first room is 1x1 screens, the room east of it is 3x1 screens). The camera scrolls while you move within the room (if it’s more than just a single screen wide or tall), and when you leave the edges, you transition to the next room.

Thankfully, for the Flash version, I saved all the rooms as individual XML files (text documents, essentially), so it was trivial to just import them all and get them working.

I made the original rooms in a simple map editor I’d built within the Flash game itself, but as I didn’t intend to change any of them, I didn’t think I’d need to convert that over for this Unity version.

When I decided to change the laptops to these voodoo dolls that you have to jump on top of, though, I realised that this room’s cramped layout made that jump feel awkward. Not great, considering this is the first one of these you’d encounter.

Also, Flash and Unity have opposite 2D up directions: in Flash, coordinates 0,0 are at the top left, but in Unity, they’re at the bottom left. This means that adding to the y value would move an object down in Flash but up in Unity. I’ve had to take this into consideration in several places in the rewritten code. Enemies’ spawn positions in rooms were affected by this, too, which is why the Mother is floating there.

(Technical details: the enemies in the original had their pivot/origin point at the top left of their sprite, but the new ones have it more reasonably at the centre bottom. Here, the room’s XML states that the Mother should spawn at position 12, 13, though the new code alters that y value (by subtracting it from the room’s height, 15 here) and spawns her at 12, 2. But because her pivot point is different and she’s two tiles tall, that places her a tile above where she should be.)

Anyway, I decided to just spend a couple of hours adding a simple map editor to the Unity version so then I could make minor changes to some rooms:

That’s the room’s revised layout (in the editor I made; the green square in the ‘cursor’), with more space to jump on the voodoo doll, and some objects have been moved around.

I realised that it’d be easier to access, edit, and establish relationships between rooms if I also made a minimap of the whole level - something I needed to make for the in-game menu anyway - so I made this:

Those are all the rooms of the first level, drawn as small sprites where one tile corresponds to one pixel, which I can drag around to determine their spatial relationships with one another.

In the original, area transitions were specified for each map - so for example the first room had an ‘east exit’ to the leftmost screen of the second - but I recoded that so that now when you leave a room, the game checks this minimap (or rather the data it’s converted into) to see which room is spatially next to the one you just left. That took a while to get working in all scenarios, but feels more robust and easier to debug now it’s working.

In that image - from several days ago - I’d roughly arranged the rooms according to their, well, ‘room’ (Kitchen, Living Room, Attic, etc). But their relations to one another don’t make any sense. The attic is in the middle with the bathroom at the top!

Here, the rooms’ colours are dulled unless hovered over (in the editor, I mean), making these hard to make out in this image!

I tried to arrange them more sensibly, but the arrangements of some of the rooms mean they don’t line up well, or even all fit on the screen. The Kitchen and Living Room are especially wide. The Kitchen layout also makes no sense spatially, as the vents-like room in the middle allows you to traverse two vertical screens in one. If that makes any sense.

If I’d planned the original Flash game with a Metroidvania-like layout in mind, I would have handled the level designs differently!

Because I’d already made the map editor that allowed me to edit rooms, though, I’ve been using that to make changes to a bunch of them. Mostly I’ve kept the rooms’ layouts the same, but I’ve rearranged their positions on this level map, meaning some rooms’ connections to adjacent ones are different from what they were in the original Flash version.

I’ve been altering some - but not all - of the environment tiles’ sprites, such as the soil tiles here.

I always hated this room in the original because all the pipe tiles count as empty/traversable space, meaning where the pipes look like they go up and down, you can just swim through the middle in a way that makes no sense. And I don’t want anything in this game to not make sense!!

How do you make it clear that something is a septic tank? Add a label saying ‘SEPTIC TANK’, apparently.

I had a better idea anyway: now this room involves you swimming through a septic tank. Which is a lovely way to spend your morning before a date. Also, I added different colours of water.

I’ve also added a few new rooms, and moved the positions of collectible items. For example, you used to get the Shirt in one of the first rooms of Clarence’s Bedroom, here:

This screenshot is from before I added SLUG MODE.

And the Shoes were right next to the front door, which you needed to get the Keys for from the Living Room to end the level:

I’m intending for each clothing item to alter Clarence’s appearance (rather than having to collect the Shirt + Pants + Shoes to transform him into ‘dressed mode’), so I didn’t like that you can get two of the clothing items so trivially. I also didn’t like that you HAD to do the Living Room; I’d prefer it if you could just run out in your underwear with no preparation at all.

(Clarence also now has stink lines that change colour or go away if you Have A Shower and/or acquire the Cologne.)

Now, there’s an additional room called the ‘Big Toilet’, which you have to swim deep down into to collect your Shirt at the bottom. Silly.

I’ve removed the Front Door Keys and made the Shoes the end goal of the Living Room. You can now just open the front door without any barriers and complete the first level in like a minute if you want.

As for the pants, a sign in the original mentioned that Clarence had locked them away because he thought they were haunted. So what if I did more with that?

The original didn’t include any BOSSES in the traditional platformer sense, so I’ve been wondering whether to add a few of those. Just simple things, like the bosses from the early Mario games, with basic, repetitive patterns, so then I don’t have spend long on them.

For example, you could venture into your Wardrobe to encounter this Pantom - your possessed pantaloons - which you have to defeat to get the Trousers.

Adding bosses would give me an excuse to compose an additional music track, too, which I like the thought of.

(I love the original soundtrack and intend to keep it, though I may make minor adjustments to some harmonies and use the opportunity to figure out how to properly produce music in a DAW… We’ll see.)

I’ve also been experimenting with making the background of Clarence’s Bedroom pink rather than blue, since pink is the colour I associate with him. I’ve kept the blue carpet (though with redrawn tiles) and beds, though, which I think clashes horribly (but that might not be a bad thing).

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I’ve been really enjoying working on this - looking forward to each day of focused work, for the first time in ages - but I can’t help wondering: who is this actually for?

Will it only appeal to people who have nostalgia for the original? And if so, would they hate all of the changes that I’m making to it?

Will it make more than zero moneys? Should I bother promoting it? Am I just doing this to avoid actually addressing the real problems in my life??

And so on.

(I’m also wondering whether the inclusion of enemies like literal ‘Whores’ - very much a product of my naive younger mind exposed to the sort of content that flooded Newgrounds back then - would mean it contains ‘adult content’…)

I mean, there are a ton of amazing indie games to choose from that anyone could be playing instead. I have a list of modern games I want to play, but just don’t have the time.

Instead, I’ve spent the past few weeks working through Wild ARMs, a PS1 JRPG from my childhood, purely because it’s from my childhood. (And its PS2 remake, which I’ve never played before but was curious to compare to the original to see what they kept or changed; ‘a lot’, in both cases.)

I noticed while working my way through those that I wish some things were different - better - though, so maybe it’s possible to preserve the nostalgic experience while stripping away frustrations that don’t contribute to it anyway?