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Hello and welcome to a very special episode of Behind The Bean!
I am of course Bean, a.k.a. Michael Molinari, creator of BasketBelle.
A game you probably have purchased, if not you should probably check it out
at basketbelle.net
BasketBelle has been such an exciting project to work on because
it was a way for me to experiment with a whole bunch of different ideas that
I've been having from my past games such as music, audio, visuals, gameplay, narrative...
There's a whole bunch of things!
The whole idea for BasketBelle came from a very minor character from
one of my past games called ...But That Was [Yesterday].
It was a purple nurse and you didn't even see her face, but
I looked at her and I asked myself, "Who is she? Who's in her family?"
"What stories do they have?"
And so I came up with this idea of a purple boy who'd be her son,
who absolutely loves basketball,
and has to save his sister who's gone missing or she's kidnapped or something
And he's going through a city
Playing basketball in order to save her.
And that's kind of where the whole idea came from.
And at the same time,
I wanted to experiment with audio tying in together the gameplay itself
with the music that's going on so as you keep playing,
the instruments get added and taken away.
And also for the basketball itself, every time it's dribbled,
it hits a bass drum,
which means when you shoot the ball, the percussion kind of dies out
and you just get to hear the highs of the intruments, which is pretty cool.
Believe it or not, this entire game started out
as a purple rectangle on a white background, which of course would
become the main character, but first I just wanted to get the motion right,
I wanted to get the feel of jumping.
And you can see it's a little different than how it turned out in the game,
but this is generally how it started.
I also wanted to tie in
audio to make sure that when you dribbled it was synced to the music.
I also had a whole bunch of different ideas for where this game could go:
What you could be doing, what the enemies would be, what the environments were,
and so to prevent myself from just going crazy with it,
I wrote basically
a screenplay of all the levels and encounters you'd go through and made sure
to pretty much stick to that the entire time.
The visual style of the game is something I really wanted to be unique
and anyone who's familiar with my past work of course knows I love cardboard more than
anything else in the world
and this time I wanted to do something a little bit different
so I didn't go completely literal with a handcrafted world but the
cardboard texture is there
and everything has a cut-out type feel to it.
And on top of that there's a static image that's constantly
making everything look dirty and grainy
so even when there's a still image
things are still kind of moving, which I thought
would bring things to life even more.
Almost all of the art in the game was created outside of Flash,
usually in Photoshop or from my repository of cardboard textures
with the exception of the characters, which were animated right in Flash
and had a little post-processing added to make them look more like the environments.
I knew generally that you'd be moving from the outskirts of Paris
all the way towards the Eiffel Tower, but I didn't really know
the layout of the city. I haven't even been to Paris which is just a shame.
I went on Google Maps
and kind of plotted a course.
Using Street View is the coolest thing because I can just jump right into any
spot in the city
and see what it looks like from a ground-eye view, so with the help
from some friends I was able to find a bunch of really cool places
that would make for some great 1-on-1 battles.
Working on past games I've found that
designing everything from the beginning is... it's a good practice but it gets
pretty tedious towards the end because at that point it's just a matter of
creating the stuff that you've already set in stone and so
this time around I decided to only design a Chapter as I was working on it.
So, some Chapters like Chapter 3 or Chapter 7
kept on changing in my head over the months or even a whole year before
I actually sat down and started creating them and that's when I started designing
them as well.
This might explain why Chapters 1, 2, and 4 are more wholesome
in their presentation
and why other Chapters like
3, or 5 seem a little bit more abbreviated.
The reason for this is because I really didn't want to
waste the player's time. Once you figure something out,
it gets kind of monotonous to keep on doing it
over and over, especially if the challenge doesn't change.
For instance in Chapter 3, once you
pretty much figure out how to get the ball past the tentacles there's this
montage sequence of seeing yourself score three baskets in a row consecutively.
And then the store jumps from 2 to 5.
It's kind of a little misleading but this is just one of many
little experiments I threw into the game to see how they work.
I could have designed 11 different ways to go against this tentacle monster
but I didn't really want to waste your time.
So a bunch of the points are skipped over and I just kept the core variations of the
monster in the game.
The same thing goes for Chapter 5 where you actually only get to score
two baskets before the wall comes down crashing on you after it gets knocked out.
In fact if you pay attention, you never actually score
11 points in a row in any of the Chapters.
Unless you count Chapter 7, but that's more like 3 games in one.
Chapter 2 easily required the most iterations to get it from
concept to completion.
At first I didn't even get the idea that there should be 11 different rooms,
each one with a basket to score a point.
I just knew I needed a bunch to keep it interesting. At first I asked myself,
"Can I even do 11 rooms?" and then once I started designing them,
I was like, "Eleven's not enough!"
So I picked the eleven best rooms that I designed,
which filled up a bunch of pages in my sketchbook,
and the Chapter was just too long.
It took too long to get from beginning to end even when you knew the solutions.
So I ended up cutting some rooms that didn't exactly introduce new ideas and
just kept 9 straightforward rooms, each with their own unique take on the mechanic.
If there's one thing I would do differently
if I were to make this game again,
it would be to eliminate cutscenes altogether.
Right now, every Chapter in the game has a cutscene before it and after it
and some of the Chapters even have cutscenes interspersed in between.
That makes, I don't know how many that is... Fifteen?
And you can kind of see
that I tried to make them at least somewhat interactive.
Like the tutorial cutscene at the beginning
not only teaches you the basics for how to play but it also sets up your relationship between
you and your father, so at least there's a couple layers of information there.
As for other cutscenes, as I kept working on them they just kept getting
shorter and shorter because I really didn't want to make someone sit through
all these cutscenes while playing a relatively short game.
Obviously the end Chapter is all interactive
and so you can jump around and move and Belle follows you
and the dad waits up if you stop moving with the family.
But in cutscenes like the intro to Chapter 6, it's fairly dialogue-heavy.
I added the ability to kind of sway left and right
because you're being held captive by the two blobs.
So for anyone who tries to move to see if you can even do anything,
there might be a bit of a surprise there.
The original ending to the game was going to be
two completely different finales, based on whether you decide
to fight QueenB or if you join her
because she asks you to join her purple blob family.
So in one ending, you would have fought against her
and the purple blobs and then eventually she would snap out of her trance and
then join up with you to defeat a larger purple creature.
If you decided to join her it would be a completely different monster because it
would be introduced in a different way.
I was kind of dealing with some serious issues.
Getting kidnapped is a really big thing and I kind of treat it
lightly here just because it's so serious and you dont want to get into all that stuff,
but, you know, Belle was brainwashed here.
It's like a sad thing when someone's mind gets changed to think
one thing or another,
or basically they become someone that they're not.
I didn't really want to have that choice for the finale. I wanted
you to get her out of her trance, show her who she really is on the inside,
that she really was good.
The two of you still join up, you still fight a big purple monster that ends up
destroying the Eiffel Tower,
but you did it together the whole time and that's kind of
how I wanted to tie things back together.
However, there are still multiple endings to the game.
although they're not exactly different; they're more like alternate endings
because you still get caught by the dad,
and he still lectures you and you talk with him as all three of you walk home.
But different things are said based on how you play.
Since there's no way to save the game the ending you get is based entirely
upon your performance in Chapter 7.
so if you're looking for all three different endings you don't really
have to play through the whole game. You can just start from the end each time.
So, thank you very much for your interest in BasketBelle!
If you've purchased, thank you even more.
If you'd like a copy of the game, you can always go to basketbelle.net
It's only five bucks, comes with a bunch of extra goodies. That's fun.
I just wanted to let you know that all of your sales directly contribute
to my ability to continue working on games including future updates for BasketBelle.
So thank you, from the bottom of my basketball-shaped heart