Welcome to the first edition of Origin Stories, our series about the specific influences developers draw on when designing their own games. In this installment, Gaijin Games CEO, Bit.Trip Core designer, and retro game collector Alex Neuse talks about how Atari 2600 title Cosmic Ark helped shape the gameplay fundamentals of Core.
And to offer more insight into the design process, Neuse also opens his notebook to share a sketch of his initial idea for Core, and a more refined design document (after the break).
Alex Neuse: In terms of Cosmic Ark being an inspiration for the game, it actually didn't come about right away. I knew that I wanted to move from one axis (like in Beat) towards two for Core, and mimicking the + control pad [shape] on-screen seemed like a neat idea.
As I started playing around with that idea, I wanted to find some other games that did something similar. I started looking at other rhythm/music games, and remembered the defense sections in Gitaroo Man. I dusted off my copy of that excellent game and started playing around with it.
But I didn't want to get too complex and require players to remember a lot of buttons (which would be more akin to the action in Gitaroo Man). I wanted it to be much simpler. So I started wracking my brains to think of a 2600 game with similar gameplay, and it struck me -- Cosmic Ark. It's one of my favorite 2600 games, too! How could I not have thought of it before?
So, we played the hell out of Cosmic Ark on the corporate 2600 at the office and studied its wily ways.
Cosmic Ark consists of two phases. In the first one you go down to the planet and abduct little critters; you're a little alien or something. Then you go into outer space and have an asteroid defense section of the game where you can shoot up, right, left, and down, and asteroids come at you from the four directions. It differs from our game in that they're always on the line of where your lasers are, and it's just a matter of hitting in that direction fast enough.
We had gameplay that was very similar to Cosmic Ark in the prototype, and we realized it wasn't rhythmically charged enough. We wanted more variety. However, we liked the restrictive aspect of having the Core in the center of the screen. Keeping that, we started looking for new inspiration. At one point, we even tried moving the Core, and we had gameplay akin to Turmoil, but that was way too much of a departure from what we wanted.
Once we started thinking of the directions you could fire as "beat lines," like in other rhythm/music games, we found our core gameplay. You can think of Bit.Trip Core as eight games of Guitar Hero, DDR, or Taiko Drum Master going on at once.
"This is the very first drawing I did of the game when the idea came
to me a year or two ago (I really should date these things)."
After we had that core gameplay down, it was a matter of getting the gameplay to compliment the basic design. You'll notice in Level 1 that we introduce themes that will repeat throughout the rest of the game. For instance, we teach the player how to fire their beam clockwise and counterclockwise, we teach them a very satisfying pattern using only two beams, but then throwing a third in right at the end, and we introduce the "Themebeats."
Themebeats are the big blue beats that always come in to the beat of the music's current theme. These examples are just a few of the recurring themes found throughout the rest of the game. Being able to recognize them and execute on them in varying degrees of difficulty becomes integral to staying in the zone and riding the vibe.
"This image is how I like to do my 'design documents.' I basically try to fit everything onto
one page in a notebook--all the fundamentals, that is. And then over the course of
the project, I fill one notebook, and one notebook only, with all the design work."
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