A Lost Game From 2004

This came up recently with a friend, so I captured a quick video to show him what it was. Realizing this would make good Patreon bonus content, here we are.

Waffle X was a web comic series by a friend I had at the time, and he was banking on it kick starting his career in comics. We were all also amateur game developers, so to "expand the brand" so to speak he enlisted the efforts of friends to begin developing a Waffle X game.

Despite what the above video shows, I was not part of the development team. The team was chosen for any number of reasons I was not privy to, but it really did not bother me. It's more likely I had my own stuff going on at the time and would have rather focused on that instead.

The project was sort of an on-again, off-again thing, as indie games of this type tend to be. Demo levels were created, people got better at making games, so new demo levels were created with fresher visuals and fresher gameplay. 

At some point, I had a stroke of inspiration for a control style I wanted to explore, so I asked to borrow the Waffle X assets to hammer a concept out. That's what you're seeing above. It's essentially just a pitch, with a small area to feel out the controls. Once you scroll all the way to the right edge of the screen, enemies begin endlessly spawning at random all over the stage.

You can dash, wall kick, super jump, dive kick and to a ground slide. You also have a "Mang" meter (the webcomic's made-up energy drink) that when consumed, enables bullet time. Mang also serves as your ammo meter.

Unique to this is the titular "Waffle X" himself, the little floating guy that follows you around. In the comic, he was surly and prone to violence, so I envisioned him as sort of a independent force here. He flies around of his own accord, collecting power-ups for you, but you also have a "Waffle X button" where you can issue simple commands based on his mood, listed in the top right corner of the screen. 

The title screen music is from Mega Man X4, and the level music is "Riches in Me" from Guilty Gear Isuka. And yes, that's my voice yelling on the title screen. 

Said friend (the creator of Waffle X) saw what I had done, admitted it was cool, but also admitted it did not really fit the style of what he envisioned for a Waffle X game, which was fair. The game he was working on with the others was a bit closer to a shooter like Metal Slug, so all the high-flying acrobatics didn't really have a place.

Later, for completely unrelated reasons, said friend and I had a falling out, meaning it would feel weird to upload a build of this now -- heck, even just posting this video here makes me feel kind of weird. 

Eventually this control style went on to influence another failed game of mine, a fan game known as "Shadow of Chaos." I'll do a video series on that another time. 

Nowadays, there's more than a few games with this sort of "ultimate mobility" type of control. N++, Dustforce, King's Bird... as is the case with ideas like this, I was probably on to something here, but just lacked the drive to fully realize the concept. Such as it goes.

Some of these ideas did eventually resurface in OverBite however, but by now I'm a bit behind the curve.

The creator of Waffle X eventually went on to a successful career in comics, having worked on the Regular Show comic and his own series, Bumstorm.