Have you ever wondered what kind of madness and insanity was required to create a game like Bonesaw? I know I have, and since postmortems are all the rage with game development (even multimedia fusion hobby games!) I thought I would give it a shot and take a look back at Bonesaw: The Game. I made this thing pretty long, so continue at your own risk.

In the beginning, there was the saw. Not too many people understand where this whole Bonesaw thing comes from. Maybe some have a slight idea, and make the connection between Bonesaw and Macho Man Randy Savage, which is linked through the smash hit movie Spider-Man. That’s just one part of the tale though, the other part resides at Clarkson University, my alma mater.

Clarkson has a pretty good hockey team, (not good enough to get very far in the NCAA tournament recently though) and the student section at home games is infamous for being pretty wild and crazy. Eventually the wild and crazy students adapted this “Bonesaw” thing that was a way of channeling the energy from Randy Savage, and basically it just gave everyone a reason to act even crazier.

Eventually students would show up to games with cardboard saws, acting out the Bonesaw hand gesture to the players whenever a goal was scored. The players even responded to the crowd with their own sawing motions. Needless to say, this became a cultural phenomenon at Clarkson University. Being in charge of the Bonesaw Brigade’s website at CU, I decided that the next step would have to be a video game.

My original idea was stupid, but I’ll talk about it briefly anyway. I imagined an old school Super Nintendo styled Hockey game but on crack. Players could charge up their Bonesaw bar and unleash a super attack onto the ice and the opposing team. However, I knew my programming skills weren’t going to be anywhere close to being able to achieve this. (Also note: I use Multimedia Fusion. Yeah.)

I thought about the game for awhile, and eventually found myself playing Kirby Squeak Squad on my trusty Nintendo DS. I’m a big fan of Kirby games, and I always feel like they’re a big influence on how I think about 2d platformers and what makes them perfect. I started playing a lot of the game using Kirby’s fighting power. I tried to use that power almost exclusively in some parts of the game, and it was a lot of fun. At that point it hit me. Of course! A 2d platformer beat-em-up game would be perfect for Bonesaw. Soon enough I cracked open Multimedia Fusion and got down to it.

The beginnings of the platform engine, and the many check marks that would follow.

The beginning month or two was devoted entirely to trying to make a decent platform engine in MMF2 as I thought about the game in more detail. My original scale of the project was very small, and I actually only imagined myself making 3 or 4 levels for the entire game. I thought it would be a good small game for hockey fans to download and just mess around with.

Bonus art of the Saw, and the 3rd boss of the game from Andrew Falicon.

The main point of the game, the Bonesaw, went through some different ideas before it became what it is now. Originally it was just going to be a one shot deal attack that cleared the screen of enemies, or did significant damage to bigger ones (and bosses.) Later on though I thought of putting in weapons, and developed the melee hockey stick (Slasher) and the boomerang hockey stick (Cutter) and decided that the Bonesaw would be best suited as a time limited god-weapon.

I wanted this game to be hard. I wanted players to get mad at the game at times, and I wanted the point of the game to be charging up your bonesaw energy by damaging enemies, or getting damaged yourself, and finally unleashing hell on all of those who angered you. I suppose this is a pretty extreme case of the difficulty swinging, and perhaps it was too extreme in the end, but I knew I was somewhere in the right ballpark when my first beta testers told me they loved unleashing the saw on the first boss and destroying him in seconds.

A zoomed out view of the world map in Multimedia Fusion's frame editor.

Still working on the platform engine, which I was determined to get as perfect as possible, I began to dream about future levels… and perhaps this is when I should’ve slapped myself. My original 3 level plan was going out the window because this platform engine was getting way too impressive (to me) for me to just use it on 3 little levels. So I decided to divide the game into 6 different worlds, containing 5 levels and a bonus level each. Holy crap, what was I thinking? Little did I know the game would take me about 12 more months to finish because of this insane plan of mine.

Another wacky idea I thought up was putting hidden items in levels. You see, I’m not a big fan of games with easy normal and hard modes. Very rarely do I enjoy this outside of the occasional shmup (Gradius, Ikargua, etc) so I didn’t want Bonesaw to have any difficulty levels. Since I now wanted this to be a feature length game though, I needed something in the game to make it worth a replay, or to make it so more dedicated players could get more out of the game, and something to make it so there were hard and easy (by comparison) paths through the game. I took a page from most classic platformer games and introduced the three golden pucks per level concept. At first, I had no clue what they would do other than be collectables, but after some consideration their destiny was decided.

A golden puck hidden away in one of the game's levels.

Golden Pucks would aid the player in charging the Bonesaw. The more pucks you collect, the faster the Bonesaw charges. I mentioned before that the Bonesaw was pretty much a swing in difficulty. The game is hard until you get the Bonesaw out, and then it becomes ridiculously easy. The golden pucks introduced another swing to the difficulty, but this one is more at a game-wide scale than just level-wide. The way I think about it is that going around and collecting the golden pucks is like playing the game on hard mode. The player has to go out of their way constantly to hunt them down, rather than just bee lining through the level. However, collecting these pucks increases your rate of charging the Bonesaw meter (when you get them all you can charge it up pretty damn fast) thus making the end game easier. However, players that don’t collect the pucks find that the end game is rather difficult. What the golden pucks do is give the player the ability to shape the difficulty of the game as they play, even if they don’t realize it.

The work on the engine continued, and for anyone that knows how MMF2 works, you’ll know that I better be damn sure that I get everything right to begin with otherwise I’m going to be copying and pasting a million times over. One thing that I wanted to make sure of was that enemies in Bonesaw weren’t that stupid. More specifically, I wanted them to act like they really wanted to kill you. So if you got even close to one it wouldn’t hesitate to punch you in the face. Enemy hockey players would swing if you were in range, and so the only way to take them out would be to carefully plan your intro attack and follow up with a fast combo, or you’re going to get hit.

This all stems from a common occurrence I noticed when I was a kid playing Streets of Rage or Final Fight. The characters initiate a combo when you attack fast enough, but when you attack too slowly they repeat their first attack. Finding a sweet spot between the fast attacks and the slow attacks leaves you with an infinite loop of punching an enemy slowly enough to repeat your first attack, but also quickly enough to not let that enemy recover. I knew that I wanted to avoid this, so I tried to make it so enemies would respond with their own attacks immediately if you didn’t continue your combo quickly enough. My thought process was “Well hey, if you were getting punched in the face, you’d probably come back swinging the first chance you got—right?”

Some of the events used to control one of the hockey player enemies in the game.

Lots of MMF2 events and check boxes later I had a platform engine with enemies running, and I also incorporated a world map system and a level transition system. What ended up being in the engine at this point were the basic mechanics that I would use through the levels. The switches and doors, timed switches and doors, bounce the ball to the switch puzzles, and the classic bomb-blocks (Kirby rip off) which I’m proud of coding in MMF2, (I’m not a programmer) plain breakable blocks, and blocks that can only be destroyed by enemy bombs. I set off on the levels.

I won’t continue any more deeply into the development that much, but for the levels I knew I wanted to start out very slow and make the initial levels very easy. I had a lot of ideas for crazy puzzles or levels, but I had to hold them off until I got towards the end of development. I don’t want to scare off players with intense instant kill laser death traps in the friendly green and brown grass zone.

The frame editor view of the original frame in which the core engine was developed.

Now in typical postmortem fashion, here is a rundown of some things that went right in development, followed by some crap that screwed up and exploded in my face.

• First and foremost, I finished the game in its entirety. Like a lot of game developers out there, I have a few folders of unfinished games that will never see the light of day for whatever reason. Sometimes a huge glitch I couldn’t get around would halt development, or just getting bored of working on the game ends my quest. Bonesaw almost suffered the same fate, but I was able pick it back up and get a steady pace going on it.
• The platform engine worked out pretty well, as well did the enemy’s “AI.” I planned it out and tried to use what I learned from my programming classes when approaching the coding part of the engine. I was able to organize everything quite nicely, and building levels was a breeze as I could just drop in enemies and special blocks and they would all behave properly. There are some small quirks with the platform engine that I wasn’t able to work out, but overall I think I made out okay. (For Multimedia Fusion.)
• I had a really good beta testing and feedback system, with some of my testers recording their play throughs of new levels and sending them to me so I could work out problem areas, and offer hints in the form of signs, or ease up on the difficulty in some areas. The game still suffers from some difficulty issues, but I always had constant feedback from a handful of my best testers so I was able to fix the big problems.
• Believe it or not, one thing that went right was somehow I was able to build up hype for the game. This happened on accident, really. I released a trailer in June 07, and it just got a little attention from the Click community. After that, I was contacted by an editor at TIGSource who said they would gladly plug my game when it came out. So when January 08 came around, a new trailer was released that showed off most of the game’s different worlds. This trailer ended up on TIGSource, and got a lot of attention. It got over 20,000 views, and a lot of positive feedback. By the time I released the game it ended up on TIGsource almost instantly. Since then, Bonesaw has been featured in a number of magazines and websites, included on freeware game discs (sent with magazines) and has been downloaded and played in one way or another close to 50,000 times. Not too bad for my first game, right?
• This one is a bit generic, but I developed a schedule about halfway through the game’s development and even though I didn’t stick to it 100%, it definitely motivated me to keep going on the game. I originally planned for the game to be done in October 07, but I slipped to December 07, and finally February 08 because of some unforeseen Multimedia Fusion bugs creeping up on me. Bonesaw was just a game I was making as a hobby, but taking it seriously helped me push it through all the way to the end.

So now some things that I realized weren’t that great after releasing the game.

• The difficulty of the game was a little on the tough side. In fact, the game has a big problem with short range difficulty spikes. The game is a pretty smooth ride until you get to the first boss, which most people get stuck on unless they get the Bonesaw going. Then in the forest level, the first ball puzzle drives people insane and the difficulty spikes way up again. In retrospect, I would’ve toned down the spikes to make the game more a smooth ride to the intense levels at the end.
• Again, the difficulty of the beat em up engine drove other people insane. I made the hit boxes for combat smaller than maybe I should have. A lot of players were frustrated by the fact that when overlapping an enemy completely, you couldn’t land a punch. Early in development this was included in the engine, but it just looked completely bizarre to be punching out in front of you and hitting an enemy on you, or even slightly behind you. The reason it changed, and stayed in, was because my early beta testers didn’t seem to complain at all, and so it remained the way it was.
• Difficulty again, this time the issue of enemy’s health. The enemies get progressively harder to defeat as the game goes on, and if the players are collecting golden pucks in the game, they can increase the amount of damage they can do and everything works out. On the other hand, if they don’t, (and most players don’t complete the game 100%) then the enemies get way too intense and most players skip right over them.
• Poor planning on my part for certain elements that I introduced later had me pulling my hair out. Some of the blame for this can fall on Multimedia Fusion, and its inability to produce a global game engine that’s remotely useful. For example, the snow levels feature a wind mechanic that pushes and pulls objects. The combat engine was totally incompatible with this new feature, as the player had to be standing still to punch and kick. So I had to go through and rework all of the punching and kicking mechanics on every damn frame. Yeah, I spent about 2 hours copying and pasting events, and for those of you who know Multimedia Fusion, you know what I’m talking about.
• Player feedback was a major issue that I discovered about halfway through the game’s development. For the first few months my only beta testers were those who were used to the mystery of old school type games. I branched off and had some non-traditional gamers test the game (including a professor of mine at Clarkson) and discovered that the game had a lot of flaws. I tried to incorporate as much as I could without redoing most of the engine (or copying and pasting 5,000 times.) but I still fell short of what I wanted. Players sometime did not know what door opened from switches, or if doors were timed, or if pits they were approaching were bottomless. Another issue is that players didn’t know when they were damaging bosses, so the flashing animation on bosses was added. Particles were also added to show damage, as well as more signs in levels, but in the end I don’t think it was enough. In the interest of time, and releasing the game before going to Game Developers Conference 08, I had to cut some things short.

In the end, I learned a lot about making a solid game, through making it and watching the reactions of those playing it. It was met with some harsh words, but also it was met with some praise. I still get emails from people about the game asking where to find the final golden puck, or telling me that they’ve unlocked every achievement icon on the title screen. I love watching the videos on YouTube of people either becoming completely frustrated with the game, or people guiding players through the boss fights.

It’s a good feeling. When I was working on the game, I thought to myself “If at least one person plays through the game, and finds every item, and every secret, then I’ll be happy.” That was my goal. It’s not a very high goal but hey, Bonesaw is a free game, and it was going to be my first fully completed released game, and I wasn’t asking for much. I had a blast making it, so whatever happened in the end I would be fine with.

I reached my goals for Bonesaw, but my next game’s goal will be set a lot higher than that. My next game I want someone to write a walkthrough for, revealing all the secrets, and exploiting all the glitches! I’m actually surprised one doesn’t exist for Bonesaw yet, with all the emails I get from people looking for the Golden Pucks. Get on that, people!