The Underside Story

A long, long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, a game was developed: it was called Cave Story. Everyone played it, loved it and raved about it. In turn, it heavily influenced many indie games, including a highly anticipated game called The Underside that is still currently in development. When a preview movie of The Underside was released, people noticed something a little odd – it looked an awful lot like a certain other game (a game involving a cave and a story) - so much so that some wondered whether the graphics had been ripped straight from the king of the indie platformers. Was it a brilliant homage or a cheap rip-off? Some were excited, others were disappointed.

The name of the developer in question is Arthur Lee and it just so happens that he agreed to answer a whole lot questions. Want to sort the facts from the fiction? Read on.

Introduce yourself to the readers..

hello~! my name is arthur lee. i'm a 19 year old indie game developer from irvine, california but when i go outside i'm a full-time student at the university of California, san diego (UCSD), where i study visual arts and computer science because indie game developers are nerds and that's not how i want to portray myself to the ladies.

What systems and videogames did you own and play growing up?

the first system i owned was a hand-me-down nintendo that was kept and guarded in my parents' room. me and my younger brother would sneak in and try to play video games with the sound turned off but man, we'd always get so into it that we'd make some noise and get caught. my favorite games were super mario brothers 1 and 3 (i didn't understand why people didn't DIE when i jumped on them in the second game), kirby's adventure and (wait for it) a little known game called metroid. actually, that's a lie. i'd never played the original metroid until last year. i only said that so people would think i had a good taste in video games. i'm sorry. i taste video games terribly.

but growing up, i'd owned all of the nintendo consoles except the virtual boy and only because i didn't understand what it was and the gameboy pocket because i didn't want to be seen carrying my gameboy around in my pocket anyways. my favorite games were (and still are) the legend of zelda: link's awakening, which was my first zelda game, and earthbound, which was my first rpg.

one game i didn't really get to play growing up was goldeneye 64 because one time i borrowed it from my cousin and my parents saw that there was guns in it and so they didn't let me play it. but then i bargained with them until they let me play on the grounds that i didn't use any guns. All in all, goldeneye 64 is a very hard game to play when you can only slap people with your hands.

(IT'S A SECRET TO EVERYBODY but sometimes when my parents had their backs turned towards me, I WOULD SHOOT SOMEONE IN THE FACE. silenced guns indeed~)

When did you start developing videogames, what sparked your interest? Did you use any other programs for development in the lead-up to MMF / MMF2?

you probably won't believe me when i tell you this but i actually started developing games when i was about 7 years old. by this time i had owned my first nintendo and a computer capable of running windows 3.1, which was quite possibly the bee's knees back in the day, let me tell you. welp, the story goes that every now and then our school would have these "book order" forms, where they'd give you a catalogue and you'd mark books you were interested in purchasing, except sometimes they'd have computer games there too. but never any of the good computer games, only edutainment games, like "reader rabbit learns how to count to two" and stuff like that. except one day there was a program that promised me that i'd be able to make MY DREAM VIDEO GAME WITH THE CLICK OF A MOUSE! this program was called klik'n'play and it fooled me into buying it with its promises of MAKING MY DREAM VIDEO GAME WITH THE CLICK OF A MOUSE!

eventually klik'n'play evolved into a program called the games factory, which evolved into click and create, which finally evolved into multimedia fusion, which comes to prove that i haven't really learned anything new since i was 7.

What was the first game you ever made? What was the first game you made and took the development process seriously?

the first game i made by myself was a little known game called operation: human shield, which was a lot like cannon fodder, though at the time i'd never played cannon fodder. incidentally, the first game that i took the development process seriously on was the ww2 styled sequel to operation: human shield, which was called operation: sitting duck. when i lost that to a hard drive crash, i started work on operation: sitting duck 2, which i also lost to another hard drive crash. then i started work on operation: sitting duck 3 but i should probably delete that from my hard drive before it causes my hard drive to crash again.

How did the idea for The Underside come about? What are its strongest influences? What influences affect which elements of the game?

hmmm, i was thinking that you could probably just replace the entire interview with a blank white page that says "cave story" on it and nobody would notice.

I was thinking that very thing. I feel I have to dig a little deeper though.

ACTUALLY, the game started its life on my hard drive in a folder called "kitty game" because i had just drawn the sprite of a small, cat-like creature. seeing as the sprite was pretty cute, i decided to give the character a cute name and i arrived at "kip". it was only days later that i realized that a small, completely obscure movie called napoleon dynamite existed and so i chopped off the k from the name, leaving "ip." and that's why there's a folder in my hard drive called "kitty game" that contains a source code file called "kip2.mfx", which contains a character named "ip" and the game's name is actually "the underside."

the gameplay mechanics of the underside were obviously inspired a lot by cave story. in fact, the whole reason i had opened up multimedia fusion to sprite the main character that one fateful day was because i had been so inspired by cave story. never had i played a game in recent history that has captured the essence of the games i had played growing up as perfectly as cave story had. playing the game, you could tell what games pixel had grown up with and i intended from the start to create a similar game, using elements from games i'd played (including cave story itself) to create a nice throwback to the days of 2d gaming.

and i think this is what accounts for the differences in overall "feel" between cave story and the underside - i had never played a single metroid game in my life until about 2 / 3rds into the development of the underside but i had played games like metal slug and megaman. that's why i think the underside feels tighter, like megaman, than cave story does, which feels looser, more along the lines of metroid.

i can't speak for all of the music, since some of it was written by a good friend of mine named j. michael brown but the theme song wasn't really influenced by any other works - i made it based on what sounded good to me (i have no formal musical training) and keeping the idea of contrasting sounds in the back of my mind throughout (which is why the song changes octaves up and down a lot). the rest of the music was influenced mostly by earthbound, cave story and final fantasy.

a lot of the characters in the underside are based on people i know in real life. for example, the dog buddy, is named after and designed after my real life dog, whose name happens to be buddy. there's also going to be a character in the game based on j, who, like i said before, is helping me with the music.

as for the plot, the premise for the game was actually an afterthought - i didn't even begin thinking of a plot until after i had hammered out a character sprite and the game's basic platforming engine. as for influences, the underside was originally influenced by the neverhood. I wanted to make a game based on the fall of man, but as i started developing the world, i saw the opportunity to make something that hadn't been done so many times before.

Do you remember the first time you played Cave Story? What were your first impressions and did you play right through it?

when i first played cave story, i had never seen nor played any metroid or castlevania games, so it was an altogether new and fresh experience for me. i really liked the graphical style of the game because it reminded me a lot of my own style and it also had a cool retro vibe to it. my love of the game skyrocketed once i got to the grassland level though. the music, as well as the predominantly horizontal orientation of that stage, gave the level a real sense of excitement and speed that i think was sort of lacking in the rest of cave story and it was pretty much that level that inspired me to make the underside (which is why the first level you see outside of the caves is route 66, which is very much a throwback to the grass land level).

So Cave Story is in a league of its own? Will it ever be matched?

i think cave story is as good as, if not better than, many professionally done games i've seen. the music was catchy, the graphics and special effects looked pretty amazing (especially considering they were all done with opaque sprites) and the movement engine was loose but not loose enough for the game to be frustrating. i'm not sure it'll ever be matched but i can say without a doubt that a lot of indie developers are trying to match it and to me, that's not such a bad thing. cave story is an amazing game and it's good to finally have a good model for other developers to judge their creations by.

The graphical style has been both criticized and praised for looking so much like Cave Story: what are your thoughts on this? Does the criticism bother you?

the graphical style i use in the underside is largely influenced by cave story without a doubt, but people who've known me long before my rise to infamy can tell you that the style of the underside is more a fusion of pixel's style and the art style i'd been using long before cave story was released. after going through a phase of trying to do high detailed sprite and art work, i began to realize that using simple shapes and simple colors is not only easier to animate and work with but a lot cuter too~! it was around that time (2001) that i started working on a simple game called super fun dungeon run, which involved a small boy running through an endless dungeon avoiding traps and a giant boulder (the game is a lot less fun that i make it sound). the graphical style in that game is pretty similar to that of the underside (especially in how i made the character look and move). it's just people most haven't seen super fun dungeon run, but everyone's seen cave story, so they're too easy to pass me off as a hack.

i think a lot of gamers these days are hypocrites. they'll play the same "ULTRA REALISTIC MARINES IN SPACE KILLING ALIENS" or "TERRORISTS VERSUS COUNTER TERRORISTS" first person shooter games, but they'll also claim that a game has no merits unless it is completely original.

i really don't mean to demean pixel in any way, because he is still one of my favorite indie developers, but a lot of the elements of cave story were derived from old games as well. for example, you can see those exact same spikes that can kill you instantly in castlevania. the health/missile upgrades are no different from the ones found in the metroid games and the list goes on.

yet the gaming community's gotten to the point where if any game comes out that happens to be a 2d platform adventure game, everyone jumps on the "looks like cave story" bandwagon.

i see my game as a lot like blackeye software's eternal daughter - it is heavily influenced by other games but that's what gives it its charm. "fun" and "original" are not joined at the hip - you can create an unoriginal game that is fun and likewise, you can create an original game that isn't fun.

at the same time, i have never advertised the underside as anything less than an homage to cave story (like i said, i only started development on the underside BECAUSE of it) so when people tell me my game looks like cave story - one of the greatest freeware games to come out in recent history, what can i do besides say besides "thanks"?

I suppose ironically, Cave Story has also helped spread the word of your game a whole lot faster since the two have been compared to such an extent. Do you think at the end of the day that people will look at The Underside as an individual and unique platform game or just 'the closest thing that we're going to get to a Cave Story sequel'?

well, the thing is that i don't really expect people to look at the underside as a "unique platform game." i mean, it's certainly not unique - the platform adventure genre has been done for ages. I just want people to play through it and to have fun, as loaded or candy-land-happy as that sounds. if people think of it as the closest thing that they're gonna get to a cave story sequel, then that's fine as long as they enjoy it.

Would you be interested in hearing what Pixel thinks about The Underside so far (or the finished version once it's released)?

it would be cool to get his opinion on it. i have no idea how he'd react to it though -- if he'd get upset for being so derivative of his game, or if he'd feel flattered that i'd been inspired by it. but i've never sought out to make any contact with him. i figure the indie development world is small enough that if he'd wanted to say anything to me, he would.

Considering the amount of time you have spent on refining The Underside (and the time it looks like you will spend), it seems like this is your dream project - is it?

yeah, it's the game i've always wanted to make. the game has gone through at least 3 iterations: the first version was made in multimedia fusion 1.5 and the only externalized part of the game back then was the ingame dialogue. eventually, i reworked the game and added the level editor but this made the game run a little slower than i would have liked. eventually, multimedia fusion 2 was released, and i ported the entire game over to the new engine, which really helped speed things up. i would've given up with most other projects, but i don't think i'd ever be able to let this one just die.

Your game is fast becoming the most anticipated freeware / indie game release on the web: do you feel any pressure to perform?

not really. the underside is a very personal project of mine since it's pretty much my DREAM GAME (only, 12 years later). people've posted and emailed me telling me to stop making this game because it's a rip-off of blah blah blah whatever and that this game will suck because of blah blah but i never let that stop me or change any part of my game, so why would i let anything else do the same?

What is the development schedule The Underside like?

because i'm a full time student at a prestigious american university, i spend most of my day not going to class, which means the entire day is my oyster, except i am not a big fan of seafood, especially oysters, so i only work on the underside when i really feel the desire to, which kind of comes and goes at random times.

Have you taken any advice on board from anyone, regarding the development of this project?

actually, yeah. three of the most influential people in the development of the underside are david 'texmo' walton, dustin gunn and my musician, j. michael brown.

texmo has been playing through the underside since it was just a platforming engine so it is due to a lot of his comments that the game is how it is today. in fact, many times throughout development, i was so overwhelmed by the amount of hate people were throwing my way (in terms of how the game looked) that i was debating going back and re-doing all the graphics but texmo slapped some sense into me and told me that there was no reason to do something stupid like that. in addition to giving me comments, texmo also helped me create some of the initial ideas for the enemies in the underside (the radishes as well as a boss that comes later in the game) as well as building the one vertical, metroidly level that comes early on in the caves.

dustin pretty much keeps the story in check. all three of these people know the entire plot of the game, including all of the twists and major plot points but dustin is the only one to really have a feel for how the average player might react to the plot at certain points of the game. he's the one that suggested i introduce liko early on in the game and to introduce more overarching villains into the game, which is why i created the chester character.

as for j, besides writing some of the more emotional tracks in the soundtrack, he's helped me come up with ideas on how to play off of the idea of a two-sided world. he also made the original drawing of the underside's logo, which i later modified and then pixelled in.

as a result of the preview, i've gotten a lot of surprisingly good feedback on how i could improve the game. certain things, like not turning fast enough, weren't even considered or noticed by me or my testers but were commented on by people who've played the preview enough times that i've gone and taken a look at it. a lot of the other features people are suggesting, like text skip, etc. are all being considered as well.

Did a lot of planning go into this project or is it a constant evolutionary process, where new ideas are thought of and implemented as development moves along?

it's a little bit of both. i think i read an interview once with shigesato itoi, the man behind earthbound, who described earthbound as a bunch of random stories that he wrote that he strung together into a single game. i could be making this up but i hope not because that's how i've been handling the underside.

the basic plot (the introduction, middle and end) were fully written and realized near the beginning of the development of the game. likewise, all of the characters in the game were based on some sketches i did a while ago.

but everything in between the introduction, middle and end is constantly evolving. for example, there's going to be a side-story involving scratch bakery that i didn't really think of until after i had created the building. something awful is going to happen in the mayor's office, etc but none of this was planned from the get-go.

what lets me do this is the way i created my game. other games made in multimedia fusion work in separate frames. that means that if you want to add a weapon / tweak an enemy's ai, etc you have to go back and do that to every frame (think "level"). I, instead, decided to externalize every aspect of the game - the levels, the npcs, tiles, scripting, sounds, music, etc. what that meant is that the entire game could run off of one frame. this way, if i wanted to add a new feature, i could just add it to the one frame. likewise, the scripting engine made it possible for me to create cut scenes and npcs on the fly. none of this (besides the external levels) had been done in a multimedia fusion game before but my experience with working with half-life mods helped me implement it in a way that made it extendable and in the long run, time saving.

You've approached the development process to The Underside differently from any of your other games. Is this a process that you will also be using for future projects?

oh yes, this modularized game design is something i'll be doing in all of my new MMF-based games. in fact, when i made merry gear solid: secret santa for the daily click Christmas competition, i used a modified version of the level editor / level loader from the underside. i really think the MMF community has a lot to benefit from learning how to modularize things.

Are you working on any other projects in the meantime or is all your energy being spent on The Underside?

well back when the underside was deep in development, i was working on TEAM GARRY (of garrysmod fame) on garrysmod 10 and his platformer zombie shoot-em-up, facewound. when garrysmod 10 was released, that gave me a lot of free time to myself, so i created a short game from a christmas competition called merry gear solid, which won first place (i only say this so i can show off). now that both of those projects are over, all i've got to work on is the underside. i have another project i've kind of been thinking about lately called operation sitting duck 3 but i'm pretty sure it'll go nowhere. kind of like half-life 3: JAYKIN BACON FOREVER. If you don't understand, you probably shouldn't ask.

What are your favourite indie games?

within a deep forest because it has really simple game mechanics but a lot of care was put into the environment and it shows. likewise, nifflas's other game, knytt, is admirable for the same reason, though you could kind of argue that knytt almost had too little gameplay. but the atmosphere was perfect. i've talked to nifflas and his next game not-knytt looks like it'll be awesome.

i also like this obscure game called cave story but i don't think anyone's heard of that game so i'm just going to skip it.

la mulana is cool because it captures so perfectly the feel of an ancient-school platformer like one i would've played on a MSX2 if i had actually ever owned an MSX2 which i haven't so i really have no idea what i'm talking about. i really liked the fact that you could change the music from sounding really retro to sounding really... MIDI. eventually i want to release a soundtrack to the underside that contains arranged versions of the songs in the game.

one game i was notorious for disliking that i really enjoy now is eternal daughter. i think it's because of my understanding of the games it borrows elements from that i didn't know back then. there are still a lot of rough edges in terms of the movement (seeing as it was made in multimedia fusion, which can get a little cumbersome sometimes) but once i was able to look past them, i was pleasantly surprised.

Who are your other favourite indie developers?

just to list a few:

- garry newman of garrysmod and facewound fame. he's doing now what i've always dreamed of doing, which is creating games for fun, and getting paid for it.

- nifflas, whose games, within a deep forest and knytt are some of the most inspiring, atmospheric games i've ever played.

- amanita design, the people behind the samorost games, which i like for many of the same reasons i like nifflas' games.

- derek yu, not necessarily for any of the games he's made but more for the (pixel) art he's done.

- chris street, who i've given a lot of crap to in the past for his game, mr. stump's dentures. truth be told though, he makes some pretty simple, fun games.

- and joakim sandberg, who i know as 'zerotau' but i think he's changed his name like 50 times now. i was a big fan of his now cancelled game, mina of the pirates and played through the test builds religiously. i was not so much a big fan of noitu love but i'm really looking forward to his upcoming game

What do you think of the commercial videogaming industry at present?

maybe i'm a black sheep for saying this but sometimes i wish they'd stop trying to innovate and work with what they've already got on their plates. i own a nintendo wii and a nintendo ds and they're both great consoles but i think i spend more time playing virtual console (on the wii) than i do playing any of the actual games i have. likewise, i think i spend more time playing gameboy advance games on my nintendo DS than i do playing actual DS games.

i think it's getting to the point that the industry is trying too hard to innovate that it's using these innovations as a replacement for actual gameplay. whatever happened to games like earthbound or kirby's adventure that weren't necessarily innovative but were still probably the most memorable games of their times?

also, i'm not talking to the commercial industry because mother 3 (earthbound 2) hasn't been / won't be released in the united states any time soon, those jerks~!

Black sheep indeed - that's the opposite POV to just about every other interviewee I've interviewed. What do you think ARE some of the more memorable commercial games in recent times and why were they memorable to you?

i think my favorite commercial games of recent history are katamari damacy for its simple gameplay but mostly because of the aesthetic of the game (the style of the entire game, including the music, art, etc). i liked the legend of zelda: the wind waker not necessarily because of the gameplay but more because of the way it looked (which i guess is the opposite of most other people). another game that came out recently that i haven't played yet but am really looking forward to is mother 3 (the sequel to earthbound), which is a pretty standard dragon warrior-esque RPG game but from all accounts, i've heard it was a pretty amazing game. i guess what you can take out of it is that i like it when games are simple and fun.

Do you already have other ideas for projects beyond The Underside?

i don't know - new game projects are usually spur of the moment decisions for me but while developing the underside, i've kind of developed an infatuation with the character buddy (he's the dog in the suit). as such, i've been giving some serious thought into giving him his own spin-off game (kind of like what blue shift was to half-life) but of course, that can only happen once i finish the underside, so you'll just have to wait and see if it goes anywhere.

Do you think it is both 'fun' and 'original' or do you think that you can't be objective enough to answer such a question, being the developer?

I can't objectively say if the game is fun or not but i can objectively say that the game is not original in the sense that a lot of the elements of the game are derived from other games.

Do you plan on playing it after you've released it or don't you bother playing the final release versions of your own games much and just move on to your next project?

at heart, i'm a gamer too (even though i pretend not to be around pretty girls and other gamers) so my favorite part about making games is being able to play them as they develop. i've probably played through the preview version about 30 times, doing absurd things like timing myself or counting how many times i die or trying to look for ways to exploit the game engine to let you get to areas you aren't supposed to be at (though a lot of people've found places i never even thought of). i don't have many play testers (and of those, only one is really ever around) so i depend mostly on my own intuition and experiences playing the game to tweak it.

Since The Underside is your dream project, do you think you've taken it more seriously than anything else you've done?

i'm at a point where i've established myself as an indie developer (in the indie community anyways) and making video games has always been my dream. to this end, i always strive for the best, because i know that the games i make now could lead me to a career somewhere making games for a living. it used to be that i could just pull crap together and think "HEH WELL THIS IS PRETTY BAD, BUT ITS FREEWARE SO WHO CARES AHAHA~!" but i've gotten to the point where i'm always trying to make games that look and feel as if they could be sold commercially.

Thanks for the interview Arthur.