Get Back High
Get Back High was one of my first major game development projects. Like most first attempts, it ultimately crashed and burned spectacularly, but not before teaching me a great deal about myself and how to make games. The following is a reflection on the ordeal, demonstrating how, in the end, the experience made me a better game developer.
Break Out the Yearbook
Hindsight is 20/20. When I think back to Get Back High, the first thing I think of is the wildly inappropriate title. (I assure you, the title is meant to evoke a sort of "engrish" way of saying "revenge" and has nothing to do with drugs!)
The second thought that comes to mind is how much I learned from the project despite not ever succeeding in ever getting it to even compile.
Shortly after deciding I wanted to be a game developer (sometime in middle school), I spent the next two or three years teaching myself programming and art/animation. I made a small number of dinky games from game development tutorials, but Get Back High was my first attempt at envisioning a game all my own, laying out plans and designs to make it a reality all while keeping up with my high school classes.
Revenge is Sweet
I like fighting games. In fact, I love the whole idea behind them, having dozens of fighters with unique abilities and attributes competing against one another, resulting in a bevy interesting gameplay decisions between two players. However, I always thought I could improve them in two major aspects:
Accessibility – I completely refute the idea that the artificial complexity of input commands in traditional fighting games like Street Fighter is good game design. The beauty of the genre is in the interaction of gameplay mechanics and dynamic player decisions, not in manual dexterity. If controls could be simplified and made intuitive without sacrificing depth, fighting games could reach a much wider audience. (Going into depth on this topic would warrant its own article...)
Unique Mechanics – At the time, it felt like many fighting games relied on slight variable differences to differentiate fighters. For example: "This fighter's attack is 0.2 seconds faster, but deals X% less damage." Not only is this less interesting, but it ultimately makes balance more difficult to achieve since fighters don't fit unique niches and their distilled gameplay will inevitably overlap, resulting in certain characters being either too weak or too strong. I believed that I could make fighters with truly unique gameplay mechanics, each symbolizing a core idea, the majority of which had never been seen before.
Pretty conservative and unambitious for my first game, don't you think?
The menus were modeled after a yearbook. The character select screen displays rows of high school photos, complete with awkward expressions.
You'll probably find my Spanish notes on the back of this...
Anyway, turning this into a game, I placed the setting in a high school for students and faculty that are... different. (At the time I hadn't heard of Rival Schools, so I thought it was creative...) Residents of Get Back High range from demons to androids to superheroes and beyond.
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I designed dozens of potential characters and mapped out their movesets. I spent everyday sketching animations in my notebooks instead of listening to lectures. I mapped out an enormous software architecture to make everything run smoothly.
Unfortunately, this game never came to fruition. The code didn't come anywhere close to running (although I have reused a number of the ideas to great success in recent projects). Taking days to finish just a single sprite made me realize just how much I underestimated the burden of producing all of the game's art assets by myself. It just wasn't going to happen.
Despite this "failure", I consider Get Back High to be incredibly important in my life. It was a "trial by fire" experience, and I learned a lot about scope and realistic expectations. I learned so many programming ideas, and I acquired a thorough knowledge of animation and pixel art. I still love all of the characters I created, and I hope someday I'll be able to revisit them in some capacity.
In fact, let me introduce them to you.
The School Roster
Although Get Back High never took off the ground, I'd like to share some of the ideas and personalities from the game, if just to give an idea of my design approach and creative capacity.
Lofty – The Newest Arrival
Story – The newest transfer student to Get Back High, Lofty is the main character of the franchise. He fights only with his legs and feet and seems to have an affinity with smog/smoke. (And yes, almost every character was loosely inspired by my friends. Lofty somewhat resembled myself.)
Gameplay – The gameplay "control", Lofty symbolizes traditional fighting game mechanics, the genre as it was. He doesn't excel in anything in particular, but he also doesn't have any major negative attributes.
Development – The first character I focused on animating, Lofty taught me a lot about art. (Namely, that I shouldn't be applying for an art position anytime soon.) You can find several examples above and below.
The original ink sketch of Lofty.
Half-finished Lofty sprite.
The first sprite of Get Back High, finished!
From pen to pixels, the creation of my first sprite
My first sketch of a running animation, incredibly rough and ugly.
A sprite worthy of the ugliness of its inspiration.
An attempt at emphasizing basic body shapes and movements for sprite sketches.
Another stab at spriting, but still so far away from satisfactory...
Although I improved with each attempt, I still had a long way to go in developing a workflow to produce compelling sprites and animations...
My first stab at animation demonstrated how much I had yet to learn. It looks so awkward in motion, like Shaggy from Scooby-Doo running with limp limbs.
Eckskemethy – The Teacher from Hell
Story – ​Eckskemethy is the Teacher from Hell, literally. A lecturer of history, this Prince of Darkness wields a trident that feeds on the souls of children. Bloodthirsty and unstable, Eckskemethy will occasionally become unhinged and will raze the school in a fit of rage. Whereas most high schools will have fire drills, Get Back High has X-Drills to prepare itself. "Please exit the building in an orderly fashion, students. If Eckskemethy is laying waste to your group, help yourself before assisting fellow victims."​
Sabrina OS – The Android Cheerleader
Story – Sabrina is the most popular girl in school. She's the head cheerleader, prom queen... and an android. Wielding dual pompoms charged with static electricity, Sabrina is a force to be reckoned with. And don't forget her boyfriend, Logan; he just happens to be a secret government satellite laser defense system.
And did I mention he's captain of the football team as well?
Gameplay – ​The first "twist" with a somewhat unique mechanic, I kept it simple with the idea of "extended range". Eckskemethy can charge his trident with the souls of children to elongate its length and extend the range of his attacks, but over time it will shorten again. The idea is to keep opponents at bay while looking for charging opportunities, lest you allow your adversaries to close the gap.​
Development – Besides Lofty, this is the only other character that saw any actual development attention. Like Lofty, this didn't extend much beyond some simple unfinished sprites.​
Gameplay – Sabrina emphasizes "singular events", spending great lengths of time to get in just one hit to deal massive damage. (Imagine a character based on FALCON PUNCH!!!) She accomplishes this through a number of abilities, such as setting up delayed attacks that will force her opponent into dangerous situations. An example of this would be setting targets for Logan to strike, who will fire a massive laser blast at that location after a number of seconds. Setting up "Anti-Blocking" fields also helps her land the hits.
I feel like I should also mention that one of her special attacks is called "Satellite Touchdown", which involves one of Logan's satellites crashing into the stage while wearing a jersey and having a football strapped to its side. (Well, I thought it was funny...)
Flud – The Torrential Custodian
Story – Get Back High can, understandably, get dirty on occasion. Grease, toxic bile, hellfire... there's always a mess to clean up! The school would need a force of nature to keep up with it all!
Fortunately, they do. The janitor is a living flood of torrential water. When his gate is opened, students must clear the halls as he pours through every room in the building, wiping away everything from existence.
Even better, he's also Swedish.
Gameplay – Flud represents the idea of "super armor", the mechanic in a fighting game where a character can take damage without receiving hit stun. Of course, having hit stun immunity might suggest a broken character, but his moveset depends on taking hits so that he can deal some of his own. He leaves a lot of his "body" around as he fights, leaving the other player plenty of opportunities to attack Flood. Sometimes Flood will also willingly give up his super armor to acquire other abilities, or his opponent can force Flood to break his super armor after enough sustained hits.​
Molly Sprocket – The Awkward Genius
Story – Although well beyond her years in intellect, Molly Sprocket has enough quirks about her that keep her out of any social circles. Flying around in a custom-built mechanical diaper, she has designed a trio of sophisticated robots to aid her in combat. In order to power them, an enormous energy reserve has been stored in a different conspicuous location on each machine.
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Molly just doesn't understand why the other students are referring to her newest creations as the Beer Belly, Hunchback, and Thunder Thighs models...​​
Gameplay – Molly cannot fight directly. Each input is tied to one of her three robots who will fight for her. Beer Belly will try to guard Molly and stay within close proximity, while Hunchback will wander around the field mostly of his own accord. Thunder Thighs will use the jet packs built into its legs to hover in the air, looking for opportunities to strike its opponent. Molly herself must focus on manually dodging attacks, being the only directly controlled avatar.
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I had originally envisioned a whole arsenal of moves that would utilize the three robots in conjunction with one another; it should be rather dynamic and entertaining (not to mention a pain to balance...).​​
Photo Not Available
I don't want to bore you with a detailed description of every single character I dreamed up, so I'll stop there. However, I'll just throw in a short teaser of some of the other more interesting characters:
– A zombie who lords over the undead
– A ninja of the wind (who can't seem to inflict hit stun on her opponents...)
– An immortal centipede dowsed in flame
– A suicidal cowboy
– A young girl whose body has been absorbed into toxic sludge
– A beastly librarian once native to the jungle
– A beautiful (but cold) angel
– A superhero that operates an enormous mechanical super-suit
– And many more!
I'll wrap this up with another small collection of sketches I managed to find and scan from my high school notebooks. Enjoy!
Menus, UI, elaboration on character moves.
Misc. character designs, stages.
Misc. character sketches, elaboration on character moves.
Experimenting with animations and poses for Lofty.