Short story long

My brother Luca already told his side of the story in this excellent devlog that explained the how and the why behind this rescue operation. Now, it's my time to add something to it - specifically some behind the scenes oddity and some material that never made the cut, but was prepared for later stages of the game.

As Luca said, CogFactory! was born as a touch-only Windows Phone game in early 2013. I was recruited midway through the process as voluntary artist/wannabe composer. My toolkit at that time included only Paint dot NET for graphics and a pre-installed version of GarageBand on my brother's MacBook Air. Yet, this was enough to bring this game to life, in one way or another.

So, here's some scattered note and pictures from that time, excavated from the deep depths of my hard drive just for this post!

Enemy design

During development, I was tasked with the design of many of the enemies. My favorite of the bunch was the Cog (as in "cog dog"), which also became the mascot of the game. It needed to share that place with the Junkosaur, though, which was instead my favorite boss. Many of the other designs (esp. the standard security guards, the icies and the UFOs) were instead left to my brother, who supervised and directed me through all the phases of the project. I'd usually mockup an enemy, test in in a quick scene and then send him the puppet parts to assemble them in-game for the final  version. Puppet animation that, let me reiterate, was made completely via code without a graphical editor. How that worked, I have no idea. I'm just glad it did.

The magic of programming, I guess.

Level previews

Level previews were also a fun part of the whole package, which resulted in several funny pictures featuring Hero and the enemies, sometimes with questionable puns as a topping. Here's some of my favorite ones out of the bunch:

Plus, as a bonus, one that was drawn by my brother, like almost everything in the latter part of the development process:

The boss battles

My brother and I devoured the Crash Bandicoot and Wario Land games, which became our main inspiration for the boss battles. The lifebar that can be seen against a boss follows 1:1 the Crash Bandicoot design, while the introduction of the boss (with the short jingle and darkened silhouette) is a clear love letter to Wario Land 4. Let it be written that I bloody hate the Snowmad and that I'd burn it to ashes if I could. I haven't managed to beat him again even just once after I rebooted the game.

The Junkosaur

Before CogFactory!, my brother and I only had experience with one game making engine: RPG Maker XP. I could only program in Ruby at that time, while my brother had already some deeper knowledge of C#. So, when it came the time to animate the Junkosaur design I concocted before, I resorted to using that to my advantage. When all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail, amirite?

So, here I was, using RPG Maker XP for trying to animate the Junkosaur by means of very complex trigonometric formulas and a lot of maths. No graphic editor, just plain, sadistic maths. 
 

This GIF above is from that prototype. If it looks like he is moving EXACTLY like in the game, it's because I forced begged my brother to trust me and just implement my titanically obscure animation code 1:1 in his engine. It worked, but at what price? Still, the Junkosaur lived and breathed fire, so I call that a win. Just for added context, even the title screen itself was first prototyped with RPG Maker XP!

Cut content

There were two bosses that never made the cut after the game was cancelled. One was Loco the Train, which was supposed to be the boss of Chapter 6:

The other was the Dead Hatter ("Il cappellaio morto"), who was going to be paired with an equally freaky Moon:

The final boss of the game was supposed to be the evil Baron von Kraut, and we had a design for him, but never got around making a playable appearance anyway. Buuuut some pictures of him of course have survived!

That was a lot of reminiscing

...so you'll forgive me if I end my trip down memory lane here. Resurrecting CogFactory! has been great and I can't be grateful enough to my brother for that. This game keeps living and that's what important about it, even if we never managed to put the word end to it.

In our hearts, Hero has managed to save Mr. Crystal and they both live in peace together as best friends.

No matter the fact that we've never managed to make that happen in-game.