Three years ago, on April 27, 2022, I uploaded the very first version of Exploding Judo Federation on this website. It was a very small game and didn't have any pretenses, but the story behind it is worth exploring a little.

But first...

OLD TRAILER TIME!

Now, looking back at it, I am not very happy about how the game looked like, at first. The font had a faux Eastern style that - honestly - didn't age well. Junrao's 3D model looks like an eggplant. The shading feels off too, together with that weird "old paper" effect.

Still, this trailer encapsulates the whole shtick behind the game:

Tech the grab, or die trying

A simple message, a simple idea that carried a whole game. But how and why did it come to this? How was ExploJudo actually born?

A tale of burnout and stupid comics

In early 2022, I was working on my previous game Motionsickness and hit a snag. Character creation was slow, crafting 4 movesets per character was slow and hard to test, finding voice actors for every new character was a challenge, interest in the game didn't seem as strong as I hoped.

In short, I fell into a deep burnout.

That's when I remembered a stupid 4-page comic I drew years ago, somewhere around 2021. This comic down here, reported in its full amareurishness for your enjoyment (read left to right):

Yep, that's it.

This stupid comic with an outlandish premise is what inspired ExploJudo in the first place. Oh, huh, just to be straight about it: at that time, I was also playing Elden Ring - the first Soulslike I put my fingers on. That... inspired me a lot. Rolls. Evade. Attack. Roll again. That was the trigger that informed my decision of having everything roll-based. Everything.

So, add together my burnout + this comic coming back to haunt me + me playing Elden Ring + me wanting to show my engine could handle yet a different game...

And you have a recipe for disaster

This disaster.

Moving back to 3D, but with catgirls

The starting point was again the Motionsickness engine, a 2.5D game. Which means that I had to bolt together the 3D movement from Schwarzerblitz back into it. It was relatively straightforward - my story with the engine spans almost 9 years at this point, so it's just like an old friend. Furthermore, I was going to be able to reuse the vast library of animations I made for both of my previous games, which would speed up development to a significant degree. With the engine modified for this new endeavor (which required short of three weeks), I was ready to delve into this new crazy idea of mine. And I needed characters. One choice was simple: Junrao Kurakurapiko, the protagonist of the short comic. That's spot one. I needed spot two, though, and I needed it quickly. That's when, you know, a neuron activated.

It's probably no mystery at this point that I need a trademark catgirl in every game I make. If Karin in Motionsickness and Naomi in Rakugaki Rumble weren't making it explicit, I don't know what would.

So, here I am, a then 32 years old man saying "screw that, Imma have my exploding judo game with catgirls and bombs". So, naturally, the first character I made was a catgirl called Nyatasha (pardon the pun, I deserve ten years in bad joke jail for this).

I unfortunately don't have many pictures left of that first prototype, but Nyatasha quickly became Nyari (please, take another shot at my bad cat puns) and so remained for a while, as you can see in this screenshot from one of the very first versions.

If the shading looks very much different from how the game looks today it's because it is. This was the shading engine of Motionsickness, translated 1:1 to my new game. To be blunt, I don't like it that much anymore. It looks like vaseline-covered plastic. It plays well with Motionsickness characters, but maybe not with a new game. ExploJudo had also the issue of not having a coherent UI, reusing a modified version of the Motionsickness HUD.

Still, it was a prototype. It got four playable characters, full 3D movement, new stages, music that I composed myself and even one arcade boss!

Al de' Baran, *totally not inspired by Taurus Aldebaran from Saint Seiya* was the first of the hard bosses, with the gimmick that he couldn't be struck - he could only be thrown and grabbed. Striking him triggered an insta-kill move that suspiciously resembled a Great Horn mixed with a Lightning Plasma (oopsie).

Still, Al alone wasn't cutting it for me. He was tough but it didn't feel enough. I had decided to go all in, in this game, so I needed to up the ante a bit more. All while also rounding up the cast.

The game evolves

The 27 April 2022 version of the game featured enough content and characters that I might have been happy with that. Still, the itch was not scratched completely. I mean, I had, in no particular order:

• a heavy-duty sharkman from Schwarzerblitz
• a former champion with a welding mask
• a Middle-Eastern catgirl
• a mechanical bunny robot idol with finger lasers (long story, but she is canon in the Schwarzerblitz lore too)
• literally a Saint Seiya character

And, shortly after them, on May 7...

• the RANDOM "?" as a playable character again with his trademark cannon

It was a small cast, but it covered most bases. INABA also quickly became a fan favorite (for a good reason)

But that wasn't enough yet. I really REALLY wanted more. And, when I mean more, I also mean a mean, bad, big boss to overcome Al himself.

Enter the chaingear

For those who might not know it, I write stories too, in some shape or form. In 2019, I had a collaboration with a Discord acquaintance of mine to write a long form story featuring her characters and the characters of a common mutual. Things went sideways due to a plethora of reasons and we had to bury an already completed 30k words story. Still, by trying to salvage it, I came up with different characters to replace those that were excluded, reworking more than 50% of the novella - resulting in what is now known as Purple Ink Reborn. Said characters would later turn into the Angels of the Stratosphere arc in the Schwarzerblitz main story.

All of this to say that, thanks to that story, I also created the chaingear, which featured as a prominent menace in First Blood - a side tale about one of the characters of that long form one. Now, when you have a gigantic dinosaur equipped with chainsaws and plasma cannons, what do you do with it?

Duh, of course you use it.

The chaingear it was. Pure, unadulterated destruction made flesh and metal.

Straight from the stories to the oven.

I craved destruction, I would have had destruction.

Incindentally, as already told before, I was also playing Elden Ring during that time - which surely had an effect on my design of this boss.

So here it is, my baby boy, finally duking it out and spreading terror. Accommodating the chaingear's existencerequired a lot of tinkering. The engine wasn't ready for his magnificent size and gimmicks, so I needed to convince it with a lot of extra coding.

All for an Elden Ring style boss.

That was made canon too, in his own way.

Was it worth it?

HELL YES.

Them lizards, gun heads and TV-gals

After the additional additions, the game now featured a pretty well rounded cast:

• a heavy-duty sharkman from Schwarzerblitz
• a former champion with a welding mask
• a Middle-Eastern catgirl
• a mechanical bunny robot idol with finger lasers
• literally a Saint Seiya character
• the RANDOM "?" as a playable character again with his trademark cannon
• a frigging dinosaur with chainsaws and plasma beams

All of them playable (YES EVEN THE CHAINGEAR). But I still wanted more. So, back to the drawing board it was. In a short time and three updates, this resulted in the introduction of three additional mofos:

• an alien non-binary lizard
• a gun-toting gun-headed freak
• a TV-head gal with TV noises dancing Caramelldansen in her win pose

Bura was the first to come and join, followed by her natural enemy - Cannon Fodder.

Cannon Fodder is the only character that is neither a boss nor a plain playable character. In fact, in the game's code he is defined as "NPC". This because his playstyle doesn't match either camps. His grabs are pitiful and he is more of a gimmick character than a real boss. Still, he is playable, despite having two almost unwinnable matchups against Al and the Chaingear.

Speaking of Al, at this point he was renamed "Al del Toro", because, frankly, Al de'Baran was too much on the nose. He also gained a goatee too. Nyari too was renamed to Bea Gattonero, to make her compliant with her canon version from the short stories.

And, of course, Junrao got a better character model that didn't look like an eggplant anymore.

The cel shaded era and the new UI

You might have noticed that Yume-Yume had a different shading in her picture. That's because around the time of her debut, I overhauled the shaders completely to make the game look different than Motionsickness. That resulted in what is today's look of ExploJudo and what is visible in the screenshots in the main page.

The last step was refining the HUD and finalizing it. After a quick round of yellows and blacks, plus a call for announcers, the game got its current form in August 2024, more than 2 years after its debut.

Yet, there's one more piece of lore to add

The GUEST CHARACTER from Duels of Fortune!

THE CALLOWMAN ROUNDS UP THE CAST

Thanks to my good friends at Cosmic Hat Games, I was allowed to include their own character Callowman as a guest to ExploJudo, back in 2023. This quirky fighter required a lot of tinkering too, but ended up coming out very faithful to his original game.

A long long trip forward

Now, ExploJudo stands tall with a finalized UI, true arcade bosses and the degree of polish and madness I wanted from one of my games. It is unclear what kind of updates will come later down the line - if any - but heck if it was a ride. I am happy with the state of the game as it is today, bar a couple small things that still need tweaking.

Thank you for being there for this wild long ride and...

ALL HAIL THE CHAINGEAR!