Let's start with the long introduction. This whole post is going to be a novel.
Introduction
So I'm mainly known online as BlazeHedgehog, real name Ryan Bloom, and from sometime in middle school I started wondering how games were made. My friends and I put our heads together and tried to "design" a game, but we were only like 12, so it was like, character art, a couple of sparse level ideas, etc. But the itch never went away for me.
In high school, completely of my own accord, I started teaching myself GWBASIC on the family's old unloved DOS machine. I found an old QBASIC programming guide at a flea market and they were close enough that most of what was in QBASIC applied to GWBASIC. I was further bolstered by school requiring me to get a graphing calculator, a TI-82, and that had a MASSIVE instruction booklet with a glossary explaining every function in its TIBASIC programming language. I effectively taught myself how to program backwards by grabbing games off my friends and using the instruction book to pull apart the source until I could put the games back together from memory.
That was immediately supplanted by discovering a community known as the Sonic Fangames HQ (SFGHQ), whose primary game development tool of choice was "Corel Click & Create", aka The Games Factory, the second generation of Clickteam software following Klik 'N' Play. And I kind of never looked back after that. It became my primary game development tool of choice, though I did try to learn C++ at some point... but that's a weird, sort of long and kind of sad story, so we'll skip it for now, but if anyone really wants to know, well, I am nothing if not an open book.
Click & Create (CnC), The Games Factory, Multimedia Fusion, and now Clickteam Fusion all operate on a kind of strange visual scripting language. I like it, I even prefer it, but I think to people who aren't familiar with it, it's hard to wrap your head around. It looks like this:
But can be made to look like this:
Believe it or not, I tend to prefer the first one.
Somewhere along this line I founded SAGE (Sonic Amateur Games Expo), ran it for the first three or four shows, then passed the torch and helped friends run it for another six or seven shows. Haven't been personally involved with the production of the event in over a decade but it's nice it will be entering its 25th anniversary next year.
My most famous game is a fangame called "Super Mario Blue Twilight DX", which I usually shorten to Marioween since it was made for Halloween in 2005. It's notable because it was featured on a basic cable channel called G4, on their Attack of the Show program.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4sQTdlCGqJ4
This caused the game to explode in popularity, to the point where I estimate it's probably had roughly a million downloads in its first five or ten years. According to Phil Salvador (now of the Game History Foundation), it completely transformed the Mario fangaming community.
These days, financial needs and undiagnosed ADHD make it hard to stay focused on any one game project for too long. I'm still very interested in just making fangames, but I did start an original game project in 2016 called OverBite:
This was a Clickteam game jam game for making something halloween themed. Castlevania was on my mind but being a vampire hunter felt too derivative so I thought about what it would be like to play as Dracula. Ignoring there's also a Castlevania game about being Dracula.
It got the runner-up prize (which was a free Android tablet and $50 store credit) but otherwise I'm not super proud of it these days. I did most of the game completely by myself (except music), the design changed midway through production, and 4 out of 5 of its levels were made in the last 7 hours before the deadline. It's a good idea, I want to make it into a better game, I have an overstuffed design document and had plans to put it on Steam (even passed Greenlight back in the day!), but it is what it is for now.
A lot of what I've done since then is just toying around with various ideas.
For instance, right before OverBite, I watched someone play through Hugo's House of Horrors, and figured a simple adventure game like that wouldn't be too hard.
Got a lot of the necessary features working until somebody said the player character should actually walk up to items to use them, which would have required proper pathfinding, something that's actually really difficult to do in Clickteam Fusion due to the way it's bad with object instancing. I'd found a coding example once on how to do it, but it was very slow and complex. Killed my interest and I never went back.
In 2021, I had to take care of my sick mom, and was trapped on an old crummy business laptop from 2012 that can barely run games from 2005. So in between helping her get out of bed and move around, I started working on a little Ghostbusters idea I had, using sprites from the Japan-only NES game ("New Ghostbusters 2" by HAL Laboratories).
Basically I didn't really like how both Ghostbusters movies and games treated these guys like action movie heroes. The first movie was a happy accident and the characters are kind of bumbling so I wanted a game that reflected that. I figured an RPG would work, since you could make each encounter feel meaningful and there's lots of room for dialog. I wrote out a pretty sizable design document.
Of course, RPGs are a trap, because they look simple on the surface but take a lot more work than you'd expect. And since I was using Fusion, that meant writing all my own menu code and stuff, which is the most tedious shit on earth. So it was a bit of double jeopardy. I still want to get back to this some day but it feels like such a drag. A friend has suggested doing it in RPG Maker, but I figure learning RPG Maker would take just as long as just writing it all myself.
Perhaps the most notable of these unfinished projects was something I started on a whim to remake the first Bubsy game.
It started out as an april fools joke that quickly got out of hand. As I took the project more seriously, a lot of work went into it, enough work that I could probably dedicate a whole post just to explaining it all. I sourced a lot of the original sounds, I cleaned up the music, it's running on way more solid code, I completely remade the levels, etc. I actually started producing a Youtube video about it a year or two ago, even. But enough work got done that I had, like, professional gamedev friends telling me I should pitch it to whoever owned the Bubsy IP (UFO Interactive at the time) and get them to let me do an official remake.
Then Atari bought the Bubsy IP back from UFO and Atari's president put out a call for indie devs to pitch new Bubsy games. This was it! My chance! I scrambled to put together a pitch... and got ghosted. Instead they announced that Bubsy collection with Limited Run Games that supposedly will feature "select improvements" to the classic Bubsy games, whatever that means. They haven't talked about it in over a year, and it killed a lot of my interest to keep working on my version.
Lately, as of a few months ago, I have been enamored with the idea for another Mario fangame.
With OverBite I'd written all the player physics from scratch. I knew how long that would take. I didn't want to do that for this. I'd remembered getting something in a big itch.io charity bundle called "Rage's Platform Movement" so I used that as a base here. Of course, it still ended up taking a long time, since Rage does things very differently from how I'm used to.
There's actually two notable things going on in that video. One, is the iris-out effect. Clickteam Fusion supports shaders, but if I remember right, it only supports a very old version of shaders that nobody writes anymore. It's like pixel shader 2 or something. *.fx files. And I don't know how to write any version of any shaders.
But Looki, a pretty famous name in Fusion, had a bunch of shaders comissioned years ago when the feature was first added, and he released them for everyone to use. And one of them was a vignetting shader. So the iris out/in effect is just the vignetting shader with the ranges clamped so there's no gradient, letting me render a sharp circle almost basically as a vector. I think that's neat. Fusion doesn't really do vectors.
But the really special part, the big innovation happening there, is that very recently, like within the last year or two, Fusion, after damn near 30 years, finally tried to address its object instancing woes. Basically, if you had two or more of the same object in a level, Fusion had a very hard time telling them apart. There were ways to do it, but they were slow, clumsy, and finicky (hence why you can imagine building a pathfinding system was a nightmare).
But Fusion straight up added a way to set an instance ID now. With Bubsy up there, I don't really show it, but I have the classic teleporter door system. But a level can only support a maximum of six doors because of the way I had to set it up: six pairs of entrance/exit objects (12 objects total).
Meaning door 1 goes to exit 1, door 2 goes to exit 2, etc.
With the pipes here, I don't have to do that anymore, and I can have theoretically infinite numbers of them. All I do is put down a pipe entrance, a pipe exit, and as long as their instance IDs match, it works. For someone using Fusion projects since 1999, it feels like fucking magic, and the doors it opens is incredible.
If I work on any game projects nowadays, it'll probably be that Mario project, though it's reaching that dangerous zenith of "I haven't touched it in so long I don't remember what I was doing." But I'm also juggling a job search and trying to maintain a slightly successful Youtube channel.