“Why aren't you giving Red Sans a story? He’s not a meme character!”
i’ve been getting comments like these complaining & questioning my decision to stray away from lore & a story to give red sans more humour
i wanna talk about why i decided to make this change and how it’s for the better
art at the top by
https://gamejolt.com/@krisinallcaps
Red Sans was always about memes, it wasn't about breaking rules.
after i gained directorship after the initial showcase video when red sans purely made fun of ashfaith, i realized something.
red sans was a joke game to be funny, and NOT to break his own rules.
when you don’t have to abide by any sort of logic or consistency, the only limit of what you can do is only up to your imagination. sure, let’s make him michael jordan. a phase parodying two left? that works. give him an gold man suit? why not, that sounds cool!
red sans wasn't the ultimate blank slate for creativity, and he still isn't. we couldn't literally throw him into any fangame regardless of tone or quality and it wouldn't work because he’s RED SANS.
but as we kept developing the game, more and more ideas kept forming.
we started creating more characters like red sans junior and r-money, we decided to add an overworld section and let you run around red sans's house. not for any reason to the plot, but because we thought it'd be cool and we had some cool ideas for it.
needless to say, the project began getting more and more ambitious. but the passion and drive to make it persisted, so we kept moving forward. that passion led us to great places, even not making an ENTIRE ANIME OPENING for the game! it goes without saying that we're very not proud of what we had made simply out of our own initiative and creative drive to make something cool.
of course this came with it's own set of problems though
im not talking about any recent events, but those definitely stunk
at the end of the day we're still game devs and making video games isn't exactly an easy task
the more we added to the project, the less stable and inconsistent it became. it was just a cluster of ideas and concepts we thought were cool with barely any glue to hold it together.
HOW different is junior compared to red sans? they already both attack with bones & blasters. green sans can pull out anything because he's red sans, so it makes sense that his son can do the same, right? but then how do we differentiate the two?
how is r-money relevant? he's friends with red sans, sure. but WHY does he have his own fight? do the ideas and concepts alone WARRANT an entire extra fight?
more and more questions like these began to form, and we began to second guess everything we had made. the LAST thing we wanted was to release a bad or mid product. we don't want this game to just get it's 5 minutes of fame and be tossed aside like most other fangames.
what was missing?
A PLOT
A MOTHERFUCKING STORYYYYYYY
and im not talking about "oh you killed my happy meal so im mad"
as previously mentioned, the ideas lacked something holding them all together. something to keep things CONSISTENT.
this, alongside a new growing distain for writing meme humor (im sorry but writing sigma ohio skibidi for 2 years straight isnt fun) started a new drive to delve deeper into each of the characters and flesh them out more.
we began writing red sans with less of an actual personality rather than just spewing pop culture references and memes that eventually became outdated in 2 weeks. once he had developed enough of a personality we did the same for the rest of the characters you know, thus giving us more opportunities for interactions and jokes that don't rely on memes!
this led to us creating newer characters that served as foils/parallels to certain attributes of characters with their own strengths and weaknesses, thus leading to more writing potential and more ideas and so on and so forth.
evolution requires some sacrifices though
with a more clear direction of what we're doing and why we're doing it, some stuff had to get cut because we couldn't make it work with the new context. compromises were made, ideas were repurposed or shifted elsewhere, so the game isn't EXACTLY the same but hey, that's game dev for you.
i hope by reading this you understand our decisions.
we're very excited to show you all just what we have in store, but of course you're gonna have to be patient!
again please follow the new game page for when we show off any future updates on the game and it's new direction.
https://gamejolt.com/games/redsans/910478
thank you for reading
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