Part 1: The start

So, everything started with a scetch of my take on Mario.exe. I managed to find it, so here you go (fun thing, but I always was forgetting Mario's correct pallete, so that's the reason why this close-up looks differently from actual sprites):

I was planning to make a NES port of Mario.exe. Why? Well, do I really need a reason? Tho I had it: I wanted to see if that's actually possible. Like, all those Doom ports for calculators and pregnancy tests, do they have any reason for being created except just out of curiosity, to see if that's possible? I don't think so. And with that idea I created Mario.nes and all the tileset. My original plan was to make it on NESMaker. But then I got two problems: first - my version of NESMaker, that was actually pirated, was outdated/broken, so platformer engine wasn't working at all. And second - I didn't want to pay for new version. I will say more - I had no money to pay for it. So, the spritesheet for Mario.nes and all the tileset was left… until I saw a video about a magical engine called GBStudio that allows you to make Gameboy games without any knowledge of any programming language. I was a big fan of retro games in those years, and a big fan of Gameboy games because of Pokémon Silver and SMB Deluxe. So, when I downloaded it on the next morning, I started working on Bruce's Funny Adventure. What? Expected that I will remember about my idea so quick? Nah, in those days I thought that it's a crazy idea and I won't handle it. But then the event that started the development happened. The call in discord group chat when I shown the engine’s basics to my friend @Bombo4ka52 . We decided to make a simple Mario game where Jumpman was beating level 1-1 (that was poorly transported into GBStudio) and then beating it again and again. That was a pretty fun experience, and it also became a base for Mario.gbc

Well, the idea of making Mario.gbc came to me when I decided to update game’s tileset for fun and noticed that it looks a bit similar to something creepy, in style of Vibingleaf, as I thought back then. I thought that “Huh, what if I will make my own Mario.exe retake for Gameboy Color? Will I be the first person who made that? And will it be possible?”. And I'll be honest, without my precious team, Amalgamated Team, this game could end up being cancelled. But we'll talk about that later.

So, I contacted Bombo4ka and told him about the idea. And that was the moment when I remembered about Mario.nes and all assets that I left in NESMaker folders. My first idea was to make a simple game with 4 levels and without ANY lore. Or wait, there was this weird thing with pieces of remnant, agony, allegories and animatronics that you call “lore”. Basically, there was a random person, “Mike”, who was playing OG Mario.exe game. And in Mario.gbc he was going through it for 10 years, ending up dying and returning back but with some changes. So, phrases like “Welcome back”, “I was so lonely” and “let's play a little game for old times sake” are referencing to this fact. And for now, with current lore, those phrases sound weird, Luigikid noticed that😹.

About Mario himself, he was simply the demon or something similar to Lord X, idk. Made a rough scetch of his look and Mike's look, at least how those two were intended to look like:

For the tileset, I was really inspired by Vibingleaf's works, especially his Sonic series called “Doomed”.

The basic idea was to make it quickly and submit for Luigikid’s game competition, Luigikidex3challenge, and that logo with this hashtag is still left in da files. I was thinking about finishing it in one week, yea! It's kinda funny to see my old plans. On the 21st of September the page on Gamejolt was created. And on the 25th our team got bigger.

Lemme introduce to you our beta tester, who later became composer, director of some games, who created a bunch of media related to Mario.gbc and now became a coder in our team - Alexer, or @Lexigamer_029 . On the 25th he joined our small team as a beta tester, and our only way of communicating back then was Gamejolt. We were talking in DMs about the game, and I was sending him latest builds via Mediafire. This was awesome time. I feel like I wanna go back and feel all this again.

But then I saw a thing that changed the game a lot and became a reason why it wasn't featured on Luigikidex3challenge. When I was checking rules again I saw one thing: the game should be made for at least 10 minutes of gameplay. When I playtested the current build, I noticed that it was beaten in less that 5 FUCKING MINUTES! I started to think about how can we extend the game for 10 minutes. And I got an idea: make some new levels and easter eggs. That's how we made “Dried” level (fun fact: it's original name was “Drowned”, but since it had no water, it was renamed to “Dried”. The reason why it had no water is because I didn't know how to make water physics similar to SMB in GBStudio. And no, there won't be any water levels cuz I don't wanna use plugins).

The first easter egg was a level stylised as Syobon Action, I remember doing a footage of gameplay of it on the old emulator called Byuu with CRT shader.

But then I got “awesome” idea: make a gallery with alot of extra worlds in different themes just to stretch the game. And that's when the period of beginning ends. Big plans started.

Part 2: Big plans

So, the first level added to gallery was Syobon Action levels. And then the chaos started.

Second world after Syobon Action was about horrorbrew called Mario.ai made by the creator of Mario.exe Re-executed. Let me introduce to you our artist, great composer and voice actor who gave voice to Mario.gbc - @KarlsonGames .

So it all started with a fanart. He drew Mario.gbc meeting his horrorbrew, RXM. It was first fanart we got so far, and then I saw Mario.ai. So, I sent Karlson a friend request and talked about Mario.ai being added in the game. He agreed, and later we added him into a group chat in Discord called “Mario.gbc team”. Also, I'll introduce you to the tileset artist who drew some tileset we used for the game - Retrotendo. He was also working on Mario.ai, so he joined the chat with KarlsonGames. Then we had two more slots for worlds. The OG idea was to add a world in style of Super Mario Land 2 and in style of Super Mario Wonder that just came out, but the second idea was quickly scrapped, and the first idea was scrapped due to Mario.gbc’s design in that style was too similar to Marco Antonio’s GB, and during that period of time I had no idea how to contact Marco and ask to use GB, and to be honest, I didn’t really wanted to use him. So, we ended up with Super Boy and Mario 19 being chosen. About Mario 19, I contacted Vibingleaf in discord, or should I say that he contacted me, cuz originally I got message request from him, and we chatted a bit, like really a bit. And when we decided to use Mario 19 as one of the gameplay sections, I asked if that will be OK, and he said that we can use it. Now about the lore, cuz it changed. When it all just started, I had another idea for the game. It could say a password to an archive in game's folder that contained a picture with two people. The plot was about the same guy, Mike, and his friend, Tom, who died in a car crash and got trapped in the game for 5 years, so when Mike found a game, he decided to trap him in the game too and just have some fun. But then we changed the lore a bit to the current version of it. I won't say about that version cuz it's the current one and you'll know that in the release version of Mario.gbc Ultimate Deluxe. Now, back to the development. Well, that period gave us another person who joined the team. So, say hello to our concept artist and betatester - SchootBotton. He drew some concepts for alot of those gameplay sections and tested alot of builds. And what about the development? Well, that was a true chaos for me. I got even more projects, I had difficulties in school, and I was working on Mario.gbc alot. And because of that I became extremely sleepy. You can't imagine how hard it was to wake up at fucking holidays. I wasn't sleeping well those days. But despite all this, during that period one very important event happened. You see, during that time I was a part of a team called C.A.T.S. - Children Animation Team Studio (not my idea for the name). And in the January 4th, it fell apart. There was drama I don't want to talk about, but I decided to combine all who left C.A.T.S. with Mario.gbc team. And those two teams became one, “Amalgamated Team”.

Also, during that period we got our first demo released and got our first fans! Thanks to @FishycraftThePissedFurry and @Micheal-GameboyColor for all the support.

But how that period ended? Well, it all ended because of my skills in breaking my own games. I renamed some sprites and KABOOM! Pretty big animations, like anumation of Mario.gbc throwing Princess Peach that contained a lot of frames, got broken, and I thought that this is because of memory limitations. So, the gallery got scrapped. But is that really bad? We got time to focus on the main gameplay part. So, our big plans ruined just like a wall, opening gates for the next part - prerelease.

Part 3 - prerelease

So, after our big plans ruined, we decided to focus on the main gameplay part. And after LiNX 4’s and Luigikid’s videos about our demo we got extremely motivated to continue our work. First of all, we extended the levels. They felt too short, so I made a second stage for “Dried”, and with help of Alexer we extended a level with trees called “Give up”. Secondly, we added colors to the prologue (tho it was made in the period of big plans). And at last, we added the worst thing to the level 1-2 - shrooms. We tried to make the game tell complete lore to close all questions and to don't make any sequels for it. With that thoughts in mind we continued our work and finished the main gameplay part, so all that was left to do was to polish the game and test for bugs.

In the end, after we fixed all the bugs, we released the game. It was a hard period of my life, but I got a great team with awesome people in it, and I really appreciate their help. But still, the game has things that should be changed, so for now we're working on the sorta V2: adding new levels and making the story as clear and finished as possible. Stay tuned and have a nice day

Bruce_cat