Comments
I uploaded this so that I could archive old content. This game will not be developed on ever again, but the fact that this page has been kept in my private games for so long is a miracle I can't help but feel grateful for. I will make a game series for Scratchy soon, but this game won't be a part of it.
Join Scratchy in his escape of the Laboratory Understory! You can collect cool items that have unique effects in order to fight the enemies in your path.
#roguelike #scifi #action #platformer
But with that brief description of my game aside, I do want to talk about development details and aspects about the game you don't just learn from playing. This game is inspired by both Super Meat Boy and The Binding of Isaac (Repentance specifically, since it was the first version I played), if it were mashed together into one weird game.
I knew about Super Meat Boy since I was 5 years old, and I also knew about The Binding of Isaac later on, but avoided the game because people had said that it played like the original Legend of Zelda, and I didn't like that game a lot (Not to mention how it doesn't play like the original Legend of Zelda).
Later on, due to the fact that I was, and still am, a Plants vs Zombies fan, I found an extremely interesting fan-game, one that even inspired my art style for this game specifically, and it was called I.RULE. It is a fan-game in which the gameplay style of Plants vs Zombies is crossed-over with the roguelike elements, characters, and items of The Binding of Isaac, alongside a unique artstyle that truly makes you remember the game.
I never played I.RULE when I first heard about it, but I infrequently watched gameplay of it. One day, I was searching around Gamejolt for Plants vs Zombies fangames to play, but I had downloaded a few and got bored of them. Then I started getting visions of I.RULE in my head again, and decided that the ultimate fangame to play was I.RULE, after putting it off for so long.
When I first started playing I.RULE, I was getting odd nostalgic feelings from the game, despite me barely knowing much about both the game itself and The Binding of Isaac. I knew it was because of the artstyle and the way the game had been designed, and that's what really intrigued me about it. But I.RULE became quite the obsession for me. It was never an unhealthy obsession, I made sure of that, but an obsession it was.
After playing I.RULE for some time, I started yearning for the real Isaac! I started watching many YouTube videos of The Binding of Isaac (Mostly of Repentance), and started listening to the music of The Binding of Isaac. Then, one fateful day, during summer break, I finally obtained the game. The Binding of Isaac Repentance.
I would always play that game, I basically ditched I.RULE, and who could blame me? I've been playing Plants vs Zombies for almost my entire life, but as of that moment, I had only been playing The Binding of Isaac Repentance for that single day. That single day had turned into a whole month, but then school started.
I was smart about the whole thing, I would play Isaac for an hour, then eat dinner, do assignments, whatever else. But there was one small problem to that schedule, The Battle Cats Together.
Now I've basically divorced myself completely from The Battle Cats altogether, so now I'm getting into history I don't want to concern myself nor associate with. At that time, I was actively working on a Roblox fangame of mine called The Battle Cats Together, and it was Battle Cats, but you could play together... Wow... It wasn't my masterpiece or anything, but ironically it was the best game I had ever released.
Around that time, my hatred for The Battle Cats and it's scummy mobile and gacha game tactics had grown to a point where I wanted to turn The Battle Cats Together into the better version of The Battle Cats. I started sacrificing the time I had saved for The Binding of Isaac Repentance and putting it all into developing The Battle Cats Together.
One day, while I was working day after day on The Battle Cats Together, one of the most well-known Battle Cats Youtubers played the game, and it was MattShea. My family was very proud of me at this point, an influential person finally played my game and dedicated the time into making a video about my game, and I was proud too, even if he was constantly slandering my game (lol).
But there was one problem, I was in the midst of developing a really important update that made many amazing changes, and he just had to play at the worst possible time. I knew this would be the worst case scenario, because the amount of players would bump up immensely, and since he didn't care for the game, he would never play it again to see it in a better state than he left it in. Due to the amount of new players, some will not want to stay for the new update due to the current state of the current game at that time, so they would just move onto other things.
Luckily, I managed to release that update at a time where the amount of players were still great, and even more people started playing. Then, I was onto making the best update yet. This update would've added new Factory levels with conveyor belts, reworked the entire combat system of the ai, but the best of all for the fans of the game and the addition that I dreaded the most, the Cat Capsule, aka, the Scummy Gacha Rolls. While making that now cancelled update, I decided to make the Cat Capsule completely optional, and allow players to unlock all of the cats through the normal means of progression in The Battle Cats Together, as to make it less scummy and more of a helpful tool to aid you throughout your journey.
I had made so much up to that point, the last thing I remember making of that update was the marshmallow cat and gummy cat rework, and then I cancelled the update because I forgot to save for 2 days straight and I lost a ton of progress. I knew that if I kept working on The Battle Cats Together, if it were to get popular, I would just live in the shadow of The Battle Cats and Roblox, both were entities that I heavily disliked. I knew this because I've witnessed it happen to others before, others much more influential than I was.
Then I quit, and Christmas was finally rolling around! I started working on a little Plants vs Zombies Roblox game, inspired by Super PvZ on Roblox, and of course I wasn't going to invest too much time into the game, but that was cancelled too. All I had gotten finished was Peashooter, Cabbage-Pult's model, and the Sun Beam for Sunflower (The models were pretty good by the way).
One of the gifts I had received for Christmas was Hollow Knight, but more notably, Super Meat Boy. I had a heavy desire for this game not only because I knew it was going to be a great game, but also as a way to explore my early history back when I was too young to understand or comprehend it. I wanted to learn.
Much like with Isaac, I started playing Super Meat Boy a ton after owning it for myself, getting lots of bandages, entering many warpzones, and accomplishing many A+ ranks on the levels, It was great.
This is where the development of Scratchy in: Religious Science began. It first started when my Dad and I decided to come up with another original idea for a game, like with our previous game, Dad's Haunted Orchard, instead of creating another fangame like I typically do.
I wanted a demon as the main character, as I was very inspired by Loki from The Binding of Isaac, and that is one of Scratchy's main inspiration when it comes to his character design. I thought of a game where you would need items to attack, and my Dad thought it would be cool to make it a platformer, so we already had a base for what the game would come to be.
However, our original ideas for this game was much different from the ideas I made later on. It still had Scratchy trapped in a lab needing to escape, except the laboratory was not treated as a novel thing and instead just another setting as Scratchy goes on to explore many other settings with many other enemies and items, such as beaches and cities. The enemies would consist of scientist (The only enemy who still remains), fire-fighters, soldiers, conspiracy theorists, ghost hunters, new age healers, cops, tape-recorders?? (I don't really know what this one was supposed to be), and even popsicles. My dad came up with most of these enemies, the conspiracy theorists and ghost hunters were playing off of the idea that you were playing as a demon.
After creating a few concept notes of the game, I decided to sketch out a character. One of the sketches looks like if Mario, Isaac, and a Demon were combined into a weird, uhhhh, thing. Another one had a pretty goofy, bouncing, and round looking demon who looked really unintimidating. Then, I decided to draw inspiration from one of my previous Plants vs Zombies fan-made plants, Musheiser. I decided to give him the bean head, but make the usually rounded part sharp to make it look more dog-like and animalistic. Then I created little mean eyes and a toothy smile, so I could make him look mischievous. Also, he used to have a neck, an odd detail to point out but it's true.
Afterward, I starting programing the game. The scope of the game was already too large, so I knew to scale it back a bit. I made the test items, I made the test enemies, and I made the test basically everything, until I had everything just right. Then I started working on the generation of the levels, which weren't considered zones at this point of development. I worked on the camera movement between every room as well.
Another key player in this story that I left out until this moment was JoJo's Bizarre Adventure vs Zombies Requiem, which is a remake of an old game I created a long time back that I will soon work on again after this game. I decided that I wanted to put Scratchy in the game. Despite me wanting to put Scratchy in the game, I knew that if I released JoJo's Bizarre Adventure vs Zombies Requiem first with Scratchy in the game, and release Scratchy's game after, Scratchy would be associated with JoJo's Bizarre Adventure vs Zombies Requiem and not with his own game series.
I decided to scale the scope of the game way back, and started working on what would become the game now. The game is forming it's identity much more now, but it's so strange how much a game can transform in over the span of half a year.
