Hi. I'm gonna give this a much-needed update to make it work better. Ever since Windows 10 made a dumb update, a lot of old GM Studio 1 games got capped at 45 FPS, including the ones that were meant to run at full 60 FPS, so I'll be updating this one later. I'll let you know when it's updated.

I know I should be working on a boss for that Terry game now, but I pulled some code from the Belgrad games to make that boss, and I figure I might as well fix both of them. (...not the original Angels of Music build. That game's in Curse of the Castle.)

I had the basic ideas of a Belmont-like character around 2014. Pretty much, he was always meant to be the Discount Slayer of the Supernatural, because he'd rather kill demons than exorcise them. The joke was that his methods were messy, but effective.

Around 2015, I wasn't in a great place. You could argue I was in a college dorm. My old laptop, the one I developed Dragonian on, was pretty much dead, and so was any chance in developing anything else in Game Maker 8.1. (BTW, back in the day, to keep it registered offline, you'd have to get a file called blacklist.yoyo which updated every month, or keep it online somehow.) I convinced the college to download Game Maker: Studio, way back when there was no 2 to it yet. To get back into game-making, and to understand the changes made between versions, I made Belgrad: Angels of Music.

No Midis allowed. .oggs and .mp3s only. No outside code allowed. No writing of outside txt files. Saving was supposedly exclusive to .ini files.

As for Jason's design... well...

I was going for that Castlevania minimalist look. The hat was inspired by the movie Van Helsing, the closest thing to a Castlevania movie. The big coat and sticking-out collar was always intentional. The combination, quite infamously, made him look like a detective at this size. So, I ran with that. He was also meant to be kind of a jerk, but not so much that we didn't root for the guy.

Also, I set his stories in the '90s, because I grew up then, and there was no internet to speak of at the time, making the mysteries more effective.

Angels of Music

I saw some similarities between Castlevania's Dracula and Andrew Lloyd Webber's stage version of The Phantom of the Opera. I wanted to make a platform-adventure game. That is, a platform game with adventure-game elements, like collecting items and dialogue trees. Essentially, Jason Belgrad was literally investigating the theater, only to uncover the secret of the Phantom.

It was small-scale because I was considering an episode-based series of games, as was the style at the time. Also, I was still experimenting with the elements of GM Studio.

Oh, and if you're wondering about Diana, she was planned to have her own episode, labeled Curse of the Museum. Inspired by Night at the Museum, where Jason saves her from a mummy.

Curse of the Castle

I had an old game that I scrapped which was a Metroidvania. It's labeled LilWitch, and featured Tara, the little witch. However, I still had the map and a few other details, so I rolled with it, and worked Jason Belgrad into it.

It was always planned to be set in the castle of Von Noyre (named Noyre as a spelling out of mispronouncing noir), even in its LilWitch form. In that plan, Tara was meant to go into the castle by her Mistress' request, and never get out, because that's the castle's curse. This made the game more of a Metroidvania than adventure-like, but it worked.

This was easy to adjust to the Belgrad story. I'd set it in 1996 in Germany, because Germany's well-known for its castles. Jason's motivated to go there when Vivian, a girl who is British because I say she is, calls him on a brick-sized cellphone while trapped there. For reasons I don't want to get into, she was more... direct with Jason than Diana was.

Also, to mix things up, and to help answer the age-old question, "Why is Jason the Discount Slayer of the Supernatural?" I introduced the world to his younger sister, Sophia Belgrad. She's a send-up of the old Belmonts and their clunky physics.

As for the main villain of this one, Donna Malfaisante, I wanted a more creative demon: a vindictive angel of death. I think she was based on a Beldam or Bella Donna, and not a succubus. I know I used Google Translate to get the word Malfaisante. Now, what does she have to do with this? Spoilers: She made the curse.

Oh, and for the music, I used a Mac at the school. One day a week wasn't enough, and my skills at composing music were kinda stifled by both the other software, and my lack of music experience. Mostly, I did the Midis, then put them through the Mac, which would have other sound fonts. None of the sound fonts were right, and it didn't even have anything close to the Midi fonts, in all irony. Not to mention, the person assisting me really wanted me to give the music some reverb. However, in my experience, reverb is bad for looping music, and they did not "get it". Yes, it might sound a bit more professional, but seriously, I didn't know how to loop music with code effectively yet (Pixelated Pope has a decent tutorial on that), and adding reverb would just make a big, obvious seam of nothingness in the music if you used GM's music-looping, like in Undertale's soundtrack.

Side note

Around this time, after making this game, I was in a relationship with someone in the area. She became a bit of a problem, trying to play with two hearts, and the other one being one of my friends.

After ruining that friendship, the relationship lasted for about more than a year. However, due to school rules, and her perpetuating a stereotype of women feeding on their significant other's bank account (which wouldn't work when I didn't carry much money on my person at the time), it couldn't go too far.

Kinda miss her in some ways, but not too much.

Y2K

I knew that I wanted one Belgrad game set in 1999. I'm pretty sure a lot of people were duped into believing that the world would end in the year 2000, as I was one of them. However, as you can tell, life goes on. So, no, I was not trying to capitalize on any particular RPG that Oney played years later.

Also, I figured out how to program a tentacle, so I went in a less Gothic direction and more Eldritch instead.

Of course, a lot of the enemies were sprite-swaps. Why fix what isn't broken?

The plot was always meant to be set outside, near a seaside beach resort where people disappeared. Nobody is aware of the monsters outside of town, because if they were, it would break the gameplay. I was inspired this time by Castlevania II: Simon's Quest. However, to add verticality, I put in mountains and an underground section.

I brought back Vivian and Diana this time around, since this happened three years after the events of the previous two games. Jason's mellowed out of getting offended by being called a detective, since his work does involve investigation. Sophia's back as well, and to challenge Jason's "Discount Slayer" title, we've got an expensive slayer, Penelope Silversmith, another rival of Jason's in the business.

Our main villain this time is this mysterious hooded figure talking about a monster which would rise in the year 2000. He leads a bunch of other Eldritch monsters, and captures random tourists as sacrifices for the all-devouring monster.

To make the gameplay more interesting, Jason can now learn new moves from ninja scrolls. Also, I made some really, REALLY arbitrary thought puzzles before the dungeons to justify talking to NPCs. This helped make this game more of the platform-adventure I wanted to go for.

I outsourced a good chunk of the music to HamPunch. I just mentioned the Sega Genesis' Yamaha YM2612, and he rolled with it. However, since I was in a rush, I did the rest with FamiTracker, which sounded close enough to me.

Sure, it was bigger than the last one, and not as successful, but it worked.

Also, yes, it was meant to be a series finale. Is it possible that there would be a sequel?

Yes. It's possible. However, if I were to do another one, I think I'll take a few cues from some other intergenerational franchise with a vampire as a villain, where one of the people in the family has a fancy hat.

...but I'm still doing the Terry game first. I'm almost halfway done with that (minus music), and I'm working on the boss for the space level.