Green Sans’s Growing Ambition, an insight into the development of...

5 months ago

Green Sans’s Growing Ambition, an insight into the development of a joke that you begin to take seriously.

“Why are you giving Green Sans a story? He’s a meme character!”

i’ve been getting comments like these complaining & questioning my decision to stray away from meme humor to give green sans lore & a story

i wanna talk about why i decided to make this change and how it’s for the better

(art at the top by @krisinallcaps )

Green Sans was never about memes, it was about breaking rules.

after i gained directorship after the initial showcase video when green sans purely made fun of dusttrust, i realized something.

green sans was a joke game NOT to be funny, but to make and 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 jackson. a phase parodying one left? that works. give him an iron man suit? why not, that sounds cool!

green sans was the ultimate blank slate for creativity, and he still is. we could literally throw him into any fangame regardless of tone or quality and it’d work because he’s GREEN SANS.

but as we kept developing the game, more and more ideas kept forming.

we started creating more characters like green sans junior and g-money, we decided to add an overworld section and let you run around green 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 making an ENTIRE ANIME OPENING for the game! it goes without saying that we're very proud of what we had made simply out of our own initiative and creative drive to make something cool.

(art by @bluisafur )

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 green sans? they already both attack with bones & blasters. green sans can pull out anything because he's green sans, so it makes sense that his son can do the same, right? but then how do we differentiate the two?

how is g-money relevant? he's friends with green 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?

(art by @marshber )

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 green sans with more 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.