Back in late 2017, a little two-man company called
Tangram Games released a homebrew GameBoy title called
Tobu Tobu Girl.
I became aware of
Tobu Tobu Girl just before it hit the internet (digitally) and Tangram Games' shop page (physically), but ignored both iterations for some time after that because I assumed it wouldn't be very good.
In the immortal words of Vivian Ward, Julia Roberts' character in
Pretty Woman, "Big mistake. Big. Huge!" You see, after I finally got around to trying
Tobu Tobu Girl, I basically spent the next six or so months slapping myself silly for failing to nab a boxed copy of it.
If only I'd watched GameBoyle's
BoyCurious Tobu Tobu Girl review earlier. In it, host Mat declares this to be one of the best titles he's played on Nintendo's first handheld game console. That sounds like a ridiculous claim, I know. But after putting more hours than I'd like to admit into it, I can say with some confidence that
Tobu Tobu Girl actually
is one of the finest GameBoy games around.
Tobu Tobu Girl both looks, feels, and sounds--this last bit is thanks to artist
potato-tan--like something Nintendo or maybe HAL Laboratory would produce. Every single aspect of it is as clean and tight as can be. Even better, it's endlessly enjoyable and entertaining--quite a feat when you're talking about a title with just four stages, each of which can be finished in under a minute.
Now you know why I can't seem to shut up on Twitter about the recently launched
Kickstarter for Tobu Tobu Girl Deluxe, a GameBoy Color-enhanced reworking of the original.
In an effort to raise awareness about both
Tobu Tobu Girl and the just-mentioned Kickstarter for its colorized follow-up, I'm finally publishing this interview I did with Tangram Games'
Lukas Erritsø Hansen and
Simon Larsen well over a year ago.
The Gay Gamer: You first started work on Tobu Tobu Girl
back in 2014, as part of the third GBJAM game jam. Did you come up with the idea on the spot, specifically for that event? Or had you been thinking of it for a while beforehand?
Simon: The idea was something we came up with during the jam. We wanted to make a game with a musical element, where everything in the game would be synced up to the music and parts of the music would be produced by player’s actions. Sort of like a 2D platformer meets
Rez. Though what we ended up submitting for the jam was nothing like that. In the end we didn’t even manage to put in any sound at all.
The Gay Gamer: The version of Tobu Tobu Girl
you produced for GBJAM 3 was pretty different from the one you made available to the masses in late 2017. Why did you change it so drastically? Were you unhappy with how the GBJAM 3 version looked or played?
Simon: I think the main reason was simply that the initial idea wasn’t very fun. We initially wanted everything to sync up to the music, but that quickly proved too restrictive so we moved in a more puzzle-like direction. After the jam, we still weren’t very happy with how the game played and kept tweaking the design until we at some point decided that a more arcadey and twitchy gameplay style was simply more fun and closer to something we’d enjoy ourselves.
Lukas: Regarding the look of the game, we did intend to keep the style and assets from the jam version. However, during the time that we were working on the game I was at a point of rapidly improving my drawing and spriting skills. About two years into the project, I just couldn’t stand looking at the game, and as such redrew just about every sprite.
The Gay Gamer: Can you explain some of the biggest changes you made to the game from its 2014 build to its 2017 one? For instance, the early version was kind of like a single-screen puzzler, while the latest version is more of a twitchy score-attack game. Also, the early version didn't have an HUD, while the latest one does--and you moved it from the bottom of the screen to the side during development. How did you settle on those alterations?
Lukas: We early on decided to change the core concept to something more akin to
Winterbells. I think having some kind of scrolling was important to us at the time. In the early version you navigated the screen by simply bouncing on enemies, like in the jam version essentially. At some point we decided to add power-ups to the game, an include that on one hand added a lot of variation to the game but also muddied the concept a bit. In the end we took the power-ups we found added most to the game and incorporated them into the set of core mechanics, the dashes and “boosting.”
Simon: The HUD was added when we introduced power-ups. The player would collect orbs scattered throughout the level, and once they had gathered enough, they would be rewarded with a random power-up. The HUD was added in order to show the player how many orbs they had collected, as well as their progress through the stage. Problem was, the HUD covered more than 10 percent of the screen vertically, which made the game significantly harder, so we had to move it to the side instead. Luckily, this also made the progress tracker much better, as it would now move up vertically along with the player.
The Gay Gamer: Did you look to any existing games for inspiration while creating the first version of Tobu Tobu Girl
? If so, which ones?
Simon: I think I’d been playing a lot of
Rez and
Electroplankton at the time and was in love with this idea of the gameplay influencing or possibly even creating the music as you play. However, in terms of the actual gameplay I don’t think we were really inspired by anything in particular.
The Gay Gamer: And how about the current version of Tobu Tobu Girl--did your sources of inspiration change at all when went to alter its gameplay?
Lukas: I was playing a lot of
Ultra Street Fighter 4 at the time. There’s a character in that game that relies heavily on these sort of teleport-like dashes. I really wanted to try to imitate the snappiness that I felt playing that character. As strange as it may sound that ended up being a defining point in the design process. When it came to the actual implementation of that core mechanic, that took quite a few tries and approaches before arriving at what ended up in the game.
The Gay Gamer: The first thing that struck me when I saw footage of Tobu Tobu Girl
was how much it reminded me of Nintendo's Balloon Kid. Specifically, your game almost seems like a sideways take on that GameBoy classic. Is that connection intentional or accidental?
Simon: Completely accidental. Neither of us actually knew about
Balloon Kid when making the game, but I can definitely see where the comparison is coming from. I think
Upwell--as in,
Downwell but upwards--is more fitting, though that wasn’t something we were really aiming for either.
The Gay Gamer: What does the "tobu tobu" part of this game's name mean? A quick check of Jisho.org says "tobu" usually means to fly, soar, or jump. Did you have any particular translation or localization in mind when you came up with the title Tobu Tobu Girl
?
Simon: We don't really have an “official” translation but it is supposed to mean something like “Jump Jump Girl.” The title is an homage to Japanese titles like
Noby Noby Boy,
Doki Doki Panic,
ChuChu Rocket! We are obviously very inspired by Japanese games in general and we wanted the title to reflect that. Same goes for the box art--both for the jam version and the final release.
The Gay Gamer: Did you encounter any particular problems or issues while making either version of Tobu Tobu Girl
? If so, what were they--or what were the worst--and how did you overcome them?
Lukas: Graphics-wise the main challenge came partly from the limited sprite and tile count, and partly from the limited color palette. Making sure the sprites are easily readable from the background was a problem and something I don’t think we entirely succeeded at. In regards to the sprite count, I don’t think there’s any animation used in the actual game that has more than two frames. Due to the limited tile count, I probably spent more time reducing and keeping each background to the allowed amount of tiles than I spent drawing them.
Simon: Perhaps the biggest challenge was getting the physical edition ready. You obviously can’t just call some company and have GameBoy cartridges made in 2017, so figuring out how to do that in a feasible and affordable way was quite difficult, and at some point we were convinced it would never happen. Even something as simple as getting high-quality manuals and cardboard boxes manufactured in such a small quantity was not trivial. These challenges are ultimately the reason why the game was so long in the making. In the end it was definitely worth it, though.
The Gay Gamer: What are the main challenges of making a GameBoy game that plays on actual hardware?
Simon: The main challenge was definitely to make sure the game ran at a nice and stable frame rate.
Tobu Tobu Girl game is fairly fast-paced and even the slightest slowdown is very noticeable and is likely to throw you off and kill you. Often we would add some new feature only to have the game suddenly slow down. Then we would have to either optimize it, remove it, or get rid of something else. This can of course be quite frustrating, but it also helps you prioritize which elements are really necessary.
Another big challenge was the music and sound effects. The GameBoy does not really have any functionality for this--you can only tell it to play a certain frequency with a certain wave form at a certain volume. In order to add music, we had to implement a sequencer, which is basically a small program responsible for playing the right notes at the right time. potato-tan, the game’s composer, would write all the music in some weird music notation language we based on MML (Music Macro Language) that we could then convert into something the sequencer understands.
The Gay Gamer: Are you two GameBoy fans yourselves, or did something else spur you to develop a GameBoy game in 2017?
Simon: I used to be a pretty big GameBoy fan. I rarely play on it anymore, but I still adore it quite a lot. It was the first console I owned, so there is obviously a fair amount of nostalgia involved as well.
However, I think the main reason is simply that it seemed like a fun challenge. I had played around with making GameBoy homebrew all the way back in 2010. Later in 2013, we wanted to participate in the second GBJAM game jam and decided it would be more fun to make an actual GameBoy game. We ended up making an (also unfinished) prototype of a GameBoy game called
Super Catacombs. About a year later, we once again participated in GBJAM, this time working on what would become
Tobu Tobu Girl.
Lukas: I’ve only very recently acquired a GameBoy, though I did own one as a kid. In that regard I’m not much of an actual GameBoy or even retro fan. The main draw was the challenge of making the game run decently on actual hardware. That meant seriously limiting frame count on animations and very laboriously reducing the count of unique tiles on each background.
See also: previous 'ten questions with...' posts featuring
auntie pixelante,
Peter Bartholow (of
Indivisible fame),
Dudedle Studio,
the guys who created Wizorb, the guy chiefly responsible for the English fan translation of
Ripened Tingle's Balloon Trip of Love, and
the makers of THE 'DENPA' MEN 2
