New The Underside Vid

I totally think he just started making a game totally-ignorantly-like and just added stuff as he went along and then he thought that ‘HOW DO I MAEKD STUFF LIEK IN CAVE STORY’ and then he DID stuff that quite matched the stuff that is in cave story and he was happy with it and then he went along and made more of the game.

And at that point it kind of turned into its own entity and right then the podunkian realized that ‘I could go back and take out the cavestoryisms in the game’ and then he got lazy. So he didn’t.

THEORY !!!

Can we focus our news lasers on something original? Or at least trying to be original? Just for tonight?

You’re not pretty.

If there was a 5th brat in Charlie and the chocolate factory, you would be that kid.

LOL Agreed.

Okay, so the game is, as always, looking pretty damn sweet and packed full of fun and creative level design and I’m sure everyone is looking forward to playing it, but now that we have descended into actively denying how much the art was derived from Cave Story I think that is all getting just a little bit sad.

Arthur dude, the “general art direction” stems from Cave Story. C’mon, the game looks great, and we all want to play it… just admit the visual style is not original so we can move on with our lives!

yo derek dude actually the “general art direction” comes from my past work. in fact i mentioned this in the planet freeplay article i did

“the graphical style i use in the underside is largely influenced by cave story without a doubt, but people who’ve known me long before my rise to infamy can tell you that the style of the underside is more a fusion of pixel’s style and the art style i’d been using long before cave story was released. […] on a simple game called super fun dungeon run, which involved a small boy running through an endless dungeon avoiding traps and a giant boulder”

what bothers me more than how annoying it is to have to deal with pages of people passing off my game just because its a “cave story ripoff” is the fact that people think i’m doing it “for attention.”

for the record, i have never ever denied that cave story was an influence on my game, and you can check all of my comments and my interview and my website and you can google “Podunkian +”Cave Story” +Ripoff +Underside” and you’re never going to find a single time that i deny that that fact. why? because the game is so obviously inspired by it, which is why i think it’s so fucking stupid for people to keep pointing it out as if they’ve made some sort of monumental discovery. yes, i get it, yes i understand it looks like cave story, i’ve never denied i wasn’t trying to go for that look.

but the part that a lot of people overlook is the fact that besides the use of “STUDIO PIXEL GRASS” or “STUDIO PIXEL 16×16 SQUARE TILES”, or “STUDIO PIXEL ROCK WALL”, the general art direction (YES DEREK YU THE GENERAL ART DIRECTION) is very much my own.

it would’ve been easy to have taken cave story’s gameplay elements and tried to hide them underneath some detailed pixel art blah blah, but i didn’t, and it’s not because i was trying to rip off cave story by any means (and certainly not to create controversy fffff), but more because cave story’s art style was very similar to the kind of art i was already doing at the time, which was getting progressively simpler and simpler after being burned out on high-detail spritework in operation sitting duck 2.

here are some examples:

(super fun dungeon run 1)[http://www.superfundungeonrun.com/sfdr1.PNG], 2001, which had a very similar 4 frame running animation with a similar jumping animation, and general character art style to the “offset eyes down sydrome idiotically cute” style i used in the underside

(super fun dungeon run 2)[http://www.superfundungeonrun.com/sfdr2.gif], 2004, a continuation of the same “retarded cute” style i used in the underside, but a little more high-detailed.

(operation sitting duck 2)[http://www.superfundungeonrun.com/osd3.jpg], 2004, which had similar dust puff sprites, used just as liberally as how they’re used in “the underside.” once i lost the sourcecode for this in a drive crash, i decided to go back to doing simpler, cleaner graphics.

(circy 3), 2004[http://www.superfundungeonrun.com/circy3/screen2.png], similarly simple, small graphics blah blah blah, before you say “MEGAMGMANAN RIPOFF” that was kind of the point of the game, every level was based off of a classic game.

the bottom line is, i think everything’s gone stupidly out of hand at this point which is why i’m actually beginning to respond to these cave story comments i’ve for the most part ignored for the first, what, year or so of this game’s development. my art style came before i was ever introduced to cave story, and the general art direction for the underside comes from what i’d already been doing, with obvious influences from cave story as it had been very compatible and visually pleasing to me.

as i’ve said, for the record, i’ve never denied that cave story was one of the underside’s biggest influences, and it’s something i’m really getting sick of having to reiterate and it’s almost getting to the point that it’s really beginning to make the game less and less enjoyable for me to work on.

derek yu, creator of eternal daugther which in and of itself is similarly indebted to metroid/castlevania (though without the overt visual similarities), it would very kind of you to stop associating my game with (cave story)[http://tigsource.com/articles/2007/11/21/new-the-underside-vid] for (the hell of it)[http://tigsource.com/articles/2007/11/06/games-for-windows-magazine-knytt].

you see, there are (tasteful ways)[http://tigsource.com/articles/2007/01/10/the-underside] of saying the same things without coming off as if you’re doing it just to elicit some sort of a response.

THANKS

lol, this is insane. your general art direction? well look, regardless of whether ‘you’ think it’s borrowed or not from Cave Story is irrelevent. the point is Pixel’s artistic style is more easily recognised as his own since he released Cave Story long before most people knew about The Underside (obviously) or your style of pixel art.

So naturally, fans of Pixel’s creative genius would mostly recognise your work as being ‘heavily’ inspired by his own.

@ Dusty Spur

yeah, sure. and painting an exact replica of the mona lisa would also take a lot of effort.

You are all stupid! The Underside is clearly a rip-off of Crystal Caves. I mean seriously, in both games you shoot things, jump on platforms, and both main characters have heads. Blatant rip-off. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crystal_Caves

Every time The Underside news comes out, the public comments make me despair for at least 50% of humanity. :(

Shab — his old games don’t come nearly as close to matching The Underside’s art style as Cave Story does. It’s really just superficial elements from his old games which are similar, while his whole overall art direction is from Cave Story. So much so that a common response at first look is “is this a mod?” “Are the graphics ripped?” The way he hedges the influence of Cave Story as this side thing, where the “art direction” somehow didn’t come from it, is pretty grating.

Also, it’s kind of amazing that people apparently never tire of having this conversation.

“The way he hedges the influence of Cave Story as this side thing, where the “art direction” somehow didn’t come from it, is pretty grating.”

“[the] graphical style i use in the underside is […] influenced by cave story.”

“i really liked the graphical style of the game because it reminded me a lot of my own style and it also had a cool retro vibe to it”

– from my planet freeplay interview

there’s not much more i can say to defend my point that the reason the game looks a lot like cave story is not because i’m ripping off cave story but because the graphical styles are very similar. “inspired by” can have many meanings, and when i say “inspired by” i mean i looked at pictures of cave story as references while drawing some of the backdrops. if any of you pixel artists out there are going to argue that you’ve never ever used a reference, and that you never once looked at a screenshot from another game to help give you ideas, then gosh you must have the most vivid imagination.

long story short: yes, the backgrounds were “inspired” by cave story — i looked at screenshots of cave story when i drew the backgrounds of the earlier stages in the game. that’s deliberate. the characters, and the rest of the art were drawn in my own style, which i had been using for about 8 years now. i don’t know how much more explicit i can get without doing a rundown of every single sprite in the game and listing off my references for each one.

i dont know or care if its a bad time to state: arrested development is boobilicious! and kinda underrated.

Who gives a shit, seriously? It looks good. Most of the offended party seems to be the americans, too (“omfg he is lying to us!”).
Those that bark pointlessly truly have no idea of the effort it takes to build something like this. Not the least.

Because he obviously felt like. O:

I think we should really drop it now, after reading the latest comments I kind of feel that we got all the answers we could’ve gotten :3

Thanks for explaining, Pod :O

And good luck with the game :33

“i looked at pictures of cave story as references while drawing some of the backdrops. if any of you pixel artists out there are going to argue that you’ve never ever used a reference, and that you never once looked at a screenshot from another game to help give you ideas, then gosh you must have the most vivid imagination.”

This is what I’ve been dying to hear for so long. That this was the method you used to create the style of the backgrounds. No need for a run-down of the sprites one by one O:!

Thanks man for the explanation (:

<3

i don’t know how much more explicit i can get without doing a rundown of every single sprite in the game and listing off my references for each one.

For a joke, you should do that as an unlockable feature after you win The Underside!

Hyup. Neil Gaiman said something along the lines of “Writers don’t need to make entirely new stories, they need to take old stories and make them new.” I wouldn’t care if this game was a straight-up Cave Story add-on pack, because Cave Story is awesome, therefore more Cave Story is awesome, and *we need more awesome*. Any new stuff that builds from Cave Story is just gravy.

Now, if Pod had *lied* about where he got his inspiration cough Nitrome cough, that would be different, because lying is bad. But he *didn’t* lie, so let’s stop bitching about the difference between “inspired by” and “similar style plus also inspired by”.

Oh and who gives a shit about the artistic influences. STFU already.

Arthur, stop being a fucking pussy and writing huge walls of text to defend yourself and your Cave Story ripoff and just enjoy making the game. Is it so hard?

Pod isn’t exactly the Golden Child either. Someone linked me to a poster from one indie game, a few weeks later he did a rush poster for some event which was basically a rip job off the other guy.

this podunkian really is clawing desperately with his rebuttal.. his previous work really isn’t reflected in Underside at all despite his paragraphs of vitriolic fuming that yes, indeed, his poorly-made kludge of mspaint from a half-decade ago inspired the style we are seeing in his most recent work.. i would not be so ignorant as to dismiss him entirely.. but it really wouldn’t take much to put him over.. his tunes sound very .. “blah”.. like the sort of stuff your average dolt produces after three weeks of screwing around with fruity loops.. his art? well, I guess he’s ok.. average at best.. but there is a fine distinction between influence and this.. i don’t even know what to call this.. very seldom would ifeel anything but idiotic for using a term like “artistic plagiarism” but this really is a fitting application. patting himself on the back for adding Lua to his little game? not only is Lua a plugin any dimwit can point-and-click into their MMF game, every fifth twelve year-old on garrysmod’s forums can embed Lua in something.. congrats again, podunkian.. you really shine, you clever little gem, you! i have played his demo.. the controls.. he claims to have fixed them so i wont complain.. the writing is ripe with errors and silly mistakes that detract from his writing.. which leads me to the next part

his writing.. he tries so very desperately to be the bastard son of Earthbound and Cave Story but painfully botches both.. the writing feels, speaking objectively and without EB in mind, awkward. i can’t put my finger on it but it feels very forced all around..

i can’t get totally down on a guy who is taking his experiences and gaming experience and actually doing something productive with it.. but podunkian seems a little bit big on the whole “studio” thing.. having played hundreds of freeware games, indie games, shareware games, etc over the span of a decade, i can say that podunkian’s place is really amongst your sort of “generic Mario clone with wonky controls 200X version hellya” level of developer

hope you stop in your tracks, look back at what you’ve done here, and just take it on the chin. you will look back in five years when you hit your stride and possess some real, firm marketable skills, see this project and the comments surrounding it, and feel ashamed of yourself for this debacle..

good luck mr podunkian..

The general, I guess you hate games or something so I suggest you go do something better than writing shit on the internet and trying to let people down.

Wait five years? Are you the stupidest motherfucker on earth? (omg this is the first time i’ve insulted someone on the internet for like a hundred years)

He’s obviously going to CONTINUE PRODUCING GAMES in five years of time and then he’ll have so much more god damn experience than if he just stops in his tracks and think about how stupid people like you are and why he should hate himself for that and

your arguments are so stupid that I can’t even answer them without being stupid myself. No go drink tea and wank and other wonderful things.

those jumping puzzles make my tummy hurt. :(

Yeah, people are uptight as fuck. Everyone calm down, it’s a game. As in, something to play to have fun. Yes it looks like Cave Story, who gives a shit? I’ll try it anyway, and I bet you’ll at least give it a try too.

The General also brought up some good points with a long ass, thoughtful post over here and Jad rebuttals with:

“your arguments are so stupid that I can’t even answer them without being stupid myself. No go drink tea and wank and other wonderful things.”

You disrespectful son of a bitch. Unwrap your lips off of Pod’s dick, Jad. Can’t someone pose a differing, thoughtful opinion (which isn’t rude, mind you) without receiving a childish attack? (LOLZ IRONY ATM)

Shit, now you’ve got me all hard. :D

Haha, I reread my message up there, it is the ultimate dickery! What the hell!