2017-01-10

legendfbumbo:

First off, the facts!

The Legend of Bum-bo is a randomly generated, turn based puzzle rpg where you take the role of Bumbo (from the binding of Isaac) as he punches the faces off hordes of paper goons and takes their coins! …only to gamble them away at the casinos.

it’s being developed by myself and James id (fingered + all those cool live action trailers for my games) and once again features
the musical stylings of Ridiculon!

the game will release on Steam and iOS sometime later this year!

Story time:

A year and a half ago James and i decided to work on a tiny little project called Fingered, you all played it, it was the hotness of 2015.

riding off the success of fingered we decided in early 2016 to start work on a full size game, the very rough outline of this game was simple, we wanted to make a puzzle game with an unconventional/non traditional visual design and a hobo theme!

the initial idea was to do a marionette puppet theme, you play as a hobo scrounging through the trash for booze to survive while also defending against hordes of rival bums out for your sweet sweet trash! the game would use a basic match x puzzle theme where you combine specific pieces of trash together to make “spells” that would aid in attacking defending and healing. you’d eventually dig down to the bottom of the trash, find a bottle of viper and the level would end.

the idea was solid, but after a few days mulling it over it didn’t feel as deep or new as i wanted and the basic crazy hobo theme didn’t feel as inspired as i hoped.

at this point James and i had been skyping a lot, we had similar childhoods, we would reminisce about visiting our fathers on the weekends,
pilfering dot-matrix printer paper to make comics and animated flip books and building dioramas out of cardboard. these are all themes i pulled from when
designing the themes in Isaac, being a creative kid, being lonely but having the ability to escape into a safer world via drawings and cardboard worlds.

of all the people ive worked with James was the one person who i had the most in common with when it came to how we grew up and since isaac was designed around a theme we both experienced, it felt appropriate to explore this theme more in Bumbo.

so i scrapped the “hobo quest” theme and allowed the Isaac world to start bleeding in. the hobo became Bumbo, the enemy bums became paper monsters and the back alley dumpsters became the cardboard walls of
the fantasy world of a 7 year old kid.

(initial design sketch)

(current build)

i know this post doesn’t really explain what Bumbo is and how it plays, but this is where we started so i thought it would be the most appropriate way to start this blog.

expect staggered updates here that range from video footage to tech posts to the innate ramblings of a nut.

here are some bits and pieces of bumbo that have been floating around the internet for a while.

Stay Tuned!

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