So yeah! I’ve just released my brand new game, Bullet Bill 3! Feel free to immediately quit this page and go play it by following this link!

For those of you still reading, I’m going to talk a little bit about the series, the game, why it took so long to finish and just general points of info only vaguely related to the game.

First off, Bullet Bill. Bullet Bill started off from a friend of mine who went by the username Placky, who I don’t have any contact with anymore for one reason or another. He was fooling around in Game Maker back in early 2006 and made a game simply called ‘Bullet Bill’. The object of the game was to avoid obstacles and hit Mario at the end of each level. It was incredibly crude and handled really poorly, but I at least loved it. I asked if it was alright to take the idea and run with it, so to speak, by making it in flash, and he said that was fine, and that it wasn’t like he was going to do anything with it.

This ended up being my very first flash game; I had worked with flash before with the first flash movie I made dating back to 2004. I had always wanted to make games so I knew I’d make the jump to coding at some point, but I digress. The first Bullet Bill game was released, on April 13th 2006. It was incredibly crude and handled really poorly, so I really nailed the feel of the original Game Maker game! I wouldn’t recommend playing it, but I did link to it after all, so it’s not like I can stop you.

Later on in the same year, I revisited the Bullet Bill concept, and on November 14th 2006, 5 years ago to the day, I released Bullet Bill 2. The second game traded the 8-bit graphics of the NES Mario games for the 16-bit All Stars versions. The controls were also changed, throwing out the awful keyboard controls in favour of mouse controls, allowing for more twitch style gameplay. While the original game had only 8 levels, spanning two worlds, the sequel expanded this to 32 levels, spanning eight worlds. The sequel also added boss battles. These boss battles would appear at the end of each world, just like in the Mario games, and involved dodging obstacles and hitting the boss three times. Most of them were pretty poorly done, but then again so was most of that game. I rushed a sequel out for a few reasons. One, Bullet Bill is a rather simple thing to code, all things considered, so it wasn’t like I had to do anything super complicated. Second, the original game got pretty popular, or at least was the most popular thing I had made at the time. I was unhappy with a few elements of the original game, so I rushed out a sequel that I’d be happier with, in hopes that that would be even more popular.

And oh god was it popular.

Maybe it’s a lot easier to understand when you consider that I was 14 at the time, but that game got voted as one of the best games of the month and was featured on the front page of Newgrounds, tons of sites stole the file and hosted it themselves without giving me credit (Thanks internet!), and, well, searching Bullet Bill in Google gives you a bunch of different sites hosting the game. On Newgrounds alone there are over 800,000 hits on the game.

So naturally I wanted to make a third.

However, I didn’t really know what to add to the game, or what it even needed. At the time I thought Bullet Bill 2 was pretty much perfect. Now, obviously, I can look back on that game and see it for what it really is, a giant piece of shit, but again I digress.

The first idea I had was around the time Super Paper Mario was coming out, I thought the switching to 3D mechanic was incredibly interesting, and thought to myself I can probably do that! What I was making turned into a weird cross between Bullet Bill and Sewer Shark, and it was scrapped after a few weeks.

I then forgot about making a 3rd game, figuring that the 2nd game is so popular, there’s no real reason so just make the same game again unless I could come up with a really cool change to the gameplay.

A year later LittleBigPlanet came out, and naturally I was hooked. The idea of making a giant level editor for a game seemed incredibly daunting but intriguing. “There’s no way I could do that though”, I probably thought to myself, “That’d be impossible.” Besides, by then, I had already moved on from making that game, and even by then I could look back on Bullet Bill 2 and see how bad it really was.

Fast forward to June 2010, I was talking with internet sensation Eddsworld about another game idea. At that time we had made three games together, with a fourth game cancelled the year before for some reason or another; I blame my entry into university but again, digressing. We were thinking about making a Zombies Ate My Neighbours game, and I set out to work. The first thing I thought of was to add functionality for levels to be edited via a string of letters, as opposed to manually moving things around. And thus I came up with a basic level decoder function, taking a large string of letters and making a level out of it. The project died shortly after (as most of our ideas do OH DID I SAY THAT OUT LO-) but the code was already written.

“Fuck it.” I exclaimed “Let’s make Bullet Bill 3.”

Work started on August 13th 2010, and the first thing I did was develop a system for the level decoder. I figured it’d have to be grid based, try to take up as little space as possible, but still be simple enough so that I could potentially make levels just by typing a bunch of characters in a row. After about a day of this, I had figured the entire thing out, and re-created the first level of Bullet Bill 2 by just typing out characters. I threw that into the game and it worked perfectly. Awesome, now for the hard bit, making a level editor.

The level editor takes inspiration from a few different sources. First off, the graphics are based on the Super Mario Bros. 3 map screens, because I felt that would look the best. Also, when playing the game, the graphics are scaled up 300%, in the editor the graphics are scaled 200%, leaving just enough room for the interface. It’s almost as if I planned it. Another inspiration is from Mario Paint, another rather obvious one, for general interface ideas. The last inspiration is from another flash game called Punk-o-Matic, where the whole idea of condensing a level into a string of characters came from in the first place. The rest just sort of fell into place after that. The user can select objects they want to place into the level, place them as a faint grid shows up showing where they can place them, and red rectangles show where they cannot be placed, as they will overlap with other objects. After all the objects are placed and the user plays or saves the level, the program does a quick scan and determines where every object is and what they are.

Without going too much into it, every object has 3 different properties, a character, a row and column values. Since the game works in a grid system, I set the total number of rows to 10, so that the code can simply use 0-9 to determine what height the object is placed at. Then each character has a character, for instance, Koopas are recognized as ‘k’, Thwomps are ‘t’, coins are ‘$’, and so on, so the code ‘4t’ would place a Thwomp on the 5th row, pretty straight forward stuff. Lastly, the columns are a bit more confusing. There are 2 different ways the code determines the column, first off, whenever there is a / in a level, the code shifts the placement 4 columns. So, for example, the code ‘3p/3p’ would place a Paratroopa in row 4 column 0, and then another Paratroopa in row 4 column 4. On top of this, the character ‘a’ is used for any in-between columns, so to get to column 6, for instance, the code would be ‘/a2’, or ‘4 plus 2’, which is what I used to convinced myself is was a good idea. Anyway, enough about this, it’s confusing me the more I talk about it and I had to work with it for 15 months.

Another addition to the game was the abilities. I never wanted the series to evolve into the normal side scrolling shooter, preferring the idea of an obstacle course, but I also felt it was necessary for the game to evolve in some way. The abilities were added to make the game slightly easier, but not by too much. The very first ability is the one I’d imagine most people would want, to slow down time. A lot of the complaints from the other two games where that they were unfair with their speed and reflex based levels, so adding this means they’ll have to find something else to complain about. Most abilities originate from the Mario Kart series in some way. There are the triple bombs, which mimic the triple shells that rotate around your character, exploding on impact with whatever it hits. My favourite, however, is the time rewinding potion. No real Mario justification for this one, using the potion graphic from Super Mario Bros. 2, if you die with this at full, your death is reversed and you get another chance. I love using this one because, well, it’s like an extra life in a way, I don’t have to reset back to the last checkpoint when hit, hooray!

I worked on the level creator rather rigorously for the majority of the year, when it got to a point I was happy with it, it was already 10 months after I started. Obviously this was due to my own laziness sure, but also due to university projects and the like. But whatever, I was happy with it, and I had asked a good friend of mine Wolfgun to make remixes for the game, which were admittedly fantastic. I debated whether or not to go ahead and announce the game at that point with a small website update or something like that, but I figured I could wait a bit longer. I ended up making a trailer for the game, which I released on August 13th 2011, one year since the project started. The trailer went over well, and it seems that there were quite a few people excited for the game, and thanks to Edd from Eddsworld promoting it very slightly, it got a decent amount of attention.

Then I didn’t do anything for a few months.

About a month ago today, actually, was when I started working on it again, and ended up adding quite a bit to the game. Which is to say, I made the levels for the game. Up until last month, the game only had two levels, both of which were just tests to make sure the code worked. Making levels seemed like hard and tedious work, so I put it off a lot. I even had an idea that I could trick other people into making the levels for me. I later scrapped that idea, figuring I may as well get it over with, and over the course of a few weeks, I made all 56 levels in the game. I also ended up adding one new item to the level creator, the mega mushroom from New Super Mario Bros. Looking into Bullet Bill 2 a lot more, a lot of people loved the final hidden character, Banzai Bill. This character was the size of the entire screen, and just blasted through everything with relative ease. I was originally against adding this character back in, but felt having the mega mushroom would be a good excuse to have him in. This also meant every character needed a ‘banzai’ form, which forced me to do a lot more sprite work, but hopefully it’s worth it.

And that bring me to today, the release of the game! By the time you’re reading this I’ll probably be drunk, since it’s the only way I can stop myself from idly sitting by and hoping people love the game. But seriously I really hope you love the game! I put a lot of work into it, so please give it a shot. Any opinions feel free to share them in this thread! And now for some more little anecdotes during development.

There was originally only going to be 9 characters, just like the abilities. This updated to 15 when Batmanthorp suggested Nyan Cat should be added as a bonus character. I agreed, and added him in. I then figured there should be more non-Mario characters in the game and added 4 other bonus characters. Guile was in the game from near the beginning, and was subsequently moved to be a bonus character when this idea came about; he was replaced by a Subcon.

I had already added all the characters into the game before my bronyism happened; I tried to justify adding Rainbow Dash to the game, but ultimately decided against it.

When coming up with ideas for the game, I’d talk to my friend Callum Howarth, here are a few things that were mentioned.

Psy: "phoenix wright jumps up"

Psy: "shout OBJECTION"

Psy: "the speech bubble is the bullet bill"

Psy: "this is not happening"

Cal: "oh come on D:"

Cal: "damn it psy You should make a Buzz Bomber game, which is just bullet bill but sonic"

Psy: "you hit the gate from SMW you have to punch to go on the other side"

Psy: "and it spins super fast"

Psy: "and the level rotates 90 degrees"

Psy: "and flings you upward"

Cal: "That'd be awesome."

Psy: "this will never happen"

Cal: "Damn it Psy! D:"

I never actually completed Bullet Bill 2. The game just gets stupid at a point. I realised when looking back at that game that there’s no real difficulty curve, instead platforms are just placed almost randomly throughout the level, I tried to make this one a bit fairer.

The World 3-1 level in Bullet Bill 3 is the World 1-1 level from Bullet Bill 2, with a few slight alterations. In fact, the first half of World 1-1 from Bullet Bill 2 is World 1-1 from Bullet Bill, so that’s cool I guess.

I decided to keep a project journal on Bullet Bill 3 so I could see how little work I was doing, according to that on August 25th 2010 I played Ef: A Fairy Tale of the Two. I wrote a little bit about it, then I trailed of and said, and I quote, “I don’t know why I end up writing so much about these visual novels and never post them anywhere, I’ll just end up stumbling on this file in a few years and realise just how pathetic I am writing about porn games.”

Some of the characters you unlock are based on flash movies I’ve made; the first unlockable character is a thwomp from my thwomp movie series, the second is a character dubbed ‘Awesome Guy’, who originated in Bullet Bill 2 and subsequently got his own movie too.

If you unlock a character AND hit the level goal at the end of the level, an Easter egg will trigger. Wait at the ‘click anywhere to continue’ screen for about three minutes, the music will die out and Totaka’s Song will start playing.

The medals have way too many references in them, a lot of rap songs, game references, anime references, even a visual novel reference. As far as Giant Bomb references go, there’s the locked message for the bombs “Like a Giant Bomb ready to blow”, the locked message for the Super Koopa “A Sad false shell-less man!” the unlocked message for ‘hit 53597 blocks’ “That’s million bricks.”, and finally, the requirement for the coin collecting medal, collect 7750 coins.

And that’s all I can think of to say! If you actually read all this then thanks! If not... well... wait, whatever, yeah, hope you enjoy the game!