Game:Fnrrf Ygm Schnish: Alleghany Hell School/trivia

Trivia

• For the most part, the setting of the game is based very closely on the real-life Alleghany High School, located near the city of Covington, Virginia.
• Joguo is one of the few characters in the game who was not even loosely based on a real person. His origin was in a never-finished OHRRPGCE project titled Spuduf Splorchers, which I worked on in 2001-2002. In that game he was the leader of a group known as the "Goueng-Zu," which later became his last name.
• In the original release of the game, almost all of the school's teachers and faculty had the same names as their real-life counterparts (though only a few actually had their names mentioned on-screen since the Notebook menu was not yet implemented.) This was changed in the April 2018 demo version.
• The Avery Award item was named after a fictional award (intended to be something along the lines of the Oscars or Golden Globes) which was mentioned in the credits of Running for the Mounties, a jokey movie that one of my teachers in high school made with the help of our class, a camcorder, and very little (if any) editing.
• The Chicken Piñata item is based on an actual chicken piñata made by another student during my high school years. The piñata featured in the aforementioned movie, where it was referred to as "Mr. Chicken" and came in second place in the election thanks to a massive last-minute write-in campaign. This is also referenced in the ending of Okédoké! La Leyenda Mexicana, where an actual chicken becomes President.
• The Chiba Ball items are based on something that several kids in my Boy Scout troop did -- they would collect the round, spiky seed pods from burdock plants and stick them together until they formed a ball of stuck-together plant seeds the size of a baseball, or sometimes much larger. And then they would, of course, throw them at each other. I have no idea where the name came from or who originally came up with it, but for some odd reason the Boy Scouts called these clumps of spiky plant seeds "Chiba Balls"... and the name has stuck ever since.
• The Garbanzo and Hamster Scroll items both originated in a Final Fantasy 6 ROM hack that I started on around 2005-2006 but never finished. Though one might be inclined to think the Garbanzo is a reference to Okédoké!, the item actually came before El Garbanzo! The Hamster Scroll, of course, is referencing Wandering Hamster and its hero Bob.
• The Puppywhacker item was based on an actual object that was kept as a decoration in one of the AHS Spanish teachers' classrooms. He described it as being a type of Aztec war club if I'm remembering correctly, and he really did call it the "Puppywhacker."

Previous "Fnrrf Ygm Schnish" games

Before work began on Alleghany Hell School in 2008, there were two previous attempts at a game titled "Fnrrf Ygm Schnish" which started out in a location based on my high school. Unlike FYS:AHS, both of these games treated the school as only the starting area rather than having most of the game revolve around it.

2003

The first of these attempted games was started in 2003 and abandoned by mid/late-2004. It began with a power outage just like the current game, but the playable characters (aside from Eddie) were completely different -- the result of me basically going around asking people in my classes if they wanted to be a character in the game, and adding in whoever responded. On top of the characters based on people who had signed up to be in the game, Sarah Fartbean was also present as a playable character, and was one of only four that I had actually made sprites for before abandoning the game. Only one classroom and the second-floor hallway maps were ever finished, and all you could really do was talk to NPCs in the classroom (three of which gave you the option to have them join as party members) and then walk around in the hall fighting roaches and Freaky Fungi. Attempting to go down the stairs would lead to a boss battle against a "Drunken Kangaroo," but I can't remember if I ever actually finished making that boss or not.

I vaguely remember details of the plot that I had thought of around the time I was making this game, but it was pretty random and disjointed compared to both of the later attempts. Aside from the beginning revolving around a power outage and the presence of the Cafeteria Dungeon a bit later on, it has very little in common with FYS:AHS.

2006

The second attempt at a Fnrrf Ygm Schnish game began in 2006, and got to a somewhat more playable state than the 2003 version. The game begins with a character introduction and naming sequence, unlike both of the other games. The actual story began differently than the other two Fnrrf Ygm Schnish games as well -- rather than a power outage, it started with Eddie being dropped off at the school one night for a school dance, only to find out that everyone else who was supposed to have been there had mysteriously vanished. Everyone, that is, except for Adam Nebozu. The two of them explore the school for a bit before Eddie disappears, going through a brief "inner world" segment and encountering a character who appears to be his evil twin. When Eddie reappears, he finds Adam again and the two leave the school, only to stumble into a boss battle against "Blackbeard Santa," an evil Santa Claus lookalike, who has apparently kidnapped all of the other students. The school map in this version was more complete than the 2003 version, but there was still a lot missing and most rooms were inaccessible. Unlike the 2003 attempt, I still have the .RPG file for this version (and several screenshots from playing through it a bit, as seen on the right), though I have no plans of ever continuing work on it -- it's basically been "replaced" by FYS:AHS.

Like the 2003 game, I had planned out some details of the story ahead of time, but it was kind of random and some bits didn't really connect to the rest in a way that made much sense -- though it was not quite as bad about that as the 2003 version was. The primary villain was the "Lord of Moronism," who commanded the forces of stupidity and sought to influence society to become increasingly dumber and dumber until humanity as a whole fell under his control. Blackbeard Santa was a minion of the Lord of Moronism, and Eddie's "evil twin" was a portion of his mind that had been corrupted by Moronic influences, only to be separated before it was able to contaminate the rest. Later on in the game, this Moronic twin would have been expelled from Eddie's mind entirely and take on a life of his own, becoming one of several recurring antagonists and causing conflict with some other characters when they meet Eddie and mistake him for his evil twin who had been wreaking havoc in other parts of the world before Eddie himself ever arrived there.

Development

Some of the graphics have gone through several different revisions before coming to the point where they are in the released versions of the game.

Hero sprites

The sprites of each playable character in the game were originally "expanded" versions of the 2008 version's walkabout sprites, and were replaced in 2010 when the game was "un-cancelled" and I realized just how bad the old ones looked. Included below are comparisons of the three versions of each hero sprite set -- original 2008, 2010 remake, and current. "Dead" frames and sprites for two additional characters were not included due to the fact that the 2008 versions of them were never finished.

The 2010 sprites were further modified sometime before the initial release, changing most heroes to darker color palettes (especially noticeable in Damuru-J's sprites) and adding visible mouths to animation frames that previously did not have them. Joguo also had his shoes changed back to brown like in the 2008 version. Jay's sprites changed the most between 2010 and 2017, with his shoes being recolored black, his shirt being looser, his belt no longer being visible, and his second "Attack" frame and "Cast/Item" frame changing to work with how the engine now allows weapon sprites to be set on a per-attack basis.

Portrait sprites

The old portrait sprites were replaced after the battle sprites in early 2011, and came with the same design changes introduced in those (such as the modifications to Eddie and Joguo's hairstyles.)

I can't remember if this is true of all the portraits, but Eddie's actually had three versions -- it was completely remade between the start of the game's development and 2009, before getting its final remake in 2011. The original 2008 version, probably my first ever attempt at a portrait sprite since the feature was recently added to the engine at that point, survives only in a single screenshot.

This trio of screenshots also shows how the hallway map and textbox format have changed over the game's development; the first two screenshots show the extra-bright colors featured in "made on the old dying monitor" versions of the game (though oddly enough the textbox in the oldest screenshot has the darkest blue background of them all!) as well as the positioning of the drink and snack machines being reversed. Portraits originally hovered in a translucent box above the character's name before gradually descending to their current position inside the box.

Font

As seen in the screenshot above, the game originally used a thinner serif font similar to the one used in Okédoké (possibly the same font or an earlier version), only changing to the current version sometime later. The new font may have been something added in 2010 or 2011 after the game was "un-cancelled" but before any graphics were changed, or it might have already been added to the game before then in 2009; I can't remember for sure.

Walkabout sprites

While objects and other miscellaneous sprites (such as the Mini Centipedes from Joguo's introduction) are unchanged from the 2008 version, all humanoid characters' walkabouts were completely remade sometime after the new portrait sprites were complete, likely in early/mid-2011.

These new sprites were inspired by those from the never-finished 2006 Fnrrf Ygm Schnish game, as well as those in some of my more recent games.

Enemy sprites

Most of the enemy sprites present in the 2008 version have gone unchanged over the years, aside from palette changes to match the darker colors that the entire game got when I started developing it on a working monitor (rather than an old one that made everything appear much darker and bluer than it actually was.) So far only two enemies -- the Bonehead and Yuckworm -- have had their sprites redrawn.

The Roachbot, originally a gray-with-orange-eyes palette swap of the common Roach, got a separate sprite of its own in 2017.

Extra enemies

Most of the randomly-encountered enemies featured in the game had been planned from the very beginning in 2008, but there are a few latecomers among the game's rogues gallery. Oddly enough, all of the new additions are medium-sized (50x50) enemies, and all but one appear in the AHS hallways early in the game. The first new additions were the Goth Chick and Possessed Mop when development resumed in 2010, sometime later (likely 2014 or 2015) the Redneck and Bully were added, and finally in 2017 the Demented Cone (which previously appeared in Okédoké!) was added to the ranks of the outdoor enemies.

Shiznit stat

Originally, the engine's unused "Counter" stat was not going to be used for anything in FYS:AHS, with its name blanked out and every hero and enemy having a 0 for that stat.

In 2016, this unused stat was replaced with the "Shiznit" stat which exists in the game today. Rather than doing nothing, it is used as a condition for many attack chains -- for example, with a Shiznit less than 1 you cannot land a critical hit and some side-effects of special moves (such as the stun caused by a Blubber Slam) will never trigger. Some attacks will gain side-effects once Shiznit reaches a certain level, such as fire spells reducing the enemy's Defense and ice spells lowering Speed; others will be replaced by a stronger variation, such as Bridget's Swarmclaw upgrading to the multi-hit Swarm Shred. Two new items which increase the Shiznit stat were added around this time, the Foshizzlapeño and Avery Award.

In the April 2018 release of the game, scaled stat chances were implemented for some of these effects, making them become more and more likely to occur the higher your Shiznit stat becomes.