Game:Okédoké!/trivia

Trivia

• El Garbanzo got his name from "Mr. Garbanzo," a username that I used to use on a few sites where I posted things unrelated to my OHRRPGCE projects.

• I had originally drawn El Garbanzo as part of another, totally unrelated game idea that never went anywhere around 2007. At the time, he was described as a "Mexican Ninja."

• Señor Rialgo is based almost exactly on Yammy Rialgo from the Arrancar arc of the anime and manga series Bleach. Presumably there aren't a lot of Bleach fans in the OHR community, as I've never seen anyone call attention to the similarity! If I ever remake or update the game, I may modify his design at least slightly so he's not a direct copy.

• The Emo Grande is also Bleach-inspired, with its design being a modified Menos Grande.

• My younger sibling Jules is singlehandedly responsible for the existence of all the goats in the game.

• Of all the Border Rangers, the only one I ever came up with an "unmorphed" name for is Border Blue, also known as Frank.

• Originally, there were only going to be two gangs in Wrongside -- the Pirates and the Ninjas. Then I realized that "pirates vs. ninjas" was sort of an internet meme for a while, so I decided to avoid doing that, which led to the addition of the Geckos and Cavemen gangs (inspired by their Geico commercials.)

• Schnee was nameless throughout the early development of the game. I didn't decide on the name "Schnee" until right around the time I was scripting her introduction scene in Chapter 3.

• Schnee's brother Gwee was not given a name until the game was almost finished. He was named after a mispronunciation of the word "guy" that I made when I was very young.

• Schnee's design was based on a drawing I did a couple years before I started working on Okédoké! If I'm remembering right, this "proto-Schnee" was originally designed as a Gym Leader in an idea I had for a fan-made Pokémon region.

• The city of New Hamster was named partly as a pun on New Hampshire, and partly because it was the "designated OHR reference city." The statue of Bob the Hamster in the park is the most obvious one, but it's not alone -- the "Shifty Slime" enemy in the sewers references The Slime Wars, with the color of the slimes determining which type of attacks work on them just like how you had to use certain attacks to defeat certain colored slimes in that game. The "Critter Dude" enemies were also meant to loosely reference Maces Wild, which is of course a furry game. There might be references to other games hidden away somewhere in New Hamster as well, but I can't remember them off the top of my head at this point.

• Pukadonna Federal Penitentiary got its name from one of the Super Walrus Land forums' word filters; some internet-word (I believe it was "pwnage," but I can't remember for sure) was changed to "pukadontics."

Development

Though I did start with a loose outline of how later parts of the story would go, this went through several revisions during the process of me making all the graphics for the early chapters and starting on the mapping, textboxes, and so on for what would eventually become Chapter 1. Though the plot was largely the same from the very beginning, the exact location of various important places in the game (such as Schnee's house, Pukadonna Federal Penitentiary, and the secret lab where the final segment of the game takes place) was still up in the air for a while, and I went through several different plans for how the later parts of the game were going to go.

The earliest plan

The first version of the Okédoké! story outline I remember had a character from several of my past game ideas as the villain. The final battle would have taken place in a mysterious castle-like building hidden away high in the mountains of Colorado. The locations of several other places would have been different, along with the order El Garbanzo and company visited them in -- Schnee's haunted house was in California, and the "less-grimy-than-Wrongside big city" area that eventually developed into New Hamster was planned to be in either Nevada or in California as well. There probably would have been one last town-like area (in Colorado) before the prison break-in sequence, which would have led directly into the final dungeon in the aforementioned mountain castle location.

Frogbucket, Alabama was absent from the original plan entirely, as their journey would stick to the southwest and west coast rather than ever going that far east. Schnee would have joined the party a bit later in the game as well, as El Garbanzo and company would have traveled through the second major city (New Hamster equivalent) before reaching her house rather than after.

Several major plot details would also most likely have been different if the game had gone this way, because the villain would not have been directly connected to the US government and so the conspiracy revolving around the kidnapping of illegal immigrants would have either been totally absent or for a different reason. The final boss would certainly have been different, because I didn't come up with that idea until around the time I was working on Chapter 4. I can't remember what the story behind Alejandro's disappearance would have been in this version of the game's story, or how things would have gone when he and El Garbanzo were finally reunited.

The "almost there" plan

By the time I had started working on Chapter 1, my ideas for the game had shifted around a bit, and the originally planned villain had been dropped entirely in favor of the shadowy government conspiracy with no clear "mastermind" being present for most of the game. The final boss in this plan would have been the one behind it all, a character I drew as a blank silhouette in my early notes on the game's story and had jokingly referred to simply as "The Man" around this time.

I can't remember if I had decided to put real-life political figures (like George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, or Sarah Palin) into the game at this point or not, though I had definitely decided that there would be a cameo appearance by Mr. T at some point in the game, along with a variety of other oddball cameos and references to all sorts of things ranging from Kingdom Hearts to Ninja Turtles to Geico commercials.

It was around this time that my plans for the locations of cities and other major locations changed to something more closely resembling the final game, with Schnee's house being located out in the woods of southwest Virginia and being visited before New Hamster rather than afterward. This was around the time I came up with the idea of calling the city "New Hamster," though at the time it was not located in Pennsylvania but in -- of course! -- New Hampshire. Pukadonna Federal Penitentiary (which was still nameless at the time) was located in Maine in this version of the plan, and the secret government lab where the conspiracy was using the kidnapped immigrants for... whatever their nefarious purposes were... was directly connected to the prison rather than being located many miles away in Alaska. The "final area is a cold snowy place far to the north" part of the plan was pretty much decided on at this point, it was only the exact location that changed afterward.

A very different Chapter 1

Early on in the development of Chapter 1, I had the idea that the desert and mountain paths to the border from El Pueblecito would have been dramatically different paths rather than ending up converging back together at Fernando's Donkey Rentals as in the final version of the game.

The mountain path would have started off with a minigame resembling the original Donkey Kong, where El Garbanzo would have to scale a cliffside using narrow switchback paths and rope ladders left by previous climbers while boulders rolled down the slopes toward him, threatening to knock him back down to the bottom if he was unable to dodge them. The combination of the contest deadline and me not really knowing how to script something like this led to the idea being dropped, and the mountain path became a more straightforward area followed by the Ghost Town and the abandoned mine where you meet Señor Death.

Early plans for the desert path involved El Garbanzo riding a donkey but needing to stop for food and water along the way, and happening upon a stadium-like location where Lucha Libre matches were being held. It was here where Señor Rialgo would be introduced, having entered himself in the tournament as a wrestler but taking advantage of his superhuman strength and fart-combat techniques to unfairly win every match. In exchange for stopping his rampage, El Garbanzo would have been rewarded with enough supplies to make the rest of the trip to the border without any difficulty -- and, being impressed by his strength and skill, the defeated Señor Rialgo would insist on tagging along.