Game:Bok's Expedition/trivia

A page for random trivia and details about the development of Bok's Expedition and what led up to it, going all the way back to the original story it was based on (which I wrote in elementary school.)

Trivia

• Almost all of the bosses you fight in the game are taken directly from the original story; the only exceptions are the Zukkus.

• In the original story, the Burijeoo are never once mentioned by name, only described as "tall, thin creatures with long hair and sharp claws." This is because the original story was written for a school assignment, and the Burijeoo (before I came up with that name) were originally named after one of my classmates -- some of the teachers frowned upon that fact, so I left the name out.

• The original story was the first time I had ever depicted Numnums as having legs. Though I used legless Numnums again (alongside legged ones) in the middle school and high school years, eventually the legged design "stuck."

• The Numnum design change originally happened for similar reasons to the Burijeoo having their name left out. During my later elementary school years, certain teachers thought I drew Numnums too much, so they decided to make talking about or drawing Numnums "forbidden" in their classes. Of course, I just snuck them into the story anyway! When I first started writing it they were called "Muns" (because "Mun" is "Num" backwards), though they became "Nurms" in the final version. The reason for giving them bird-like legs was so any description of them in the story didn't match what the teachers knew to look for based on my older, legless Numnum drawings.

• The never-finished "roguelike-ish" attempt at a Bok game (alongside the contest's 4-map rule) is probably responsible for the final game's setup of having many dungeon levels, but only a small outdoor area on the surface. The original story featured much more overland travel and none of the major battles in it took place underground.

• Crikki died halfway through the expedition in the original story, rather than being with the team all the way through like in the game.

• The Ondu that appeared in an old awful game I made decades ago was supposed to be the descendant of the Ondu from Bok's team, not the same character. Mistaking them would be easy to do, of course, since they're basically identical.

• Errei, the K'hyurbhi pilot on board the Ummiboro 5, was not present in the original story. The name "Errei" comes from a K'hyurbhi with a similar role in an old ZZT game I made during the later elementary school years.

• I had originally planned on having more than just four possible party members. Before I dropped the idea, the fifth party member was planned to be the Numnum chef Immun, who would have used "Foodfighting" techniques to heal as well as being able to heavily damage Yukkohs. A likely sixth party member would have been Sozipi, who would have been fairly weak but so fast that he could land several hits in the same time it takes the other characters to get a single turn.

The original story

Bok's Expedition is very loosely based on a story I wrote when I was in elementary school, probably somewhere around 1997 or early 1998.

The original title of the story was "Bok's Expedition to Planet Tamagotch," and most of the creatures native to the planet were based on the various Tamagotchi creatures from the virtual pets of the same name. It was even mentioned in the introduction to the story that K'hyurbhis had already been to the planet before the Blurbys got there and had "trapped the creatures in plastic thingies" (actual wording used in the old story) in order to sell them as virtual pets on Earth.

In the original story, there was a stop on another planet named Bifiboro along the way. This was not included in the game partly because the 2020 Ridiculous Games Contest enforced the 4-map rule, and partly because the stop was kind of unnecessary to begin with and I would need to come up with a new reason for them to land due to the removal of the original story's main villain. This detour also featured random appearances from Cthulhu-like beings and a Hutt from Star Wars, both of which were being held captive in what was called a "creature zoo" but released to attack the Blurbys upon their arrival.

The overall plot of the original story was also much different than my later re-imaginings of it that led to the game's story. The villain was an older character of mine named "Dark Blubber," who I no longer use (long-running OHR users may recognize that name as my old Castle Paradox username, though.) He had provided necklaces shaped like his eye to several of his high-ranking minions, which enhance their strength when worn but when united could be merged together to form the "Sword of the Ancient K'hyurbhis," the only weapon capable of killing Dark Blubber. These eye necklaces were reused in the game, but this time their only significance is as symbols of the Rupoo cult that the villains belong to. Ondu figures out how to combine them after all three are retrieved, and is inexplicably sent into a dream-like sequence where he walks a path floating in space and fights a sequence of utterly random opponents -- the giant psychic brain monster "IT" from A Wrinkle in Time, Cthulhu, and finally... a fat guy named Bobby who wielded a giant plastic fish, based on an elementary-school bully I had around the time the story was written. Ondu then reappeared on the planet, but the sword reappeared in Bok's hand instead of his own, as apparently Bok was the one chosen to fight Dark Blubber. The two float into the air above the planet and fight while the rest of the cast watches from far below. Bok is eventually victorious, but is briefly knocked unconscious by the resulting explosion and then has to desperately reach for the sword as both he and it fall toward the planet's surface (while a pteranodon-like creature flying about randomly offers to fly him to another planet, named Uzz), since he's incapable of flying without the sword's power.

The original story also had a wholly unnecessary "twist" to the ending, where Bok is telling his grandchildren about the trip when suddenly a small creature that had been brought back as a pet jumps onto his back and bites him, causing him to die from its ridiculously strong and fast-acting poison. Bok's grandson then captures the creature and kills it with his bare hands, followed by a flash-forward to several years later where Ondu and a team of young Blurbys (including Bok's grandson) have discovered a green crystal with unusual properties that they end up naming Blubbonite. The flash-forward at the end implies that this group of new Blurbys were going to have some adventure of their own, but I never wrote anything featuring them.

The high school revision

Though I never actually rewrote the original Bok's Expedition to Tamagotch to include these changes, an altered version of the story is referenced in some of the stuff I was making during the high school years. I had become somewhat embarrassed by the random Tamagotchi references, and it was around this time that I renamed the planet "Ihctogo" and started gradually redesigning the planet's inhabitants so that most no longer resembled Tamagotchi creatures at all. This was also the time when I decided that the story took place around 2000 years ago, rather than being "maybe in the distant past but maybe in 1996 or so" the way the original was.

Dark Blubber still featured as the primary villain in this revision, but all references to characters and creatures that I didn't make up -- such as the Hutts, IT, and Cthulhu -- were either removed entirely or replaced with an original creature. Cthulhu and his spawn (the original story just called them "Cthulhus," though it made a point of distinguishing between the smaller ones and the Cthulhu) had much more of a presence than the other random cameos, so rather than simply cutting them out, I made up the Zukkus to replace them. The name "Zukku" was used for an enemy in a ZZT game I had made a few years earlier, but I couldn't remember what I had actually intended it to be at the time, so I just reused the name for these new monsters.

The 2010s revision

A few years after high school, I stopped using my old Dark Blubber character. Sometime after that, I once again changed around some details of Bok's story, probably so I could include some reference to him and other members of his team in The K'hyurbhi Lands. With Dark Blubber gone, the idea I had for the story in my head basically settled into something closely resembling its current form.

Previous Bok game attempts

Bok's Expedition as we know it today was actually not the first time I attempted to make a game based on the same story. Sometime after 2010 (the game file's "last modified" date is in 2013, but I can't remember if it was actually worked on in that year or if I had just opened the file to look at it but accidentally chose "save and quit" even though I hadn't changed anything), I started filling out graphics of an OHRRPGCE game based on Bok's story -- really old-style graphics, like not even NES level. The look I had been going for was something in the vicinity of an Atari 2600 game mixed with an old text-based roguelike, and if I had continued work on this version of the game, the map movement system would be similar to roguelikes -- with enemies only moving while the player is moving, and so on. The plan was to still have standard OHRRPGCE battles (Bok, Norgu, Ondu, and Crikki were all player characters rather than the single-character setup roguelike games generally have), so it wouldn't have quite been a full roguelike, but I had definitely thought about looking into some way to do randomized or semi-randomized maps and item/enemy placement.

In the screenshots to the right, you can see walkabout sprites for the Kweekee, Yukkoh, and Zukku enemies as well as the full party of Bok, Norgu, Ondu, and Crikki -- though Crikki's design still had the "pink bow to show this one's a girl" design like in my older drawings, rather than having a bandanna like the current version.

I also started working on a Zelda Classic quest project based on Bok's story. I can't remember exactly when I worked on this attempt, or which of the two previous attempts came first; if the roguelike-ish attempt really was from 2013, then I'm guessing the Zelda Classic project was older, because it still used the old "red feet and flipper arms" design for its Blurbys and I had already started drawing the species with their current clawed arms and feet by that point.

Just like the OHR roguelike-ish attempt, this didn't really go much further than a bunch of graphics being made. Some portions of an Ihctogan surface tileset were finished, as well as a lot of sprites -- most notably Bok and a number of enemies had full spritesets complete with all animations, and the designs for the Ihctogan native wildlife and some other enemies were pretty much in their current form by this point. Even the scenery was not far off from how I ended up depicting it in Bok's Expedition. I'm not sure if I had planned on making anyone else from Bok's team playable in this attempt at a game or if I would've just given Bok items similar to their equipment (like Norgu's sword and Ondu's blaster and bombs), but graphics for all of those items were already present in the quest file the last time I worked on it.