So Rusty wanted me to write a little blog post about Everyday Shooter for PSP. I don’t really know what to talk about so I guess I’ll start chronological and see where that goes.

I actually tried porting Everyday Shooter to PSP way back around December 20th, 2007, and stopped around December 27th, 2007. Here’s an old video I found from back then:

WHAT!!??!? WHY DIDN’T YOU RELEASE IT!?!?? WHY DID YOU SIT ON IT FOR 239846921487 MONTHS YOU SON OF SO MANY UNMENTIONABLE THINGS!!!!!!!

I thought the same thing until I remembered that it crashed every eight seconds, had a ridiculously low frame rate, was missing graphics and effects, and generally blew.

Yeah, Everyday Shooter PSP really worried me at the time. I was convinced to get the game running properly it needed to be hacked to shreds – reducing the number of enemies, changing all the
backgrounds, changing the enemy graphics – ugh, this is going to SUCK.

So I dropped the idea until Rusty contacted my agent, Warren, and I, saying Sony was interested in putting Everyday Shooter on PSP. Immediately, the floodgates opened to the stress of so many potential problems sweeping my soul to the faraway depths of darkness where it was then beaten repeatedly at three frames per second before crashing…

But Rusty said (paraphrased): “Jon, this is how it’s going to go down. We’re going to hire this developer [Backbone], and I know this guy, he is one of the best programmers I know. And the deal is going to be this: if they even hint at a suggestion of messing with your vision, we are going to fire them and find a new developer. This is going to be a straight port, we are not going to mess with your vision.”

Skeptically, I replied “and the boobies?” To which he answered “no boobies.”

Honestly, I was still skeptical.

I was also told that the original QA team for ES-PS3 was brought in to test the PSP version too, so I’m quite confident that it was left in good hands.

I’m amazed at the job Backbone did:

They actually ported it without altering any of the graphics, effects, or gameplay! How!?? No seriously, how did you do that!? Like, even the backgrounds? I was expecting to have to do this whole back and forth about what graphics needed to be changed and redesigned, what enemies needed to be reduced, gimping the game just for the sake of performance… NO! Not at all! They just somehow made it work. What is this sweet juice of hexadecimal that you drink from and where do I get it?

Then again, I’m not technically a great programmer, so maybe there’s some simple secret I’m not aware of. I generally just multiply things by negative one if they don’t work because in math, to get the opposite of something you just multiply it by negative one. Since the opposite of “doesn’t work” is “it works,” multiplying numbers by negative one should yield a correct result. Unfortunately, when
applying this strategy to Everyday Shooter PSP it still didn’t work.

Thus, and clearly thus, there was no solution.

Of course Backbone proved me wrong.

I think this is a pretty accurate port of the game. I mean, I played it till my hands cramped, jotting down every subtle problem, some bordering on imaginary, but yet still fixed. For example, the first
few builds I played, everything looked great and seemed to be in working order but something was weird. I kept getting beaned by the game! I mean, I couldn’t even get to level 4! Suspecting my own
skill level, I busted out the PS3 version just to make sure and to my surprise, I was still able reach the final stage with just three starting lives. It’s got to be the port.

Okay, so how do you convince someone that this is actually a bug and not because of some lack of skill on my part? I mean, otherwise, the game felt exactly like the PS3 version, so there was no factual information to draw from except for “well, Jon thinks it’s too hard now.” For weeks, I kept thinking they were going to ignore it, and it’ll get released, and the internet will swallow me whole, and then it will hurt a lot.

But amazingly, the bug was found. Apparently (and from what I recall — I might be wrong), it had something to do with timing issues since Everyday Shooter PSP runs at a much lower simulation rate given that the PSP isn’t as powerful as the PS3.

To this day, I’m still not sure if anyone believed me on this, and I’m not even sure if I believed myself (I’m quite positive it was way harder, though), and I totally see that the whole thing just sounded nuts and imaginary, but either way, Backbone was gracious enough to give me the benefit of the doubt and make this change. I know some people who paid a silver dollar only to have their ports birched by shoddy developers, so I’m very grateful for the amount of effort and attention Backbone gave to the project.

Anyway, we tried to make this as accurate as possible. Warren called me a few weeks before the final build asking whether I played the PSP port yet and what I thought of it. I replied, “I don’t know what to say. I mean, it’s basically Everyday Shooter PS3, except it’s running on a PSP.”
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My PS3 is sitting on the box that it came in.

I look forward to playing Heavenly Sword on my 12″ TV.

Most developers have mountains of candy and soda. I have seaweed.

Yesterday I bought 5lbs of hash browns.

As I’m writing this, I’m talking to a game developer who’s friends throw pig’s blood at each other.

I can no longer stay awake for more than eight hours at a time.

The Everyday Shooter code has no 4s or 5s execpt in the combination of 54, or in very rare instances 0.5, because 5 and 4 are very unlucky numbers.

There are eight levels in Everyday Shooter and eight points in this post because eight is a very lucky number.

Heya PlayStation fans, my name is Rusty Buchert and I’m the Sr. Producer for Everyday Shooter. As we’re approaching the release of the game, I wanted to drop in and give you some background on how Everyday Shooter went from the Indie Games Festival to the PS3.

Starting at the beginning …

At GDC 2007, some of us from SCEA’s Santa Monica Studio were looking for new games and developers that we thought would be cool for PS3. George Weising had beaten me to the Indie Games Festival (IGF) booth this year and started looking through the games that were there. After a bit he grabbed me from a meeting saying I had to check out a game. But because of meetings, I never made it over there. George kept telling me, “Dude, when you get a chance you need to play this game.” So the first thing I did was figure out how I could get a hold of the developer Jonathan Mak or his agent if he had one. I found out that I knew his agent already so I gave him a ring and told him I really would like to get a build of the game so I could check it out. He connected me with Jon and we went from there.

The first time I sat down with it I knew we had something magical. Not often do I get that buzz from a game. It was something that I wanted everyone to play. We worked things out and we got Jon Mak – the one man that makes up Queasy Games – up and going on PS3. It was amazing how quickly he got it up and running once he got started on the PS3. In just 3 days he had it running and in a few weeks he was up to what was shown at GDC.

What made it magical? It was the constant interaction between the music, gameplay and visuals. The way they feed back into each other is something that happens very rarely. Lots of people try but most of the time it comes up short. Jon hit it dead on and did it with guitar music. Most people have always thought the only way to do it was with techno or electronica. Every level has its own vibe and song that just work for me. I hope they work for you, too.

I love the fact that it’s an album of shooters. That is just plain cool. It hit that point where you are honestly crossing that barrier between being a record and a game.

E3 proved to any doubters that there was something magical to the game. I never expected the press coverage that Everyday Shooter got. Who thought a downloadable game would hijack a lot of press. It’s nice to know that people do want to know about indie games from the hardcore to casual player. This is where we’re going to find the future of the game industry.

One thing I have to say is that after the months of working on and playing the game, I’m still enjoying it and I’ll still be playing it after it comes out.

Oh, by the way it will be up on the store by Oct. 11 (this Thursday). Make sure you check it out!

Tomorrow, we’ll have a post from the game’s creator so you can learn more about the one man show that makes up Queasy Games – Jonathan Mak.

PS – My favorite levels are Root of the Heart, Build 88 and So Many Ways. Check ’em out!