NOTMario

NOTMario was my first proper 2D game that simply wasn’t a rip off Pac-Man clone with crazy stuff going on. It was also my first proper platformer that was kind of its own thing. As the fake boxart and splash screen suggests, this is NOTMario, instead a total ripoff in an interesting way.

How did this bootleg come about?

Well that is quite an interesting story. I had this idea when I was in year 10, or thereabouts, after getting sick of developing for the 3DRAD game engine. At the time, my programming skills had not yet become proficient, so keep this in mind. I decided to come up with my own idea for a 2D plaformer “knockoff” of a more popular series, with the main character having the ability to pick up weapons. Work then began designing what would become a much more epic adventure than Ninkeo Kart ever would be…

To be a good knockoff without attracting attention from the wrong crowd, I needed to design the character to be similar, but not so similar to the original source. So what I did was skew the mustache, get rid of the hat and changed the suit colours… and done. Bob, as he later became known, was the star of this interesting game.

Things here and there were borrowed from other random sources, which smooshed together to provide this. In hindsight, I’m not all that proud of this game, but was one nonetheless. There’s quite a number of worlds to explore, and also plenty of enemies to shoot. The key difference that sets this game apart is its “Special Stages”. I won’t spoil it here, but they truely are “special” alright…

Adventures in Game Maker

Yes, you read that right. I made this in good ol’ Game Maker. In this case, it was originally using a friend’s unused copy of GM8 Pro, as the Lite version was way too limiting for what I wanted to do with it. The code was borrwed and painstakingly assembled from various code samples around the internet, which remained the backbone for the physics for the entire adventure of NOTMario and Bob. I became very proficient in GML, which later led me to start doing C# and PowerShell coding. In a way, I have this bootleg to thank for fleshing out my programming skills.

That being said, GM8 was by far the worst version of Game Maker I worked with. I later bought this project across to Game Maker Studio, which at the time was at version 1.4. I bought a copy of Pro from Humble for cheap, and then really got set to work. While a few things were missing, it delivered a much better end result than 8 could ever imagine of doing.

The Sequel

Believe it or not, there was a full on sequel to this game. Bootleg Adventure as it was called, saw a total redesign of “Bob” into his own character. While most parts of the game remained similar, the physics were greatly improved as well as the combat system. The levels were all completely redesigned, and boss battles were introduced to shake things up a bit. However, it didn’t get too far past the alpha stage, with the last known release unstable and crash happy. Fun idea, but shit execution at the end of the day.

Downloads

NOTE: A bug was discovered in Game Maker Studio 1.4 that causes any game to run at insane speeds, if your monitor refresh rate is set beyond 60hz. For this game, please ensure that you have your refresh rate to 60.

NOTMario
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