Wicked Plague is a stylish Metroidvania that pulls inspiration from classics like Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, and has a gorgeous anime art style that impresses on the Game Boy Color. Developed by solo developer Rafael Fuentes Zambrano (under the developer name Locus-Motion) and published by ModRetro, I’ve followed the game’s development since the first screenshots appeared online. Rafa took some time to answer questions about the game:
GB Studio Central: I love the world and story of Wicked Plague. All the characters are distinct and feel like they’d fit perfectly in an anime. When creating the game, did you start with the characters and story? Or did you start with the gameplay?
Rafa: The first thing planned for the game was the mechanics: double jump, fire dash and a shoryuken style for high jumps. I kept in mind that the mechanics should not just be tools for exploration but also weapons. That idea gave shape to the main character’s most basic details. After a few drafts, his hairstyle, clothing and weapon gave direction for the designs of the characters and world of Wicked Plague. So you can say that the game was created surrounding the looks and mechanics of the main player character, Ramuel.
GBSC: Speaking of the characters, where did the ideas for them and the story come from?
Rafa: Most of my inspirations came from early 2000s metal and punk styles found in anime and video games: modern, juvenile, defiant and sometimes naïve & immature.
The first idea for the plot was simple and classic. A big, bad guy wants to rule or destroy the world using a zombie army, and the main character will have to destroy the villain. Then I thought that I could use a different cliché and came up with the ridiculous idea of what if everything is just a regular day for everyone, and Ramuel’s place in all the drama is because of some absurd reason: a tantrum from some spoiled girl with friends equally immature and bratty.
A fantasy world where a guy resolves problems with fire using an oversized lighter can easily embrace all kinds of fantastic metahuman people, so it was obvious that the rest of the characters should be as equally absurd as the protagonist. I say with no shame that the main inspiration for the art style was the Guilty Gear series and Tetsuya Nomura’s work on Kingdom Hearts and The World Ends with You. Some people have noticed a resemblance between Sol Badguy from Guilty Gear and Ramuel, both of whom carry a huge lighter as a weapon.
GBSC: Were there any games that influenced you when making Wicked Plague?
Rafa: Two things are hard to find on GBC platformer games: a cohesive and easy-to-understand map, interconnecting different areas of the game for free & open exploration, and fast-paced battles against bosses whose difficulty wasn’t linked to the limitations of the gameplay. Two games that influenced these areas during development were the Castlevania games released on GBA and DS, and Megaman Zero, respectively.
GBSC: How did you achieve the impressive art style, especially in a legacy version of GBS?
Rafa: Wicked Plage was developed over a year and three months. Four or five months were dedicated to squeezing every drop of available space for sprites in memory. The game looks good due to the time it took to implement this, and the ability to find clever ways to use the sprites to show/hide/load in certain moments.
GBSC: How did you design the enemies and their behavior?
Rafa: The first enemies are classic ones you can find in many platformers to help teach the basics: how fast the player can run, how high they can jump, attack range, damage etc. After the garden zone, enemies are more like hazards that require unlockable skills to defeat. My hope was to surprise the player each time they see a new one.
The bosses are different. Their patterns are programmed to be random and dangerous, but predictable. They are designed to test the player’s use of available movement skills during fights.
GBSC: Were there any neat code or art tricks you implemented to achieve the end results in the game?
Rafa: With regard to the rooms, there are up to 128 tiles to fill with curiosity and pixels. So I went the extra mile and made every single tile have something to say inside a room.
For sprites, Wicked Plague has a ton of tricks to avoid frame glitching since the game is constantly swapping sprite sheets, especially during boss battles and for the main character’s animations. It boils down to two concepts: well-planned, organized sprite sheets, and ensuring that each actor has enough allocated memory to cover sprite swaps.
GBSC: Anything else you’d like to say?
Rafa: I’m planning new projects for future releases and trying to deliver fresh experiences for the GBC. I also want to thank the community of players and developers for the warm welcome to my first game. The whole experience was really pleasing to my inner child, who always wanted to play this kind of game on a 160×144 screen.
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You can play the demo for Wicked Plague on Locus-Motion’s itch page and purchase the physical release from ModRetro. If you want to stay in the loop regarding Rafa’s future plans, follow them on X.
Audio Engineer, Mac Technologist and Video Game Developer. Former Managing Editor of GBStudio Central. (he/him)
