Sumoo

This is a game I made together with Kirill at a game jam we organized as a kickoff of the MyFOG event, in June 2013. The acronym stands for “Make your First Own Game” and it’s a MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) about creation of videogames.

For some reason I was talking to him about Kobe beef, and then I mentioned that I had thought about doing a humorous game about the story of the life of one of those cows. Kirill suggested making them Sumo fighters, which is a brilliant idea. The third ingredient in this game was attempting to do a homage to Monkey Island and its insult swordfights. So, the concept involves fighters waiting for their turn in an inn, next to the stadium, and thus having a chance to talk with each other. Through taunts and exchanged insults, they try to undermine the moral of the rival and get an upper hand in the coming combat.

It turns out that coming up with cow-themed insults and comebacks is not an easy task. For the jam, I just collected insults online from lists found through google, and displayed them randomly. On the week after the jam, I threw that material away and wrote an actual conversation tree where the “right” answer is fixed and can be found, in the worst case, through trial and error. The writing isn’t specially good, but I’m not a writer anyway. I used Twine for that part, exporting the result as a text file and then importing it into the game source. Also, there’s several references to famous films in the text.

The game was written in Löve2D. The downloads are big because the music files we borrowed (all of them CC-BY-NC-SA) are quite heavy. There is an online (WebGL) version, it plays the same but the audio takes some seconds to load when you launch the game. Once it’s loaded, the game runs fine.

Note: The wikipedia entry on Kobe beef doesn’t mention the folklore and myths surrounding this particular type of beef. Stories about the cows receiving massages while being raised and following some very special diet. I don’t know to what extend any of those tales are true.