Are you ready for part 2 of the girlypop journey? I’m Jane, the lead developer at Funny Fintan Softworks, and this is… ✨Dev Storytime✨ Following on from our post last week, we’ll be continuing the girlypop story! In this second part, I’ll be talking a bit more about the games that inspired Don’t Stop, Girlypop!
Our inspiration story begins when I was about 10 years old and I was at a store called EB Games, which is like the Australian version of Gamestop. They used to have these consoles in-store that you could play on and I’d go there to play the demo for Star Wars: Battlefront on the Xbox One. I was blown away by the “real life graphics” and decided I needed an Xbox One.
I traded in my New 3DS XL and a bunch of other stuff to get an Xbox One SX, but then tragedy struck! I didn’t have enough credit left to buy Star Wars: Battlefront! I was walking around the store trying to find another game I could buy and then my friend pointed out a game that “looked kind of like Star Wars.” That game was Destiny. Since that day, I’ve probably sunk over 2,000 hours into that game. I’ve played the first game, all of the expansions, Destiny 2, and all of the expansions for that. It became the initial inspiration for the artistic direction for the landscapes and buildings in Don’t Stop, Girlypop! In particular, a lot of inspiration came from Dreaming City, which is from Destiny 2: Forsaken.
In terms of the gameplay though, my first major inspiration was Quake 3. In high school, we had these PCs that all had Quake 3, Halo Combat Evolved, and Minecraft on them. Whenever the teachers weren’t looking, my friends and I would just play Quake 3, although the one at our school was this weird open source version of the game called OpenArena. It was the first time I’d played a shooter on PC instead of console and I couldn’t get over how good the raw PC game mouse aim was. The arena shooting in Don’t Stop, Girlypop! was definitely inspired by Quake 3 and then after that Half Life 2 played a major role, with the gravity gun serving as the inspiration for our magic wand.
Back in 2020, the game was initially going to be a Battlefield-style shooter, but then I went to a friend’s house and experienced DOOM Eternal for the first time. It was the best thing I’d ever seen in my life!!! I loved how they’d taken the arena shooter and brought it into the modern day.
After that, I ended up playing ULTRAKILL, which was another huge inspiration. I felt like ULTRAKILL took a lot of the ideas and mechanics from DOOM Eternal and pushed them even harder. The alt-fires in ULTRAKILL in particular were mind-blowing for me, especially the coin flip alt-fire. I loved the idea that an alt-fire could be something so creative and different, rather than just being a more powerful version of the default fire.
When it comes to the girlypop style, that all started back when I was at GDC last year and I came across Bratz: Rock Angelz. I stood on the show floor and played that game for hours. Back in the day, I used to play a lot of flash games on a website called Friv. There were millions of dress-up games on that website that I loved playing. Bratz: Rock Angelz reminded me of those dress-up games, but if they had a real budget. That then became the inspiration behind the girlypop style and in particular the dress-up mini-game in Don’t Stop, Girlypop!
This may seem like a weird one to everyone reading, but I bet you wouldn’t have guessed that Alan Wake 2 was also a major inspiration!
That game totally changed my perspective on video games and made me fall in love with gaming all over again. It was the first time I’d seen a game lean so hard into the concept of video games as an art form, taking elements from other art forms like music, writing, film, TV, and theatre and embedding them into the game itself. Alan Wake 2 really explored all of the different types of art forms that comprised video games individually and I wanted to do that in Don’t Stop, Girlypop! as well. There are a bunch of vignettes throughout Don’t Stop, Girlypop!, along with music videos and weird boss fights. All of these ideas came from Alan Wake 2.
It’s a big melting pot of inspirations that have all come together to make something totally unique!
I love games like ULTRAKILL, TURBO OVERKILL, and DOOM Eternal, but they’re all grimdark and gritty. Aesthetically, when it comes to most shooters, we’re always in hell or in a castle or a cyberpunk dystopia. Don’t get me wrong, they’re all beautiful looking, but there’s this common set of aesthetics within the FPS genre and particularly in arena shooters. When I first started pitching our game to publishers, I kept getting knocked back because we were “just another sci-fi shooter.” We needed to find a way to stand out. I was in an escalator talking to our PR & marketing consultant Michal and I had this revelation. What if our enemies exploded into PINK BLOOD???
I prototyped it straight away and it looked AWESOME! An FPS game is sort of like an advanced button pusher, so you need to make the button pushing as satisfying as possible. Having the enemies explode in love hearts and pink blood was just as satisfying as seeing them explode into gibs and red blood. The whole world started to form around enemies exploding into love hearts and that’s where the aesthetic began.
We really wanted to lean into a lot of colour and a lot of pink, which is not a palette that is used a lot in FPS games. It’s a very maximalist aesthetic. We get a lot of comments from people saying “this looks like slop” or “this looks like vomit,” but we’ve learned to just respond with “if it’s not for you, it’s not for you.”
That’s also where the idea of songs with lyrics came in. It all started when I was re-playing DOOM Eternal. I love the DOOM Eternal soundtrack but, the second time around, I muted the game, played with my own music, and loved it. I decided then and there that I wanted Don’t Stop, Girlypop! to have songs with lyrics.
From a gameplay perspective, I wanted to bring arena shooters even more into the modern day, so unintentional but integral mechanics like bunny-hopping have been transformed into something intentional that we call wave-hopping. I wanted to add such a huge feature of the arena shooter genre and make it an official mechanic! In original arena shooters, you were never really required to move (but it was the most fun way to play the game), so I wanted to bring movement to the forefront in Don’t Stop, Girlypop! and I’ve solidified that intention with the wave-hopping mechanic.
In terms of the Y2K aesthetic, it’s really more related to nostalgia for me than an actual recreation of the Y2K era. I love the idea of tactile technology, so like chunky mobile phones, DVDs, CDs, etc. I’ll talk about the Y2K inspirations more in our next dev storytime though, so keep an eye out for that!
I hope you’ve enjoyed our first dev storytime and I can’t wait to share more with you soon!!!!
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