VVVVVV: The Depths
This post may contain swearing and crude humor, mainly due to mockups. Additionally, there will be mild spoilers for the April Fools VVVVVV mod, "The Depths".
On March 11th, 2025, I messaged my friend mothbeanie about something we should add to the 2025 April Fools VVVVVV mod. That doesn't sound like a lot of time, but it's just a silly mod.
Last Year
Last year, I made a silly bait-and-switch mod, disguised as an official "3.0" update to the game, which contained a recreation of Cave Story's hardest area, the "Blood Stained Sanctuary" (or the "Sacred Grounds" if you're a fan of the fan translation).
It seemed like a very simple idea: just make this game in another game. All I had to do was:
- Port Cave Story's physics perfectly (aka, rewrite VVVVVV's physics engine but only if you're in the Cave Story area)
- Add a scrolling camera (VVVVVV doesn't have a normal camera as rooms are static other than inside of The Tower)
- Make a bunch of music
- Make a bunch of art (I had someone help me with this!)
- Actually recreate the maps
- Add a whole bunch of new systems to VVVVVV
- Program all of the enemies
- Program the boss fight at the end (with a boss system)
Uh... yeah, that's a lot. But at least I had time, right? Maybe like a month or so?
I... started the week before April 1st. I thought to myself, "that was a difficult crunch, but I'll give myself plenty of time next year."
This Year
Next year arrived. And as April was approaching, I kept telling myself that I'll start soon. I'll come up with an idea, and I'll get started. Unfortunately for me, I had a contest level to work on!
The VVVVVV Discord server's 2025 "Bingo Contest" was announced January 10th. A week later, the contest began, and would not end until March 2nd. Due to circumstances, I had to rush to make a level in a couple weeks. (You'll notice that me crunching is a very common theme here.) But either way, I finished my level, "Vermilion Blows Up A Sun", and felt it was pretty good. Judging for the contest levels, which I was also a part of, didn't end until March 30th. Results were posted on the same day.
March... 30th?
480 Hours Remain
I promise I won't do that every time.
It's March 11th, and I just messaged mothbeanie about the mod idea (see above). After a bit of brainstorming, moth designed a cool grass tileset, and I started working on the water.
Yes, the first thing I did was the water physics. They were nothing more than rectangles with waves (which is surprisingly very difficult), but that was good enough for me at the time, being someone who has never programmed water waves before.
The next day, moth and I made some mockups.
That's pretty much the extent of what we did other than some more planning. We decided that some gameplay is good, because we can do coin challenges.
264 Hours Remain
I had to do the title thing again.
It's March 20th. A couple days earlier, I messaged mothbeanie about this year's mod, saying that we should scope down.
The rest of the day was implementing fake "layers" (so solid tiles could be in front of water, and background tiles could be behind). Additionally, I changed how water looked, added waves for the bottom of water, made other entities interact with them, and tweaked the values.
The next day was mainly moth working on fish sprites and expanding the tileset. Not much to show, as all of the art DID make it in.
On the 24th, I finally made water slow down entities.
The 25th was mainly mockups and planning for the item system. I started with this:
I didn't know how to show which one was currently being hovered over, or which ones were equipped. There was also no space for item names or descriptions. For this style, I wanted it to show the name and description for what you're selecting, probably at the bottom... but names should really appear for all of them...
That's when I thought about a horizontal list... where equipped items got pinned to the top. That way, you could show tons of information for each item.
Despite my mockup being a little unhinged, it was a good starting point for us to really visualize what the item system would look like. Unfortunately, this mockup was maybe TOO verbose, as it drops the 28ish items per screen to... 2 items per screen, with a little change.
Thankfully, moth came up with this concept:
Somehow, moth made an even more unhinged mockup, but it was a great combination of both. Display the information for the current selected item at the bottom, while showing a ton of items, but keep around their names. This was perfect.
The most unhinged mockup yet, moth did some pixel art magic to show what it'd look like better. It's perfect!
It's now the 27th, where most work got done in voice chats.
Only a few days remain until April 1st, and we're only just now getting the item system in.
Great.
96 Hours Remain
I guess I'm not done with the title thing.
It's now the 28th. The night before, moth wrote all of the information and descriptions for every single item in our huge item spreadsheet.
I thought I'd start off making the item menu scrollable like what we planned. This honestly didn't take very long.
The day was mainly doing item implementation. It's a bunch of very annoying manual labor, despite making a complex flexible item system. It turns out, if you have a ton of items, it sucks to implement those items. Especially all at once.
So far, I've mostly just shown progress. Keep in mind, I've only been at this for a few days at this point...
Either way, this must get done. On the 29th, Allison Fleischer sent us some music she made for the mod. Both of us loved it. I said "its sooo freshwaterfishingcore..." and moth said "ITS SO CUTE...", with moth winning the "who can say things in a normal way" competition.
It's 3 AM now, so I finish up the "got item" display and go to bed.
INTERMISSION: The level itself?
This is a short intermission, but I want to clarify that pretty much all content that WASN'T programming was made by moth, with the exception of MOST music.
That means, moth was responsible for:
- The gameplay
- The scripting
- The tiling (I did write a plugin to autotile our complex tileset, but still)
- Any artwork
- One music track
- Near the end, they also helped with item implementation
And I was responsible for:
- Programming
- One music track (which took 30 minutes)
...yeah. I spent most of my time programming, and moth spent most of their time on everything else. And they STILL ran out of things to do, so I had them help with item implementation... It turns out making an entire fishing simulator is a LOT of programming! I was sleeping every night at around 4 AM, waking up early to get back to the grind and work all day. There weren't many breaks. Sometimes moth would take well-deserved breaks and play Isaac, and I'd... just program all day. Not moth's fault, of course, not at all. They were a massive help, but I didn't allocate enough time for us to do this.
Burnout was imminent. But it has to be done. April 1st is in a few days.
72 Hours Remain
We make bucket items, and moth scripts the bait upgrading system. I come up with the name "VVVVVV: The Depths" to work with the bait-and-switch, and we roll with it.
Later on, moth sends me a better title, which I implement in-game. Additionally, moth does a little line cast animation for Viridian using the fishing rod!
I... haven't started the main mechanic yet! I work on fishing all day, and this is the video from midnight:
48 Hours Remain
I work on implementing key gates, while moth works on scripting. I don't really know what happened, because we were in call all day and we barely messaged. I was panicking and didn't have any time to talk to people. I was locked in.
I finished the main mechanic. You can now catch fish.
24 Hours Remain
It's almost time... it's the 31st, which means release is tomorrow.
I don't have enough time.
I work on buying, selling, and the enchiridion. And a whole bunch of other stuff I didn't document whatsoever. We make a bunch of mockups, but I'm not sure where any of them are.
I stay up until 5 AM working. It's still not done. I'll finish tomorrow when I wake up, and we can release it.
Working for this long without breaks really takes a toll on you. I've never felt physical effects from programming before, but this project did it.
I am so tired.
-6 Hours Remain
It's April 1st. I wake up at 12, message moth "grind and rise" (intentionally out of order, because I'm quirky like that, or something)
I jump in a voice chat with moth. I am so tired. I have a headache, but I take pain medication and continue. Release is TODAY, whenever we get this done.
We finish pretty much everything required, and then did a few stretch goals. I make bobber gravity be separate from the player's gravity. I do a bunch of miscellaneous bug fixes and tweaks and changes.
Discord voice chats go down for a bit... I message moth instead while we work.
We realize that we never made a custom map, so we draw one up very quickly and slap it in.
It's now 6 PM. We're done.
We're done.
I don't feel much of a sense of accomplishment. Or relief, even. I just feel gross. But it's over, and I don't have to work on it anymore.
Hotfixes
We released the mod right after implementing everything.
Nothing was tested. Nobody played through the mod in full before release. We just... released it.
We ended up having to make 6 hotfixes. Some scripts just didn't work, or you couldn't progress in certain areas.
It's Over
I messaged moth a day later, as it was a very difficult crunch for both of us. We agree that it we shouldn't let this happen again. I don't have good work habits, and I need to learn how to manage my time better. I need to take breaks, and NOT work for 16 hours straight. I need to learn to not push myself so much, and to give myself time to rest. We both think we could've (and should've) communicated better.
But in the end, we made a pretty cool mod!
Is It Really Over?
The contest release was rushed near the end, and was unpolished in a lot of ways.
A few months later, we came back to it! Polishing a few things, implementing some new items and features, and NOT working under a strict deadline.
Controller support was added, real credits were added, the bait upgrading logic was completely changed, there were a LOT of QOL tweaks, and we did our first public release!
...We compiled it with Visual Studio 2013, so it would run on Windows XP, which had its own challenges... so we had to release v1.1.1 after, but that's okay.
Final Thoughts
v1.1.1 is where it stands today. It's a pretty fun (and long) mod, and I really, really think people should check it out. It's free, and definitely a fresh take on the VVVVVV universe.
Despite the difficult crunch we put ourselves through, I think that the end result is very, very cool. Terry Cavanagh talked about it on his blog, which genuinely feels so cool. The creator of the game I love enjoyed our silly little mod, and that means a lot to me. Thank you, Terry.
And we aren't done with it, either. I think both of us would like to add more content to it in the future. But for now, it's good where it's at.
If you'd like to play it, you can download it from itch.io. Thank you!
Appendix A: More Mockups
These mockups didn't fit anywhere else, so here's a huge dump of them:
Appendix B
