When the crowd at Maryland’s 2019 MAGFest got a glimpse at pink-haired Becky Brewster and the mutated rats and possessed principals of Carpentersville High, faces lit up with recognition. Dexter’s Lab! Powerpuff Girls!
Attendees’ personal touchstones were different (Courage! Ed, Edd n Eddy!), but the vibe was exactly what Becky’s creators were going for. “The audience just got it,” says Chris Burns, one of the co-founders of Exit 73 Studios, creator of Becky and her cartoon dungeon crawler #BLUD. “People from all ages, too, telling us, ‘This looks like something from late 90s Cartoon Network!’ And we never really started with that goal—but when people tell us that, it feels like we’re doing something right.”
Chris calls #BLUD “a love letter to animation and old-school video games,” a fusion of two passions shared by all five members of #BLUD’s tight-knit indie development team. The game features everything you’d expect from a 90s cartoon about a vampire-hunting high schooler: a charismatic hockey-playing monster slayer; a colorful cast of student friends and frienemies; well-meaning and oblivious adults; and a menagerie of imaginative monsters—all hand-animated with the elastic, contagiously jubilant energy that was a hallmark of the era.
For Chris and studio co-founder Bob Fox, the cartoon heart of #BLUD came naturally. The “video game” part? That required skill points they didn’t yet have.
Getting animated
Before there was #BLUD, Chris and Bob built winding careers in the realm of traditional hand-drawn animation, born out of a love for the medium cultivated in their youth.
“In the mid-90s I stumbled upon this pretty famous anime movie in a Blockbuster called Ninja Scroll,” says Chris, referring to a notoriously over-the-top tale of a swordsman who battles a series of eight supernatural, super-powered foes like a blood-soaked mercenary Mega Man. “I had always liked art and animation, but that movie sort of opened my eyes to the idea that cartoons could be for more than just kids.”
Chris and Bob attended the same high school, and crossed paths again at the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan, but it would take some time for them to form a bona fide team. After school, each ventured out on their own into the flourishing early 2000s New York City animation scene. Bob’s early work involved kid-friendly Nick Jr. and Nickelodeon shows like Wonder Pets! (starring a realistic-looking turtle, duck, and guinea pig whose adventures were brought to life through 2D digital puppeteering), while Chris’s first job out of college was Comedy Central’s Shorties Watchin’ Shorties, about a pair of babies commenting on the routines of the decade’s biggest stand-up comedians.
Ten years’ worth of eclectic experiences into their careers, the two independently felt their Long Island roots starting to beckon them back home—and so their paths would cross once again (this time for good) as they left Manhattan and formed Exit 73 Studios together.
“We were all over the board,” says Chris. “In terms of genres and ages and all that—we kind of just went where the money was and whoever was willing to take a chance on our small studio.” As Exit 73, the two would focus on 2D, frame-by-frame traditional animation for everything from Nick Jr. shows to cereal mascot commercials to video game cutscenes and more.
And then came #BLUD.
Dungeon crawling
“About maybe seven and a half years ago, we were working on a Disney pilot that had hit a lull in the writing schedule,” says Chris. “We don’t like to sit still, especially if we’re in the studio, so we used the time to make this 45-second concept of a girl fighting a bunch of vampires, talking to her dad on a cell phone.”
The two pitched the concept as an animated series, but quickly found themselves operating full-time on the Disney pilot once more. Additional client work followed. The pair put the short up online and showed it at a film festival (they challenged themselves to make a short film for the fest annually), but it seemed like Becky’s battles might be relegated to the “unfinished ideas” bin—until their then-roommate, a programmer named Cody Greenhalge, got the idea to try collaborating on a game.
Watch: Exit 73 Studios’ original #BLUD animated short that would eventually inspire the game.
Cody was sorting through Bob and Chris’s archives for inspiration, where he happened upon the vampire short. “And that’s when kind of a light bulb went off,” says Chris. “A high school vampire hunter would be a great video game. But we were just an animation studio at the time. We had no real aspirations to make games, and never even crossed our minds that we could pull off making one.”
The two became three, and the three soon brought on a second programmer, Andrew Tavis, and a writer-producer from across the country named Greg Lane, who had (pure coincidence) caught the #BLUD short that New York film fest. And Exit 73 Studios’ game development spinoff was born.
Dungeon walking
“The first game I ever played at my friend’s grandma’s house when I was six was The Legend of Zelda,” says Chris. “And I was hooked ever since. It felt like an event. The top-down perspective really sold the idea that you were in this giant world.” And that perspective felt like the perfect canvas to illustrate all the crazy goings-on in the small town of Carpentersville High in #BLUD.
“I came into making video games through pencil and paper RPGs like Dungeons & Dragons,” says Greg, and the dungeon-crawling Zelda vibe felt like home. “When we settled on this kind of game, my brain immediately started thinking of the town as dungeons—we’re gonna have a school, and we’re gonna have a cemetery. What if the mall is a dungeon? The grocery store is a dungeon? The hospital could be a dungeon. So instead of an ice dungeon and a fire dungeon, we started to take all these modern buildings and envision them with monsters and encounters.”
#BLUD speaks a language that will feel familiar to Greg’s fellow dungeon delvers. As Becky progresses, she discovers attachments that power up her trusty vampire-slaying hockey stick Brenda, unlocking new ways to do battle and explore the world. An umbrella serves as a shield, upping her defensive capabilities and opening up new counterattack possibilities. A grappling hook allows her to latch onto objects, pulling across pits that were uncrossable in earlier parts of the game.
In his head, Greg likens Becky’s friends to a D&D role-playing party. Best friend Corey, the artificer and guide who creates wild contraptions and sets Becky off on quests. Goth girl Morgan, the spellcaster who helps grok the mysteries of the mystical grimoire passed on to Becky from her mom. Terrell the cleric of sorts, there with a health item and an encouraging word when you need it most.
Greg says those personalities just flow naturally from the designs and animation. “There’s a story about how when Steve Ditko and Stan Lee were drawing the first Spider-Man comics, Steve would draw the panels and Stan would come in and write Spider-Man’s dialogue and thoughts based on those drawings … sometimes my job feels like that. Writing these kids is a breeze, because Chris and Bob add so much life to the characters and this world.”
And of course, no dungeon crawler would be complete without multi-phase, screen-breaking boss battles that test all of the skills you’ve accumulated thus far. Here’s where #BLUD feels more nighttime Adult Swim than daytime Cartoon Network, as school mascot goats and hapless rats become monster-fied and take on some horrifically creative contortions. (They’re fine after you beat them, of course. Mostly.)
“We wanted to balance the cute and the gruesome to make a chocolate-covered pretzel,” says Chris. “A little salty, a little sweet.”
Dungeon running
While #BLUD had characters, animators, a setting, coders, and plenty of ideas, Chris says it wasn’t until MAGFest 2019 demo that the pieces came together, and #BLUD truly felt like it was a game.
Watch: The team’s original MAGFest 2019 submission video. Programmers Cody and Andrew would build the playable demo for the show in Unity in roughly 4 months.
At the show, the team got the “Dexter’s!” and “Powerpuff Girls!” that told them they were on the right track with the 90s vibes. But they also got people playing what they figured was a 30-minute-max demo for 45 minutes or an hour, interacting with the mini cartoon world they’d created, some even coming back for more the next day.
That’s when the experimental, fun-with-friends side project proved that it would be worth pursuing to the fullest—and eventually, it became the team’s full-time gig. Exit 73 Studios’ other animation projects would go into sleep mode for a while while Chris and Bob used every minute of their working hours to hand-draw, animate, and in Bob’s case even make the music for the unsuspecting town of Carpentersville, a true labor of love that challenged them in new ways.
”One of the biggest challenges, from a character standpoint, came from the game being top-down,” says Chris. “You have to account for a lot of angles, and there’s a lot of redundancy—Becky has multiple attacks, all animated to work in different cardinal directions and diagonals. Then compound that by hundreds of characters, enemies, and villains.”
“Figuring out how to translate this 90s cartoon art style to top-down backgrounds took some time to figure out too,” says Bob, who drew every painterly classroom, cemetery plot, and mall food court in the game himself.
All told, Chris and Bob estimate they’ve created close to 200,000 drawings for the game. By some rough math, that’s nearly two feature-length animated films’ worth of individual frames, all from the inkwells of two people, knit together by the imaginations and tech wizardry of three more.
“We really pressed the gas down on #BLUD the last two years,” says Chris. “That’s been all we focused on, turned down a lot of work. We really wanted to make this game the way we wanted to make it, and how we wanted to make it look. And when I have a PlayStation controller in my hand or bring the Switch home and watch my son play my animation…that’s a feeling I can’t remember having since very early in my animation career.”
Bring the cartoon mayhem of Carpentersville to life yourself when #BLUD arrives on PC, Xbox One, PlayStation 4, and Nintendo Switch on June 18.
