Ethan Vance - Bupmelon (Rivals of Aether)

Bupmelon

Date: October 2021-February 20th, 2022

Roles: Animator, Programmer, Trailer Producer

Mod Game: Rivals of Aether

Genre: Platformer, Fighting

Engine: GameMaker Studio 2

Summary: Bupmelon is a quirky take on a Workshop stick figure, with spindly limbs and memes galore. He's a hyper-rushdown that lacks stage control, but can cancel any attack into a special move on hit!

Download him here!

Development Experience

I actually started working on Bupmelon back in October of 2021, though the only progress I had made on the character was a base sprite and some of their movement animations. It wasn't until the start of 2022 when I decided to finish the character. It had been a few months since I had made anything, so I wanted to do a relatively simple character to get back in the groove of making Workshop content.

And simple he was (design-wise at least)! I did have McDucky help with coding the command grab code a bit, but outside of that, I was able to do all of the code work myself on the character! Where I ran into a couple of hurdles initially was animating Bupmelon himself, since this was the first time I had put serious effort into animating a humanoid character. Regardless, I was able to pick up on animating him really quickly, and managed to crank him out within a month despite also managing college work.

Bupmelon released during a drought in the Workshop community. Four new characters were added to the game's base cast, and everyone's eyes were on them for the next few months. Fortunately, I did get some people to play the character for a while. With a lot of my other characters, their designs didn't quite work in practice the way I wanted them to on paper, but Bupmelon was the first time where I felt like he worked exactly how I intended him too! Overall I'd consider Bupmelon a success, even if he's not going to be as recognized as some of my other works.