Back around March of 2010, I had the idea of creating my own Battletoads clone. I don't remember the exact German words that the word "Skampfer" comes from, though. At that time, I was quite enthusiastic about the Battletoads series, having played the Gameboy exclusive game on an actual cartridge (I think I was using a Gameboy Advance SP), and making it to the final stage. Being unable to make it far in the NES game, which was ported to other systems like the Genesis and Gameboy (with the Ragnarok's World suffix), I wanted to make my own game that would be more 2-player friendly.
On my first attempt at making the game, it was just a simple platform beat 'em up without much in the way of attacks. Only Lopi and Zila were playable, and one of the enemy types was a model I also used in Combat Kids 1. At that time, I was starting to learn how to use Famitracker. I had a few tunes composed for the game, like the character select music and one tune that didn't make the final cut. This version of the game, as well as the Famitracker Project I made for it no longer exist on my external hard drive after I accidentlly formatted it.
Two years later, I created a beat 'em up engine called "Cosmic Seethe". Inspired by Ogonbryn in that it features characters from various video game franchises, a game made by Tatsusoft (now Twinsky Games), the game was going to have 12 stages. Cosmic Seethe was originally intended as a full title, but not much progress was made, and so the game was cancelled, and I now consider it an engine. The engine itself was rather lackluster at the time, as it didn't have grabs or invincibility after you wake up, meaning enemies could repeatedly knock you down.
Fast forward to March 31st, 2015, shortly before the Rare Replay collection was announced. I decided that the Skampfer Squad concept should come to fruition, and so I improved upon the Cosmic Seethe engine quite a bit. Things such as running, grabs, multiple jump attacks and wake up invincibility were added to make the engine more in line with the Streets of Rage series. Enemies are handled differently; instead of each enemy being their own object, I used up to 8 enemy slot objects (same amount of enemies on screen as Arcade Final Fight) in order to make the grab system work well, by letting the game know which object is being grabbed. On April Fools Day that year, I coined the term "Verkeit" (German for Transform and Ability), the mutagen thingy used to transform boys into various creatures, and girls having more grown up proportions. I liked the idea of characters having separate standing and walking animations depending on whether or not there are enemies active. If there are no enemies around, they would be happy, but if there are enemies, they would be mad.
One of the very first stages I got out of the way was the notorious Turbo Tunnel. Based on the American and European NES versions of the stage, I was copying the layout as much as I could, while using graphics from the Genesis version. I personally think that Turbo Tunnel is nowhere near as difficult as Volkmire's Inferno, and that Battlemaniacs' Turbo Tunnel is what the NES Turbo Tunnel should have been, it's much more insane. I never liked the fact that in the home Battletoads games, just because one of the players runs out of lives, the game goes to the continue screen. Or if one of the players dies in a platform stage or obstacle course, the stage restarts even though the other other player hasn't died yet. Which makes me think that the 2-player feature was a very late addition in the original Battletoads' development. Those things don't happen here in Skampfer Squad. The stage doesn't restart until both players die, and the continue screen shows up only after both players lose all their lives, just like in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II and III (NES). And if you run out of lives during boss fights, the bosses tell win quotes to the defeated heroes. Giant Beaver was the first boss implemented (he's essentially the game's Big Blag).
In regards to the other stages, I wanted to have more emphasis on the beat 'em up stages, so there's more of them here. I was thinking about having a Rat Race stage, but it wouldn't work well with the different character physics. I threw in a tribute to the Semi-Fast truck, my favorite Hot Wheels vehicle as a hazard in Stage 5. Because most players were stuck in Turbo Tunnel, I included a mode where you get to practice both obstacle courses. I wasn't really too happy with Stage 7's obstacle course, though, as a few of the checkpoints require strict memorization, and the fireballs seemed harder to dodge when I was testing that stage. So the fireballs in Stage 7 kill you in 3 hits instead of 1 in this game. Spike City was called Vine City, Leaps 'n Terror was called Red Ocean.
As far as characters go, Oken is my personal favorite. He's a fast but very slippery cat! Zado is is your typical large guy who wrecks havoc, and he's horrendous to play through the platform stages with. Zila is the girl in love with Oken that could (in later revisions of this game). The other playable characters actually weren't implemented until the final month of the game's development, so most of the play testing was done with Lopi. Implementation order: Lopi -> Oken -> Zila -> Zado. For some reason, I made Oken's char ID 3 while Zado's char ID is 2, even though Oken was right next to Lopi in one of the concept arts, so I had to incorporate a weird way of changing the character ID values. Mano = T-Bird and Selena = Dark Queen. Speaking of Selena, her appearance in the actual game is quite different from her concept art. She never shows her face until you reach her at the very top of the rotating tower! Scar (originally named Hacker) and K-Kuro were designed on April 21 that year. The Rokurokubi enemy (Dog from Stage 9) was inspired by an enemy from the Kiki KaiKai series, and the Devil Toddlers were clearly based on Geme's model from the Infight Kids series.
The reason the game was written in Game Maker as opposed to Beats of Rage, is because I never really learned how to create games in OpenBOR, and I already had my own beat 'em up engine to work with. I had zero experience creating anything in OpenBOR. Though it would be nice if the game was available on other platforms that OpenBOR was ported to. As to why the HP would refill after taking hits, Battletoads uses a weird HP system where characters have to lose at least a certain number of HP or they'll regain some of their HP back... it's rather hard for me to explain, but fire up an FCEUX emulator, load Battletoads, watch RAM address 51A (P1's HP) and you might see what I mean. Each block of HP represents 8 HP, and a Battletoad had 47 HP.
The game was initially released on June 23, 2015, followed by a few updates in 2016 and 2017.
Here are scans of the concept art I drew on paper:
As you can see, there were a few villains that didn't make it into the game, and several newer villains I designed during development took their place instead. Only Welver had a model created for the game, but it was only used in a very short lived comic series I made. Funny enough, none of the quotes written in the concept art were included in the actual game.
As of now, I've grown tired of playing this game. Therefore, in the 2017 revision, I let players access a Stage Select with Ctrl+L at the main menu, so they can practice later stages (excluding the boss fight with Selena which is treated as a separate stage, just like the final boss fight in Battletoads).
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