Creative Blood is (I hope) a series of interviews with cool developers from all over the world! Come check today’s guest: Mad_M, creator of Project Basement Dating.
Disclaimer: My goal with this interview is to highlight a project that I think’s pretty cool. It does not mean we as a company are involved with it in any way. We’re not publishing, distributing, or hold a particular stake in it other than hoping it’s good at the end of the day, lol.
A couple months back a pretty interesting game trailer got posted in our Discord server, and what I saw was a really cool sort of aesthetic I’ve come to describe as “oekaki punk”. Someone probably came up with another term years ago but I don’t care, this one sounds cooler.
The principles of this aesthetic are twofold: A complete disregard for commonly-used visual conventions, and the whole process forgetting anti-aliasing even exists. Who needs drawings to be smoothed out when they can be pixels so raw you can smell the blood coming out of them?
Being the curious person I am I couldn’t just sit still and speculate about its creative process. I needed to know what’s up, so the idea of an “interview” surfaced. So, these are snippets of a conversation I had with Mad_M, the creator of Project Basement Dating. A very unique adventure game that caught my eye and wanted to highlight in some way.
The game’s still a work in progress, with a public demo coming soon. So come with me and let’s unravel some of its mysteries. Just what is this cool collection of characters and atmosphere?
“I’m a bit tipsy, but it will be a lot more honest.“
Mad_M
Kiri (Sukeban): If you could describe your game as an elevator pitch, how would you do it? An elevator pitch is exactly what it says on the tin. Pretend you have to explain it within a single elevator ride to some bloke.
Mad_M (Project Basement Dating, creator): L22 is a city where cats teleport, children get kicked out of home regularly, the moon talks, and you help maidens mix drinks, drugs and magick to keep them sane. It’s VA-11-hall-A on drugs mixed with monkey island.
The more I hear about it, the more I like it.
Now introduce yourself in the same way.
My name is Fehér-Badics Sándor Albert aka Mad_M, I’m a mechanical engineer who made himself a traditional painter who wanted to be a tattoo artist.
People with odd backgrounds create the most interesting games, to be honest.
Dunno lad, I’m just a 20 year old with many regrets and many people crossed. I’m searching for forgiveness right now.
It’s funny. Originally I wanted to ask about six questions, but things just kept flowing from one spot to the other from here on out.
What were you doing when you suddenly went “I want to make this”. How was this atmosphere born? In other words, what was the spark that sent you into a creative spiral?
Oh boy, I was 17; about 2 years before my technician year and I was rather high in my room all alone. Felt this jolt of energy and wrote a 2000 word small novel in a single night about the artists I was listening to in that moment. I already was researching them but when I got clean in the morning I loved the novel so much I decided to sketch it during classes instead of studying. 2 years later I felt like I didn’t know where I was heading in life and decided to make a game where I’d show people an escape/fix plan. Where to head when they don’t know what they actually want to do with their life or are in some kind of ditch. I lived the typical teen dream: Girls, parties, drugs. But I regret it now. It led me nowhere and I want to show people there is always a way out.
All the darkness in the world cannot extinguish a single candle light.
Is this why you say you’re searching for forgiveness? Forgiveness from yourself I assume.
And many other people I crossed. I was a dickhead most of the time. But it’s fine. It was me, and I like to be honest about it.
Naturally I changed, and I want to show to people that it’s fine. You’ll be alright.
Would you say this is the recurrent theme in your game? The glue keeping everything together. If I had to speculate, I’m expecting young people who want to live fast and hard, then let their future selves deal with the aftermath.
Tough this was my motto for quite a while: “Live fast, die young, leave a beautiful corpse behind” the answer is yes and no. The game’s themes include: Drug abuse, social anxiety, breakups, need for violence and adrenaline, self-consciousness, relationships, religion, environmental change, disability both physical and mental. All things I can talk about since I personally experienced them. Though I try my best to not make it an “edge-fest”. My characters have many faults; sometimes hidden, sometimes rather obvious.
From here I went on a bit of a tangent regarding game creators often being too sheltered.
When I first saw this game, I thought that whoever’s making it has gone through some shit, and that it’s definitely outside of the usual places where games come from. It’s this sort of energy that, in my personal opinion, should be celebrated much more. Odd games from odd places, made by people with odd lives.
I got many hard hits from boxing before I realized I really shouldn’t look down on myself, and that it’s fine for me to be me.
Mad_M
You mentioned quite a bit as the backbone of your game, from drug abuse to religion and disability. So, let’s pull back just a bit. Let’s bring back the “children get kicked out of home regularly” part from the description. What does it mean to you? What is the genesis of this topic?
I should note that this question was formulated in a really shoddy way and had to change it for this publication.
I left home at 19 on my own accord after I made sure I could stand on my own two feet and got enough money via digital art to create something I can finally be proud of. That is the creative spark behind the “people getting kicked out of home” element.
I’ll say that I respect the fuck outta people who write what they know.
A lotta folks balk at such a thought and start talking about writers being able to write dragons despite dragons not existing, not realising that the meaning of “write what you know” simply boils down to touching enough grass so that your stories end up being actually interesting.
Thank you. The whole story will be very personal. Every maid represents a past regret/ shortfall/ fault of mine, and that is a cross the player has to accept/bear and/or fix… or not. But I avoid self inserts. It needs to be grounded, but fun, and not something that’s a self-based fanfiction.
Next up, here’s me tryna bring up the subject of inspirations in a non-boring way.
It’s tricky. This sorta question places Mad_M (and the audience) in a position of comparing their game with other more established works, and hopefully we avoided such a scenario. I’d like PBD to stand on its own two feet.
Where do you find inspiration for the character designs and general look of the game? I can sense a million things when I see a screenshot; It’s unique, it’s raw, while also possessing a sort of shared DNA with some other works I’ve seen. But I also dislike telling artists “your work reminds me of X or Y anime” so I’d prefer if you told me if there’s anything out there that you can safely say it inspired you.
Naturally, there is the whole history behind the Nijiura maids:
The Nijiura maids are net characters originally created in 2001 on the Futaba Channel, a Japanese imageboard. The first maid, Medoi, was created because an anon wanted a cute maid.
Over the years, these characters have spawned a ton of content. Although fanart is the most common type, people also make music in their names (found on VK primarily), as well as plushies/games/etc! But The musicians themselves came from a russian forum called omnichan where they trolled people with these maids. Eventually many of them decided to create music, which was named “Maidcore”.
The songs these russian maid musicians create can be described as a kind of “Upbeat Post-Rock” tough many of them create shoegaze, witch house, and breakcore-like music.
I know the artists behind these characters personally, and rather than going with original characters only (though some designs remain as such), I went with a mix of the two: Personality of the artists and the characters. Recently I got told my design for “Itai” is bad because it resembles the singer behind it too much 😄
This also stood out to me a lot. Mad_M is like 20 years old, yet he’s being inspired by the spirit of the old internet. He explained to me that this is because Hungary, the country from which he hails from, is still stuck in the 90’s. But I can’t help but feel that the younger generations will eventually save the cyberspace by bringing back the way things used to be, despite not really living through the good old days of everyone having their own real online spaces.
We also talked a bit about politics around this moment, but I think it’s better for the game to speak for itself when it’s out. Sorry for the abrupt end, but the convo was getting out of scope once we started!
Let’s wrap this up with some rapid fire questions. Keep it short. Either one word or a yes/no answer.
Favorite film?
Whiplash.
Favorite book.
Roadside Picnic.
Favorite song.
Yakui the Maid – Clutter
Favorite weed strain.
Cheeseburger mmm hmmhmhmhm (whatever I got my hands on)
Now three facts about yourself.
I believe you can only find God in creation. That is the only way to talk to him that humanity hasn’t forgotten.
I am a christian.
I have lots of tattoos, and I’ll get many more.
Many thanks to Mad_M for his time. It’s my first time running an interview of sorts and I hope there’s a chance to do it again. I love picking people’s brains.
I got a bit of a bucket list now, so if you guys liked this entry please let me know and I’ll highlight some other cool projects when time allows.
Mad_M and his team are in the process of releasing a demo. Feel free to follow them in any of these places:
This interview was edited for clarity and brevity.
Thank you kindly for this interview Kiri, it was my pleasure to talk with my idol a bit more personally. Honesty is given to everyone who contacts me naturally, no matter the weight of question. And i do everything in my “greenhorn” power to make this game and story shine as much as possible. I won’t ever try to make something cookie cutter, rather something experimental and unorthodox. Thank you again! <3
This was great!!! I’m not very in touch with all the games being made these days, so this interview was wonderful. Thanks for getting this on my radar, looking forward to it!
That was a nice interview. Thank you for sharing it with us. ^^/
Whiplash fits the vibe perfectly here. Good luck on the project Mad_M!
Looking forward to more of these interviews, too.
this looks fire and im obsessed with the art, i need this game rn
Oh hell yeah, this was great. Nice work on the interview – definitely gonna give this game a look.