Buttercup Festival: an island people (the unfinished video game)

All art in the video is either directly taken or based off the art of David Troupes, aka Elliott G. Garbauskas, the creator of Buttercup Festival. That is not me, btw.

This video is a collection of short video clips and screenshots from the game I created and worked on back in 2004 and 2005.

LINKZ:
1) Play a VERY early version of the game (requires shockwave):
http://discussthing.com/bf/
2) The origin of it all:
http://www.buttercupfestival.com

I was inspired by the rich, beautiful artwork in the Buttercup Festival short graphic novel "An Island People Go To", and I set out to create a game with the distinctive artwork and the natural flow of the book. I enlisted a few people to help with animation and music, while I did all the game programming and converted David's art into looping backgrounds and tileable terrain.

It was a labor of love. The game was ambitious: you start on a stark black and white island with a cast of characters, each with their own reason for being mostly miserable. As you explore, you find that you can help each character with something they need, and you work to solve mini-problems. In many ways, I wanted a side-scrolling zelda game, but without the fighting. There would be no fighting, but you could throw and carry items, and fly if you could figure out how.

As you progressed through the island, as you made people happier, the world would slowly shift to watercolor instead of ink. As you near the end, it becomes full-on 3D realism. By the time you have explored the entire island and 'beat' the game, every character has found their bliss and the whole world is color and 3D. The game is titled for these people of the island.

The entire game is actually made in a 3D engine, despite it being a side-scroller. This gave me the flexibility to set up a path around 3-dimensional objects and to give a real sense of space and distance on the island.

Obviously it is nowhere close to being complete. Unfortunately, i am not a game company, i am just one person and a hobbiest. I do not make games for a living (although, that does sound fun). If I were rich, I would hire a team to create the game to it's full potential. But, I'm not. Compounding the problem, I lost almost all my files in a hard drive collapse so all I have left is one .exe of the game in development and several screenshots. I put them together crudely in this video. I hope you enjoy.

Buttercup Festival, like, is the best. Buy that book "An Island People Go To" from David Troupes if he is still selling it. It is art.

Category:

Gaming

Tags:

• buttercup
• festival
• elliott
• garbauskas
• david
• troupes
• an
• island
• people
• video
• game

[RandomPROJECTZ]

thank you all for the wonderful comments! as I have said in the description, this project meant a lot to me at the time and it means a lot to me now to hear such positive feedback for the work i did get done.

rofreg - i signed up for the google group (as Paz). if you DO find some serious interest in the blogosphere, lets discuss.

[CR4TES]

AWESOME!

[Vixlacimaa]

Holy cow, that's awesome! When [if? :( ] is this coming out?!

If I ever win the lottery, this is my #1 priority. :3

Pwease pwease pwease~

[ch142857]

This was cool I saw it a while ago and thought I would come back to it however sadly the link no longer seems to be working :(

[FatKittyProductionsX]

I absolutely love BF and I think you've done a beautiful job of turning it into a live-motion hopefully to be game for all of us fans. It's gorgeous and wonderful, and you've done an AWESOME job :3

[pratogi]

Onoes! Meant to rate 5, but hit 4 instead :(

This is really gorgeous. Especially the image at 1:47 .

[ziran]

You should make this! It would be wonderful :)

[captiansoban]

oh my, this is absolutely beautiful.

you certainly have my interest in starting up again

[macro2sancro]

Very cool. I would love get behind something like this if it got started again.

[hawkinsssable]

That is such a beautiful idea for a Buttercup Festival game. Amazing.

Sidenote- any idea where I could track down a copy of An Island People Go To?