Future Cat Sailor Sample/Inspo Post

Hi, I said I would do a big post of all the things the game samples / takes inspiration from, so here it is! I likely won't actually be able to cover everything but I'll go over most of the interesting ones. If you haven't played the game yet before reading this I Highly Recommend it, since I'm actually going to spoil all the ending images here as well as other things about the game.

Before I explain the specific samples though I want to quickly plug... 

Plundercore

Screenshot form Titanic II: Orchestra for Dying at Sea

Plundercore is a name I've been using to describe the style of game that Future Cat Sailor is. I've recently played a lot of these games, which take assets from existing games and make use of a player's pre-existing connections to them to invoke emotional response. The full (loose) definition I give in my ongoing itch.io collection of such games is "Games made up of stolen pieces from recognizable works that recontextualize those pieces into new and beautiful things, often playing off of their pre-existing meanings and contexts. Transcending shitpost games into legitimately meaningful art." FCS is the first game I've made deliberately in this style, and it's greatly inspired by a lot of the games in that collection, specifically Titanic II: Orchestra For Dying At Sea by flan.

Now, on to the specific things plundered for this game. First, there's two very blatant ones that form the basis of the whole game world. First is...

Super Mario Sunshine

Delfino Plaza as seen on noclip.website, an invaluable tool for appreciating videogame vibes

So yeah, obviously, the whole worldmap is made out of exactly 58 copies of Delfino Plaza, downloaded from The Model's Resource, which is an invaluable tool for plundercore, as it's where people upload ripped models and other assets from games. The very first thing I did when making this game was just start dragging and dropping the map into unity and arranging them at odds to the water plane. I wanted to make a cool post apocalyptic climate anxiety kind of game, and I'm a little aesthetically addicted to floods, so that's sort of how we ended up with the world map we have. I like the idea that 1000s of years have passed and the old world, and thus the old videogame worlds you know and love are in ruin now, and sinking below the sea. The texture scaling on the models didnt import correctly, which is what leads to their flat colours, but I like to think it's because sea water slowly washed away the paints. I basically wanted to turn mario sunshine, a notoriously pleasant and shiny place, to somewhere more like New Londo Ruins from Dark Souls 1.

Future Boy Conan

There are apparently some game adaptations of Future Boy Conan, but I couldn't find any assets from them anywhere online, so I only used stuff from the show.

Speaking of climate anxiety flooded world post apocalypses, I obviously took a lot from Future Boy Conan, which is a 1978 anime directed by Hayao Miyazaki. Most obviously the title, which is a very strange riff on it. The subtitle "128 Leagues Under The Sea", is supposed to combine Super Mario 128 (a working title for mario sunshine, i think?) with 3000 Leagues In Search Of Mother, which is itself referencing 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea. See? Everyone is plundering, all the time.

Slightly less obviously, I used the intro sequence of the show (in full, if you wait around you can hear the whole thing) for the title screen and the end credits music for the ending cards. I also sampled some dialogue from the episode "high harbour" in the boating song.

The Music

Listen Here!

Oh yeah so I guess that smoothly transitions into the musical samples! Sampling is a much more accepted move in music than in videogames at the moment, and I actually made all of the music for this game before I knew I was making this game at all, but a lot of them happened to be sample based anyway, which was very fitting. 

The boating music, as stated above, samples Future Boy Conan, though on soundcloud it actually samples a bunch of my friends sitting around the campfire.

The drowning music samples the underwater music from donkey kong country (more specifically, i was playing a weird donkey kong romhack on a SNES and it froze, with donkey kong unmoving but the music persisting). A pretty fitting sample for the game, and the reason it became the drowning music.

The shop music samples the hum of the drink fridges at the Rabba 24 hour supermarket near bloor and high park avenue in Toronto. Those fridges for some reason have a very sonorous hum, so I recorded it with my phone late one night.

And finally, the jellyfish music samples the hold music from an internet service provider's customer service line, which my friend was on hold with for a while. I always liked how completely garbled music sounds over the phone like that.

Several of the songs (boating and shop I think at the very least) also use a sort of silly self sampling method i’ve been doing where I play and record back some of the tracks through my phone speakers/mic, which lets me do some pretty wacky distortion of the audio. In the shop song the entire first half of the song plays again but through the speaker while i do a wah / record scratch thing by putting my finger on and off the speaker, and in the boating song the guitar track has also been re-recorded like this with the phone in the mouth of my waterbottle, which gave it these really wacky feedback sounds.

The Key Art

And now im just going to go through the key art for the game and all of the things I sampled for that. They’re more varied and dense in their sources than the rest of the game combine I think. Lets see if I can remember it all!

The title screen samples:

• A stock photo of a boat
• The sky and water from a ghibli movie (Porco Rosso)
  • Porco Rosso is the only reason there are seaplanes in the game, and this title screen sample happens to have 2 in it, flying over the city. This is where I got the idea for the ‘evil twin’ shopkeeper who destroys segments of the city and has a sick mustache. Have you noticed him?
• The sky from another ghibli movie overlayed for better clouds (I don’t remember which)
• Several delfino plaza screenshots from noclip.website
• Some new londo ruins pillars, which are barely visible
• Future Cat’s pose is directly traced from the famous painting ‘Wanderer above the Sea of Fog’ by Caspar David Friedrich. I thought it was pretty funny to try to frame my cute little cat guy as an edgy byronic hero

The shop screen samples:

• A stock photo of a seaplane
• Another background from Porco Rosso
• More stock photos of an atm, open sign, and convenience store goods. I wanted to make the plane shop feel like a convenience store since the shop song samples a convenience store hum.

AND NOW THE ENDING SCREENS! SPOILERS AHEAD!

The Jellyfish Ending samples:

• A screenshot of delfino plaza, posed in noclip.website 
• Several different overlayed ghibli water and sky shots, from various movies and at various angles. I think Ponyo, and maybe Poppy Hill are sampled here?
• The big momma jellyfish from spongebob
• Inside the jellyfish is a shinesprite from mario sunshine. I added this because a lot of NPCs mention a ‘lost treasure’ of the city, and while its possible they mean the coins, I thought it might be interesting to imply that the big shine sprite that used to hang in the city gates now somehow powers the nefarious jellyfish.

The Drown Ending samples:

• The sea floor is from Ponyo
• The water above is from a different ghibli shot, I don’t remember which movie.
• Another massive shine sprite is in the background, which could maybe also be the lost treasure? There’s also several red and blue coins, which one NPC claims to have seen.
• Further in the background and not really visible are more New Londo Ruins pillars and a crashed seaplane (I think from wuhu island or something? Ripped from some game surely)

The No Money Ending samples:

• Oh god so many things
• The buildings on the right and some of the clouds are from Kingdom Hearts 2, in their weird and expanded Destiny Islands areas that I think are only in cutscenes.
• The rest of the sky and the hill and boat and some of the water are all from Up On Poppy Hill
• There’s some other layer to the water probably also from ghibli but I don’t remember what. I also have no memory of what i did to make the sky so ripply and rainbowy but whatever it is it probably involved the ‘xor’ setting in paint.net
• The house on the hill is also from Destiny Islands. This is supposed to be Future Cat’s family home, and there’s a tiny cat silhouette in the window.
• It also samples the Yes Money ending for the vision of your pensive cat wife in the sky.
• The buildings at the bottom of the cliff are from porco rosso (on the left) and the movie Beasts of The Southern Wild on the right.

The Yes Money Ending samples:

• The house interior is the grandma’s house from Wind Waker
• The sky and path outside the house are from ghibli movies, I think also Up On Poppy Hill, though they might be from different scenes.
• The coins in the pouch are from mario sunshine of course!

Misc:

Here are some other random things in the game that I happen to remember:

• The boat engine sound effect is from the sound of mario getting electrocuted in mario sunshine. I also used another sound from the same strange video of sounds for a secret in the game. Are these real sound clips from Mario Sunshine? Are they unused? There’s some really bizarre stuff in there.
• There are several other mario sunshine sound effects for the gameplay, and also a couple from spongebob! Namely the “you cant buy that” sound in the shop and the buzz of the jellyfish.
• Hidden around the map are a bunch of other assets from The Model's Resource, mostly boats from various games, mario and other, to have as shipwrecks around under the water. See if you can find any!
• The skybox samples a real photo I took near my home in Toronto! It’s really not a great skybox image but I think it somehow works here.
• The transition effect, and the ripples in general, were supposed to be a lot cooler and also be a lot more similar to the transitions from Oikospeil , an essential piece of plundercore media. Unfortunately I couldn’t get it to work in build, but here’s what it looked like in editor!

So I guess that’s it! I hope that this was interesting to someone, and maybe encourages you to do some sampling in your own work! Remember: stealing from companies is Cool and Good! Cheers,

-JohnLee