Dev Log 1 - What Came Before

Now that GB Compo 2025 is behind me and I’ve had a few weeks to recover from the mad-dash gauntlet of putting a complete entry together, I’d like to start chronicling the development of Cosmo Command going forward. But, in order to do that, I think we need to start from the beginning. The very beginning.

I’ve been a fan of Star Fox since there was a Star Fox to be a fan of, back when the humble SNES served as the unexpected home to the revolutionary 3D rail shooter. But it wasn’t really the graphics that enthralled me—I had seen far more advanced polygon-pushing on my computer. And it wasn’t really the gameplay either, though I did enjoy the simple, almost cinematic nature of the game’s “on rails”-ness. 

No, it had far more to do with its goofy cast of space animals. As sprite-scaled space debris shot past and primates piloting their polygonal ships pointed their space lasers at the player’s Arwing, it was hard not to smile when surly Falco tells Fox to mind his own business—or perhaps groan a little when the much maligned Slippy once again croaks for help.

But if the games possessed the spark of character, it was really the comic that made them come alive for me. Printed monthly in Nintendo Power, I eagerly awaited every volume to see what “Fox Jr.” and the rest of the band of fuzzy misfits got up to. It was corny, melodramatic, and in all ways wonderful.

Unsurprisingly, much of the plot was retconned to heck and back when Star Fox 64 would come out some years later, but I think it was noteworthy how many core ideas from the comic would find their way into the video game sequel, including the entire subplot with Fox’s probably-dead-but-is-he-really? father.

But whether or not the story was the same, Star Fox 64 really brought home the idea that a shooter could have an engaging story, with memorable likable characters and their dozens of one-liners I still quote to this day. It’s this that I loved. Star Fox wasn’t just a game of blasting space ships out of the cosmos, of metal and space rock and the cold void of space—it was a world bolstered with humanity…animality?…in a way many other shooters were not, and it wasn’t afraid to remind you of it constantly through mid-mission comm chatter. It’s something that, however you feel about the later entries in the series, continued to define Star Fox for the years to come.

Given all that, it’s not a surprise I would periodically come across Star Fox fanart and find no small measure of enjoyment in it. But one time I came across a piece I was particularly enamored by, featuring Miyu and Fay from Star Fox 2 having an animated conversation. The art was nice of course, but it was more than that: it was the camaraderie on display, the implied “Bechdel Test” that Star Fox often failed to pass—mostly by virtue of each game only featuring one girl at a time.¹ I was beset with a longing for a Star Fox that never was, one infused with a team of female fuzzbuckets trading banter instead of the boys' club it has traditionally been.

Naturally, the logical continuation of this thought was “Maybe I could do that." Logical is used loosely here, considering I had very little in the way of skill sets relevant to the task, chief among them a programming “background” brimming with such useful knowledge as “How to write Hello World in BASIC.” But I had recently become aware of GB Studio, even fiddled around with it some, and this idea was quickly expanding: What if this Star Fox that never was also came out for the Game Boy?

For all the love I exhibit for Star Fox, there’s an equally large place in my heart reserved for Nintendo’s aged handheld. It always felt more personal than a home console, a private portal to pint-sized renditions of the games I loved. Even as an adult, I find the limitations of the hardware engender a certain beauty—forgive the waxing of poetic—not present in other consoles. A Star Fox for the machine was a dream never realized…until now? Maybe?

I figured the best way to start was to create the aforementioned female fuzzbuckets. Mind you, I don’t really consider myself an artist, even now. Back when I was drawing these, I most definitely wouldn’t think so. But nonetheless, I gave it my best shot.

I wanted to create a cast featuring species different from the original Star Fox team, and the result was Captain Cat, Mechanic Opossum, and Doctor Collie. (Proper names is not something that would happen until much later.) All in all the results were...passable. Cat looked more like a fox (a prospect I wanted to avoid for obvious reasons) and Opossum more like a rat. But it was a start!

The next step was deciding exactly what kind of game I wanted to make. Obviously, a 3D rail shooter was not really in the cards.² I played around with making a puzzle game, since that was a popular genre on the Game Boy, but I found that it didn’t lend itself to the narrative fun that inspired the idea to start with, and was also well beyond my programming skills. So I began leaning to the more obvious choice: A shmup. GB Studio did allow for this, but the built-in option was rather limited—too limited to even hope to compare to various shmups released for the handheld. And my intended top-down view just didn’t seem capture the cinematic feel I was hoping for. I would continue to poke around with the program, but most of my efforts in the following months focused on improving my artwork, and consequently, the characters themselves.

Next Time: Jams, Showdowns, and Compos, Oh My! Or where everything begins to take shape.

[1]: Star Fox 2 did, in fact, feature both Miyu and Fay, but it went unreleased for decades and none of the characters really talk to each other. Star Fox Command bumped up the number of females to 4, and even featured a few missions where they *do* all share a few lines of dialogue, but these moments were few and far between, squirreled away in the game’s byzantine branching story paths.

[2]: Though, it’s worth noting there is a game for the Game Boy that almost fits the bill. X (or Lunar Chase, as the cancelled English localization was to be named) packed impressive 3D punches for the green-screened handheld. More importantly, it was programmed by Dylan Cuthbert, and his efforts left enough of an impression on Nintendo that they enlisted his help in creating, you guessed it, Star Fox.