October 16, 2026

The Inspiration Behind VIRICIDE

I drew inspiration for VIRICIDE from a variety of different sources: self-imposed restraints, Game Boy games I loved growing up, an unfinished game I started 15 years ago, and electronic music.

I wanted my first bona fide Game Boy or Game Boy Color game to be something manageable. I figured the best way to do that was to create a game with just one 160×144-pixel room and pack as much fun into it as the Game Boy hardware would allow. Naturally, such a game would be an arcade game. A game that you could pick up and play anytime.

When you’re away from home and have some downtime, whether it’s during a boring family vacation or between meetings on a business trip, that’s when handheld gaming shines. But such situations rarely allow you to dedicate a significant amount of time to a game. Personally, I find it difficult to sink a lot of time into narrative-driven games and RPGs in these situations.

Instead, the Game Boy almost seems like it was made for pick-up-and-play games. The ones that come to mind for me are Tetris, Qix, Defender/Joust, and the Game & Watch Gallery series. As a kid, those were the games I’d pick up during a car ride. And as an adult, they’re the games I pick up when I need a quick fix between whatever mundane adult scenarios life throws at me.

But what would my game look like? I had already set my limit: an arcade game set in one 160×144-pixel room. A shooter of some sort seemed like the best option. I’d make a shooter with fast, satisfying, and addictive movement, but not a traditional shmup or the kind of shooter you’d commonly see on the Game Boy.

Then I remembered an unreleased and unfinished game I made years ago when I was tinkering around with Game Maker 7 (long before Game Maker Studio and the avalanche of great indie games it spawned). It was (generically) called Cyber Space. It was a shooter with a cybernetic theme. You blasted away viruses and racked up points by aiming and shooting with the mouse while moving with WASD.

Of course, I couldn’t exactly replicate that sort of movement on Game Boy hardware. The next best thing was to create a multidirectional shooter with movement similar to Asteroids. My solution was to create 16 individual sprites, each representing a different direction. This made turning feel smooth enough on the Game Boy. However, to make it easier to “illustrate” all 16 directions, I decided to keep the circular shape of the character from my old Cyber Space game. Any way you turn a circle, it’s still a circle.

Back when I made Cyber Space, I was a big fan of Underworld and shamelessly threw in a few Underworld tracks as placeholder background music. However, I still wanted to keep much of that same vibe with VIRICIDE. The song that plays in the main arena, which I call Viral Pulse, takes heavy inspiration from Underworld, with hypnotic repetition, gradual progression, and steady, dance-oriented percussion, but obviously all on a much smaller scale.

More recently, however, I’ve been exposed to Berlin School electronic music, especially the early work of Tangerine Dream. The ominous song that plays during VIRICIDE’s main menu, which I call Initialization, is heavily inspired by that side of electronic music, focusing on atmosphere and tension over percussion and energy.

Unlike my early unreleased game, I wanted VIRICIDE to have visual appeal beyond simple geometric shapes for enemies and backgrounds, but I also wanted to keep the cybernetic feeling and electronic influences. For the overall aesthetic, especially the backgrounds, I found inspiration in Digimon, particularly File City from Digimon World. For the look of the viruses, I was inspired by the one-eyed creatures Orbservors and Kracko from Kirby, which I remember best from Kirby Tilt ‘n’ Tumble.

All of these inspirations helped me establish a solid foundation for VIRICIDE that I was able to build on and refine.

Keep an eye out for VIRICIDE, coming soon to Game Boy Color.